theintercept--2020-07-26--Baltimore’s Violence Interrupters Confront Shootings, the Coronavirus, and Corrupt Cops

with the cherry cheeks , ” a Black woman said to an unmasked , white Baltimore police sergeant as he approached her outside a public housing project in April .
In response , the sergeant intentionally coughed on the woman and kept walking .
“ Oh , I ain ’ t worried about that shit , ” the woman told the sergeant .
“ Y ’ all get that shit .
Black people don ’ t. ” The incident in East Baltimore ’ s Perkins Homes was captured in a widely circulated video and came to represent the contempt Baltimore @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public health even during a global pandemic .
The exchange also suggested that accurate information about Covid-19 was not making its way into the community .
“ The problem is the tension as far as between the community and the politicians , especially when we ’ re dealing with the police , ” Baltimorean Levar Mullen told The Intercept .
“ It ’ s a lack of understanding.
” By the time the video started to spread , Mullen was trying to address the problem , walking Baltimore ’ s streets with his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and information about Covid-19 .
Mullen is an arabber , a member of a long-standing Black Baltimore subculture that raises horses to deliver fresh produce to residents , connecting communities in a deeply segregated city and remedying local food deserts .
Safe Streets , Baltimore ’ s version of Cure Violence , got off the ground in 2007 .
A 2012 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health showed the program was responsible for significant reductions in violence in three of the four neighborhoods where it was implemented .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ homicides in the neighborhood of Cherry Hill and a 26 percent reduction in McElderry Park .
In nearby Ellwood Park , there was a 34 percent reduction in nonfatal shootings .
The Mondawmin neighborhood , where Mullen worked , was added as a fifth Safe Streets “ zone ” in summer 2012 .
In 2019 , according to city data , Safe Streets mediated more than 1,800 conflicts .
Though the city still suffered from a record number of homicides , Cherry Hill , once considered one of Baltimore ’ s most violent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ murder , a success many attribute to Safe Streets .
As people call for defunding police departments during a global pandemic , a public health approach to violence has a lot of appeal .
Slutkin believes Cure Violence is the path to reducing police presence , getting away from the “ threat and force and punishment-based ” approach to crime , and actually preventing violence .
“ Most of the places I ’ ve been in the world that are safe are not safe because of policing , ” he said .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ norms against using violence.
” Because of the time Mullen spent in prison on a murder charge , he is what the program calls a “ credible messenger , ” a community worker who is able to gain trust on the streets to stop violence before it spreads .
“ I definitely have a responsibility to make an amends with the community , ” Mullen told The Intercept .
“ I fucked it up so I have a moral duty , you know what I ’ m saying , to try to give @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outbreaks of violence and uses his connections to stop the spread of shootings and retribution through mediation .
When Mullen urges someone not to shoot or retaliate for a prior shooting , they might actually listen because of his life experience and the understanding that he won ’ t involve the police , he explained .
“ They could trust that I ’ m not gon na allow a situation to come back and bite them in the ass , ” Mullen said .
“ They could trust that if me and my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ] ain ’ t got to bring no weapons.
” Being a credible messenger doesn ’ t just mean people will listen to you ; it also means people will talk to you .
You have to know who was responsible for a shooting and why in order to know who might retaliate .
Interrupters are often reluctant to talk about particular mediations in order to maintain this trust , but in a public talk in 2016 , Dante Barksdale , the Safe Streets outreach coordinator who hired Mullen back in 2012 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He quickly learned that the beef went back to 2004 when “ A ” testified against “ B.
” Both ended up in jail , and when A came home in 2015 , B ’ s brother “ C ” went to shoot A.
C ’ s gun jammed , and A shot him instead .
A few months later , C ’ s brother , who had no stake in the original beef , shot A .
Understanding that 11-year history enabled Barksdale to get in the middle of the conflict and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that kind of knowledge sets violence interrupters at odds with the police .
Cops would like that information , but they can ’ t get it from Safe Streets because the program views violence as a public health issue .
Mediation is governed by a street-level version of doctor-patient confidentiality .
According to Slutkin , for an interrupter to talk to the police would be like a doctor sharing the result of an HIV test with someone other than the patient .
