But now, five years since its inception, Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention has barely begun to build its staff and infrastructure, and its success appears increasingly difficult to assess as violent crime in the city becomes a more intractable problem.

The department, created in 2017 in an effort to apply public health practices to reduce violent crime in Oakland, has been mired in a mix of crises, distractions, sclerotic bureaucracy and impractical benchmarks that have hobbled the agency from the beginning, according to some city leaders.

Last week brought perhaps the most explosive development yet. Attorneys for Sarai Crain, who was fired after working at the department for a year and a half, sent a letter to the city accusing the department’s chief, Guillermo Cespedes, of sexual harrassment, gender discrimination and retaliation, and demanding that the city give Crain his job or pay her $268,104 to fend off a lawsuit. The letter also threatened to go to media if the city refused to settle.

Cespedes declined to discuss personnel issues.

Half of Oakland’s city councilmembers threw their support behind Crain, calling for an investigation and settlement. City Administrator Ed Reiskin said the city condemned discrimination “in any form,” but said he stood by the decision to fire Crain. Prohibitions on discussing personnel matters prevented him from explaining why, Reiskin said.

At a moment when the department’s methods, which seek to curb violence by means of social services and conflict resolution, are gaining broader acceptance, Cespedes is laboring to show that his agency can deliver on its aspirational promises, and grappling with how to measure its progress.

Homicides have risen each year since the department was created, from 67 in 2018, to 75 in 2019, to 102 in 2020, to 124 in 2021. As of April 3, Oakland had witnessed 28 killings this year, slightly down from last year’s tally of 30 by the same date. Meanwhile, the city is spending millions of dollars to expand violence prevention services — boosting the department’s budget to $24.9 million this fiscal year.

“When we prevent violence, it doesn’t appear in a ledger anywhere,” Cespedes told The Chronicle. “It doesn’t appear in data. Do we know how many homicides were prevented by people who are ... responding to homicides, meeting with families? Is that work in vain? I don’t believe so.”

Sitting in a third-floor office in City Hall a day after Crain went public, Cespedes wore a weary expression. Since taking the post, he’s been burdened with a vague mission, a pandemic that has fueled homicides and largely kept violence interruptors off the streets, and fights among the city’s nonprofits over who should receive the department awards.

Now, the spotlight on him is heating up. Cespedes said he faced a “spike in expectations” following the acceleration of homicides and the societal moment of reflection after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Politicians were gravitating toward the idea that civilians should handle duties traditionally delegated to police officers, and looked to Cespedes to fill that role.

“It’s the perfect storm of COVID, reimagine, defund — ‘let’s restructure, let’s look at the underlying conditions that create violence,’” Cespedes said of stresses piled upon him. “I think almost overnight, the department went from a concept to something (where) the expectation was that it would produce results next week.”

The Department of Violence Prevention was supposed to embrace a public health approach to violence on a larger scale, with a department head who would wield as much power and influence as the chief of police. Still, nearly all of its work — from life coaching, to intervening in conflicts, to visiting shooting victims at their hospital beds, to providing emergency shelter for victims of sexual exploitation — has been delegated to nonprofit contractors.

Former Councilmember Lynette Gibson McElhaney, who crusaded for years to create the department, said she pressed for the 80% homicide-reduction mandate to be included in the legislation that formed the agency. Yet the City Council left that language out of the final ordinance.

“Ultimately,” McElhaney said, “we adopted legislation that came with a do-nothing goal. That came to be a problem.”

Although Mayor Libby Schaaf and city administrators voiced doubts about adding a new, potentially costly city bureaucracy, they considered it a coup to hire Cespedes.

He’d begun his career as a nonprofit worker in Fruitvale and deeper East Oakland, where he served low-income families from 1981 to 1999. In 2000 he moved to Los Angeles and developed a citywide strategy to curb gang violence, before taking his expertise to Central America in 2007. There, Cespedes focused on Honduras and El Salvador, working in cities that had a high concentration of murders and a paucity of social programs.

Though he arrived with a lofty pedigree, it didn’t take long for critics to arise from all corners: community organizations wanting to protect their funding and relationships in City Hall; politicians desperate to tamp down shootings and killings; residents eyeing the crime statistics and growing impatient.

