The bloodhound

Mark Wassberg has lurked around local crime scenes for years, collecting reams of raw footage of the city as few see it. Driven by a near-obsession to document the city’s struggle with deadly violence, this aspiring documentary filmmaker hopes to author his own rags-to-riches tale.

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Crime overlays poverty

The concentration of poverty tends to concentrate other problems like violent crime. Criminologists have long agreed on this relationship between poverty and crime. The city of Richmond, as the map to the left suggests, is plagued by both social ills.

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Youth employment program on the rise

Richmond’s YouthWORKS, a city-run youth-employment program, employed 705 local teens and young adults ages 16-21 last summer at 140 Bay Area public and private work sites. The civic youth jobs program is one the nation’s largest in proportion to the population of the city it serves.

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Richmond Homicide map

Total homicides this year stood at 45 as of Nov. 6, nearly double the number killed in all of 2008, an increase that has raised renewed concern among city leaders and law enforcement officials. Twenty-seven homicides were recorded in all of 2008. Forty-plus homicide totals were the norm for most of this decade until last…

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