“ What I remember was , like , every cop being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a former Baltimore police detective , told The Intercept .
“ Any kind of violence interrupter program was automatically thought to be criminal.
” Now that alternatives to policing offer a serious budgetary threat to the law enforcement model of violence prevention , violence interruption programs have become more formidable competitors .
“ Law enforcement people actually do engage in this fantasy that crime goes up and down because of them , ” Butts said .
“ So they would undermine the program just to maintain their own ideological dominance and perception of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ charge.
” Slutkin agreed .
“ There have been a lot of false accusations against these workers for the intention of hurting the program so that there can be a maintenance of an unthreatened status quo , ” he said .
Mullen saw firsthand how police could undermine violence interruption when he was arrested by corrupt Baltimore police officers .
“ Instead of looking at us as an ally , they look at us as the opposition because in their eyes , we never change , ” Mullen said .
“ So now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ end of 2013 , Mullen had been working as a violence interrupter in Baltimore ’ s Mondawmin neighborhood for a year and a half .
The neighborhood had 28 shootings between 2012 and 2014 , and Mullen often knew who was doing what ; he had to if he wanted to intervene in the violence .
On December 7 , a white Baltimore police detective named Wayne Jenkins , accompanied by officers Evodio Hendrix and Ben Frieman , pulled Mullen over on the pretext that he wasn ’ t wearing a seat belt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fastened , but he wasn ’ t surprised .
These same cops had been harassing him and his outreach workers for weeks .
The cops said that when they approached Mullen , he made a “ furtive motion ” and was “ visibly nervous.
” When he refused to allow them to search his truck , they pulled him out and claimed he had a gun .
Mullen said that “ the police stopped him for no good reason and made up critical facts set forth in the statement of probable cause , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his lawyer .
The officers called him “ Mr .
Safe Streets , ” Mullen said , and demanded information about a recent shooting .
“ It was only after this refusal that the police asked Mr. Mullen if they could check his truck for drugs and guns , ” his lawyer wrote .
When Mullen refused , Frieman called a K-9 unit .
Frieman ’ s partner , Sgt .
Wayne Jenkins , had already used a dog to search Mullen ’ s truck a few weeks earlier — and found nothing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Frieman asked Mullen to roll down the passenger window so Jenkins could ask him a question .
When Mullen leaned over and took his eye off Frieman , the detective stuck his hand through the partially opened driver ’ s side window , opened the door , pulled Mullen out , and arrested him .
“ They knew that I had multiple suspended sentences , ” Mullen told The Intercept .
“ They knew what I was facing had I been arrested for anything , let alone a gun or drugs , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ They knew that and that was their tactic.
” He didn ’ t even know he was being charged with a gun until the next day , he said .
The same qualities that made Mullen effective in the streets left him particularly vulnerable in a situation like this .
His gun charge went federal , and his lawyer advised him to plead guilty .
If he went to trial and lost , his sentence would be much higher .
Mullen understood .
“ What I look like trying to convince a judge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ m innocent on this one , ’ ” he said .
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight years in prison on the gun charge .
Because of the publicity surrounding Mullen ’ s arrest , the Mondawmin Safe Streets office was shut down for two weeks .
Despite the guilty plea , Mullen maintained his innocence .
But violence interrupters do sometimes legitimately relapse into crime , as a result of their backgrounds and the relatively low pay the job brings .
Dante Barksdale ’ s uncle , Nathan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the inspirations for Avon Barksdale in “ The Wire ” — was arrested by federal agents for selling heroin while he worked for Safe Streets .
And , in an unrelated incident in July 2015 , police raided the McElderry Park Safe Streets office and said they found guns , heroin , and cocaine .
Police often used these arrests as evidence that Safe Streets was inherently crooked — and bad publicity for Safe Streets was good PR for the cops .
Yet Brandon Scott , Baltimore ’ s City Council president and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stigmatizing Safe Streets workers , even in the face of relapses .
“ We can ’ t indict a whole program based off of the actions of one person .
If that was the case , we wouldn ’ t have a Baltimore City Hall , we definitely wouldn ’ t have a police department in Baltimore City , ” Scott told The Intercept .
Even though the Mondawmin Safe Streets office reopened , Mullen says that the city “ lost a vital piece of mediation networking ” when he was arrested .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the city erupted in protest after the death of Freddie Gray , and then , helplessly , as it erupted in gun violence .
There were 11 firearm-related homicides in Mondawmin ’ s zip code in 2014 and 40 in 2015 .
By the end of 2015 , Baltimore had endured more than 340 homicides .
In response to the surge in violence , the police department prioritized “ proactive policing , ” where specialized plainclothes units ride around in “ hot spots ” looking for “ bad guys with guns , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of saying .
Jenkins received a promotion and began running a new squad , the Gun Trace Task Force , which racked up arrests and gun seizures and collected accolades from higher-ups in the Baltimore Police Department .
The task force focused on the same at-risk population Safe Streets dealt with — and with Jenkins as its leader , targeted Safe Streets workers themselves .
In August 2016 , Safe Streets ’ Albert Brown was arrested by Jenkins and the Gun Trace Task Force as he began to pull away from a gas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because he wasn ’ t wearing his seat belt .
During the stop , Jenkins and his squad searched Brown ’ s van and said they found a handgun and cocaine stuffed in the visor .
“ You work for Safe Streets ?
” Jenkins asked Brown .
“ Because this is like the third time we got a guy on Safe Streets with a gun.
” Recorded by a body camera , Jenkins pushed Brown for information about shootings and offered to let him walk if he gave the cops names .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ talk this out ?
Wan na make it look like we ’ re arresting you , get out of here so people don ’ t see it ?
” Jenkins whispered .
“ I don ’ t care about that gun or the drugs .
You wan na go somewhere and talk and keep it a hundred or not ?
Last chance .
If you do it , we got ta go now .
Wan na go to jail ?
” It was an impossible predicament for Brown .
Safe Streets can not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if they charged him with the gun and the coke , that would cause problems for the program .
“ You might as well take me to jail , ” Brown said .
Instead of taking Brown straight to jail , Jenkins and the GTTF went to his house and searched it , without getting a warrant .
Detective Daniel Hersl stayed with Brown outside while the squad broke in .
Hersl pushed Brown for information and lectured him about Safe Streets .
“ Safe Streets , boy , I tell you , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hersl said .
“ The whole program ’ s got to be shut down .
That whole program ’ s got to go.
” Safe Streets suspended Brown .
The gun and drug charges were a political liability .
He would likely lose his job .
Brown claimed the evidence was planted .
Unlike Mullen , who had pleaded guilty , Brown decided he would fight the charges in court .
He tried to get the charges dropped based on the cops breaking into his house without a warrant , but the judge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ guess you may have a good lawsuit , potentially , ” Judge Charles Peters told Brown ’ s lawyer , without dismissing the case .
Like Mullen , Brown learned that the qualities that made him a credible messenger on the streets had the opposite effect in a courtroom .
On March 1 , 2017 , Levar Mullen sat in the rec room at Allenwood Federal Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania , on the third year of his eight-year sentence .
One of the six televisions clamoring for attention on the wall was broadcasting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arrested on federal RICO conspiracy , racketeering , and robbery charges .
An indictment unsealed that morning charged members of the Gun Trace Task Force with a vast array of criminal activity : from stealing drugs and money to dealing drugs , protecting drug dealers , and claiming thousands upon thousands of dollars in false overtime from the city .
Jenkins and Hendrix , two of the officers who arrested Mullen , and Hersl , who was involved in Brown ’ s arrest , were charged along with four others .
Frieman was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ since left the Baltimore Police Department .
Generally , bad police are considered exceptions in need of more training or better equipment , while a violence interrupter accused of a crime is used to demonstrate the problems inherent in the approach .
But that general bias in favor of police is changing , especially in the face of widespread awareness of police brutality , and people are calling for police departments , not Cure Violence offices , to be defunded because of the criminal behavior of members .
In 2018 , the Johns @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a study comparing the effectiveness of the Violent Crimes Impact Section — a police unit that Jenkins once belonged to — and Safe Streets .
The study counted the VCIS model as more effective in stopping violence than Safe Streets .
But it had no way to quantify the effects that targeting Safe Streets workers or suspending the program had on violence .
Or the effect that violence had on police .
“ The reality is there ’ s a cloud of epidemic violence .
There ’ s exposure to violence and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in that cloud , ” Slutkin said .
“ If they ’ re causing toxicity , it ’ s because they themselves have been traumatized too.
” Slutkin is careful to note one major difference when it comes to police : “ The systems protect their violence.
” Other recent studies have shown a correlation in police violence and an increase of violence in general .
One recent study of the kind of proactive policing that the VCIS and GTTF engaged in found that “ contact with law enforcement predicts increases in black @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 6 , 12 , and 18 months later.
” By contrast , it ’ s harder to track the criminal behavior that didn ’ t occur due to violence interrupters .
“ People don ’ t really understand public health , ” Slutkin said .
“ Because most of our successes are invisible.
” Advocates for Safe Streets say more funding would increase the effectiveness of the program .
In 2018 , the Safe Streets budget got a $ 3 million boost when it was moved from the health department to the mayor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but its budget was dwarfed by the $ 500 million police budget .
For Scott , Baltimore ’ s presumed next mayor in the deeply blue city , it is apparent that the homicide rate , which has surpassed 300 each year since 2015 , is not something that can be fixed solely by police or by Safe Streets .
Baltimore needs to reimagine public safety and adjust the budget accordingly , he explained , and part of that is investing more in violence interruption .
“ We know that the Safe Streets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be , ” Scott said .
“ We have to have a very deep and hard conversation about how we can accelerate programs like Safe Streets … so that we have less reliance on police.
” As a result of the GTTF indictments , the cases of both violence interrupters were revisited .
Charges against Albert Brown were dropped on March 4 , 2016 , three days after the GTTF indictments .
Brown returned to his job at Safe Streets .
On January 19 , 2018 , three days after Wayne Jenkins @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from federal prison , his sentence reduced to time served .
“ Man , you talking to a motherfucker just been in jail for the last four years dreaming about freedom , ” Mullen recalled .
“ So , it was just a feeling of disbelief — like a dream.
” Mullen had missed out on so much .
He lost his horses .
His grandfather and brother died , and he couldn ’ t be there .
Now that he is free , he tries to look at it as part of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He now also works for ROCA , a violence interruption program that came to the city in 2018 and teaches alternative approaches to conflict mediation to high-risk youths .
“ At the end of the day , we are all geared towards doing the same thing , ” he said .
“ We ’ re trying to save these young people from killing each other .
So , you know , I let bygones be bygones.
” After his release , Mullen created a horsemanship program through Safe Streets and ROCA .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ youths the skills of arabbing , such as horse care and riding .
Each one of the six to eight youths in the program will have their own horse to care for .
The pandemic put that program on hold , but it never slowed down the rate of violence in Baltimore , so Mullen tries to do what he can to fight both of the epidemics plaguing his community .
For Scott , people like Mullen are precisely what Baltimore City needs more of right now .
“ When you have a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time , it ’ s gon na require credible messengers , ” Scott said .
“ The only way we ’ re going to reach the people that are most at risk of dying of gun violence and most at risk of contracting Covid is through credible messengers on the ground .
People that Baltimoreans can relate to and trust.
” “ We have a direct connection to the population that we serve , ” Mullen said .
“ We ’ re in the community with them all day , every day.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the authors ’ book “ I Got a Monster : The Rise and Fall of America ’ s Most Corrupt Police Squad .
”

“Hey, Officer Friendly with the cherry cheeks,” a Black woman said to an unmasked, white Baltimore police sergeant as he approached her outside a public housing project in April. In response, the sergeant intentionally coughed on the woman and kept walking.
“Oh, I ain’t worried about that shit,” the woman told the sergeant. “Y’all get that shit. Black people don’t.”
The incident in East Baltimore’s Perkins Homes was captured in a widely circulated video and came to represent the contempt Baltimore police have often displayed toward residents and public health even during a global pandemic. The exchange also suggested that accurate information about Covid-19 was not making its way into the community.
“The problem is the tension as far as between the community and the politicians, especially when we’re dealing with the police,” Baltimorean Levar Mullen told The Intercept. “It’s a lack of understanding.”