“We understand you need time to get the department off the ground,” West Oakland resident Carol Wyatt said Wednesday, “but we absolutely have to see outcomes.” Wyatt served on the city’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, which successfully pressed the city council last June to set aside $18 million for the Department of Violence Prevention, split over a two-year period.

Nearly a year since that infusion of money, residents are asking for an audit to see where it’s going, Wyatt said. She noted that residents are less concerned about the department’s leadership and its internal dramas than about getting tangible results.

“Whenever you’re putting in something new, you’re never going to have it perfect the first time it’s rolled out,” City Councilmember and mayoral candidate Loren Taylor said, arguing that the department had responded well to “unrealistic” demands.

With pressure mounting, Cespedes has begun trying to craft an organization to fit within the city’s complex anti-violence ecosystem, interacting with law enforcement, the Ceasefire gang mediation program run by Oakland Police Department, nonprofits that have traditionally managed social services and the policymakers in city government.

He more than doubled the number of violence interrupters to mediate conflicts between groups and gangs. He began holding “Town Nights” events at eight sites across the city, drawing crowds to parks and playgrounds in areas afflicted by shootings. He planned to invest 25% of the department’s budget in gender-based violence — including sexual assault and exploitation, as well as domestic violence incidents — with crisis responders at local clinics and hospitals. Crain, the fired official, originally led that effort.

Cespedes strained to quantify the impact of those efforts. During the specific hours that the department’s Town Nights events took place in 2021, shootings with injuries in Oakland went down 90% compared with the same days and hours in 2020, Cespedes wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle.

“And though these reductions may not be causal, meaning we cannot say with scientific certainty that they are the direct result of Town Nights, we know that they represent an important shift that we hope to maintain when Town Nights summer series begins in June,” he wrote.

As Cespedes has laid out his vision and agenda, he has clashed with community groups.

“The department has a huge task — to address and reduce incidents of violence in Oakland,” said Jennifer Lyle, executive director of a nonprofit that works with survivors of sexual exploitation, which opted not to apply for city funds this year. “They have to have the wherewithal and the understanding to galvanize people and move forward.”

Instead, Lyle noted, “they have galvanized people in opposition.”

Teiahsha Bankhead, executive director of the the nonprofit Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, remembered the excitement about “trying to reel in this expert who turned around cities internationally.” She later came to view Cespedes as vindictive, believing that he pulled funding from her organization after she raised questions about his spending plan in 2020.

Cespedes, Bankhead said, didn’t understand the sensibilities of the nonprofit community “and the values of collective input.” He denied punishing anyone for questioning a decision or plan.

His most recent controversy erupted after a Public Safety and Services Oversight Commission meeting Monday, when he presented a new organizational chart for his department that eliminated Crain’s deputy chief position. Cespedes wrote in a memo to Councilmember Treva Reid that he had reconfigured the department's structure to remove redundancies and “provide adequate supervision” to other staff.

Four councilmembers — Nikki Fortunato Bas, Carroll Fife, Rebecca Kaplan and Sheng Thao —released a joint statement that criticized the firing of Crain, who had said she was terminated after asking for pay equal to that of a male colleague. The councilmembers called for an investigation, and the council’s rules committee scheduled an agenda item for the May 3 council meeting.

A day before the councilmembers raised the dispute over Crain’s treatment, Cespedes sat with the department’s direct services coordinator, Kentrell Killens, reflecting on what they said was their biggest difficulty thus far: growing the department.

The department’s expansion efforts have caused tension, nonprofit directors say, because it has poached staff members from organizations it funds, offering them more money to work for the city. Some nonprofit workers expressed frustration that the department was starting to duplicate and micro-manage their work.

“We’re doing amazing work,” Cespedes countered, acknowledging that he’s sought people with credibility in the nonprofit sphere and brought them into city government, where they get better salaries and job stability. He assured that Oakland will continue to partner with community organizations.

“It’s the hardest-working team I’ve ever led,” the chief said. “An incredible staff. And yet, when we go to bed, we always feel like there’s something else we didn’t do.”

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan