A slim, well-dressed mayoral aide stammered uneasily before the crowd of roughly 300 young people who blocked the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. Many of these students wore hastily screen-printed white tee shirts emblazoned with “Invest in Prevention: More Police Doesn’t Equal Less Violence.” 1 The aide began stiffly reading Mayor Gavin Newsom¼s condolences to the crowd at the ¹Rally for Peace” organized in response to a series of fatal shootings.“We are acutely aware of the violence and we have been working closely, not only with my staff and with the police department, but with the community and the schools, parents and businesses to help us,” she said. Punctuated by boos and hisses, the aide’s speech was winding down when a fiercely teary black woman sidestepped the official and grabbed the mic. In a voice pitched high with emotion, she demanded,“Why isn’t the mayor here!?” With that, the crowd roared in agreement, with whoops, whistles, and drumbeats from a youth-led Afro-Brazilian bateria. The woman whose grief interrupted the script of bureaucracy in action was Kishara Bailey, the older sister of Joshua Cameron, a senior at the June Jordan School for Equity (JJSE) who was one of the two JJSE youth killed within the first week of the 2008 school year. 2 His death had come on the heels of the murder of Jorge “G-One” Hurtado, a JJSE graduate and founding student. The Rally for Peace was developed as a collective response to these losses, and as their voices echoed against City Hall’s marble façade in support of Kishara, Josh’s and G-One’s peers claimed control of the discursive space. Unlike the acrimony that had marked student mobilizations in other San Francisco high schools, this rally was co-organized and supported by the staff and families of the high school, resulting in almost the entire student body of the small school traveling across the city to the seat of municipal power to demand justice. 3 In this instance, the grief and rage of students and staff were transformed into an organized protest insisting on concessions from the state in the form of municipally funded prevention programs instead of increased police repression.