By the time the video started to spread, Mullen was trying to address the problem, walking Baltimore’s streets with his horse-drawn wagon and distributing food, masks, and information about Covid-19. Mullen is an arabber, a member of a long-standing Black Baltimore subculture that raises horses to deliver fresh produce to residents, connecting communities in a deeply segregated city and remedying local food deserts.
Levar Mullen distributes food, personal protective equipment, and information about Covid-19 in Southwest Baltimore in May 2020. Photos: M. Holden Warren
Mullen also works as a violence interrupter, and the contrast between his response to Covid-19 in the community and the coughing sergeant’s underscores the fundamentally different approaches their agencies also take toward violence, an ever-present epidemic in Baltimore.
Violence interruption, created in Chicago by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin in 2000, views gun violence through an epidemiological lens and tries to prevent it with public health approaches. Because the program views violence as contagious, its methods are similar to those, like contact tracing, used to track outbreaks of Covid-19.
“Violence has been viewed incorrectly: It has been seen as a moral problem rather than an epidemic health problem,” Slutkin told The Intercept. “Violence behaves exactly like any other contagious disease.”
Slutkin’s pilot Cure Violence program in Chicago reduced shootings in the neighborhood where it operated by 67 percent its first year. The program has since spread to cities around the world and continues to yield positive results.
As people call for defunding police departments during a global pandemic, a public health approach to violence has a lot of appeal.
Safe Streets, Baltimore’s version of Cure Violence, got off the ground in 2007. A 2012 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health showed the program was responsible for significant reductions in violence in three of the four neighborhoods where it was implemented. There was a 56 percent reduction in homicides in the neighborhood of Cherry Hill and a 26 percent reduction in McElderry Park. In nearby Ellwood Park, there was a 34 percent reduction in nonfatal shootings. The Mondawmin neighborhood, where Mullen worked, was added as a fifth Safe Streets “zone” in summer 2012.
In 2019, according to city data, Safe Streets mediated more than 1,800 conflicts. Though the city still suffered from a record number of homicides, Cherry Hill, once considered one of Baltimore’s most violent neighborhoods, went a year without a murder, a success many attribute to Safe Streets.
As people call for defunding police departments during a global pandemic, a public health approach to violence has a lot of appeal. Slutkin believes Cure Violence is the path to reducing police presence, getting away from the “threat and force and punishment-based” approach to crime, and actually preventing violence.
“Most of the places I’ve been in the world that are safe are not safe because of policing,” he said. “They’re safe because of community norms against using violence.”
Cross Purposes
Because of the time Mullen spent in prison on a murder charge, he is what the program calls a “credible messenger,” a community worker who is able to gain trust on the streets to stop violence before it spreads.
“I definitely have a responsibility to make an amends with the community,” Mullen told The Intercept. “I fucked it up so I have a moral duty, you know what I’m saying, to try to give back.”
He gathers information about potential outbreaks of violence and uses his connections to stop the spread of shootings and retribution through mediation.
When Mullen urges someone not to shoot or retaliate for a prior shooting, they might actually listen because of his life experience and the understanding that he won’t involve the police, he explained.
“They could trust that I’m not gonna allow a situation to come back and bite them in the ass,” Mullen said. “They could trust that if me and my crew get them together … [they] ain’t got to bring no weapons.”
Being a credible messenger doesn’t just mean people will listen to you; it also means people will talk to you. You have to know who was responsible for a shooting and why in order to know who might retaliate.
Interrupters are often reluctant to talk about particular mediations in order to maintain this trust, but in a public talk in 2016, Dante Barksdale, the Safe Streets outreach coordinator who hired Mullen back in 2012, described a shooting he came upon. He quickly learned that the beef went back to 2004 when “A” testified against “B.” Both ended up in jail, and when A came home in 2015, B’s brother “C” went to shoot A. C’s gun jammed, and A shot him instead. A few months later, C’s brother, who had no stake in the original beef, shot A. Understanding that 11-year history enabled Barksdale to get in the middle of the conflict and stop it from escalating further.
Having that kind of knowledge sets violence interrupters at odds with the police. Cops would like that information, but they can’t get it from Safe Streets because the program views violence as a public health issue. Mediation is governed by a street-level version of doctor-patient confidentiality. According to Slutkin, for an interrupter to talk to the police would be like a doctor sharing the result of an HIV test with someone other than the patient.
Safe Streets workers walk past a mural of Freddie Gray, painted by the artist Nether, in Sandtown-Winchester in West Baltimore in 2016. Photo: Andre Chung for The Washington Post via Getty Images
“That is how confidentiality is essential for public health. They have to be able to talk to the health worker with a full trust that they can empty their guts out there,” Slutkin said. “This isn’t against a police officer, he has a different role.”
Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research & Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, believes there are productive ways for police and violence interrupters to work together.
“The correspondence and coordination with law enforcement needs to be at the very upper reaches and should be confidential … and they should talk about things like, ‘in this neighborhood … something’s brewing,’” he told The Intercept. “But they undermine it by saying ‘Who are the leaders in that? Give me some names.’”
“Any kind of violence interrupter program was automatically thought to be criminal.”
“What I remember was, like, every cop being so cynical,” Larry Smith, a former Baltimore police detective, told The Intercept. “Any kind of violence interrupter program was automatically thought to be criminal.”
Now that alternatives to policing offer a serious budgetary threat to the law enforcement model of violence prevention, violence interruption programs have become more formidable competitors.
“Law enforcement people actually do engage in this fantasy that crime goes up and down because of them,” Butts said. “So they would undermine the program just to maintain their own ideological dominance and perception of the community that they’re in charge.”
Slutkin agreed. “There have been a lot of false accusations against these workers for the intention of hurting the program so that there can be a maintenance of an unthreatened status quo,” he said.
Mullen saw firsthand how police could undermine violence interruption when he was arrested by corrupt Baltimore police officers.
“Instead of looking at us as an ally, they look at us as the opposition because in their eyes, we never change,” Mullen said. “So now we become a target.”
Targeted Enforcement
By the end of 2013, Mullen had been working as a violence interrupter in Baltimore’s Mondawmin neighborhood for a year and a half. The neighborhood had 28 shootings between 2012 and 2014, and Mullen often knew who was doing what; he had to if he wanted to intervene in the violence.
On December 7, a white Baltimore police detective named Wayne Jenkins, accompanied by officers Evodio Hendrix and Ben Frieman, pulled Mullen over on the pretext that he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Mullen insisted his seat belt was fastened, but he wasn’t surprised. These same cops had been harassing him and his outreach workers for weeks.
Photo: Courtesy of Safe Streets
The cops said that when they approached Mullen, he made a “furtive motion” and was “visibly nervous.” When he refused to allow them to search his truck, they pulled him out and claimed he had a gun. Mullen said that “the police stopped him for no good reason and made up critical facts set forth in the statement of probable cause,” according to a motion filed by his lawyer.
The officers called him “Mr. Safe Streets,” Mullen said, and demanded information about a recent shooting. “It was only after this refusal that the police asked Mr. Mullen if they could check his truck for drugs and guns,” his lawyer wrote.
When Mullen refused, Frieman called a K-9 unit. Frieman’s partner, Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, had already used a dog to search Mullen’s truck a few weeks earlier — and found nothing.
Before the dogs got there, Frieman asked Mullen to roll down the passenger window so Jenkins could ask him a question. When Mullen leaned over and took his eye off Frieman, the detective stuck his hand through the partially opened driver’s side window, opened the door, pulled Mullen out, and arrested him.
“They knew that I had multiple suspended sentences,” Mullen told The Intercept. “They knew what I was facing had I been arrested for anything, let alone a gun or drugs, you know what I’m saying? They knew that and that was their tactic.”
He didn’t even know he was being charged with a gun until the next day, he said.
The same qualities that made Mullen effective in the streets left him particularly vulnerable in a situation like this. His gun charge went federal, and his lawyer advised him to plead guilty. If he went to trial and lost, his sentence would be much higher.
Police used the arrests as evidence that Safe Streets was inherently crooked — and bad publicity for Safe Streets was good PR for the cops.
Mullen understood. “What I look like trying to convince a judge that, ‘Hey, you know I’m innocent on this one,’” he said. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight years in prison on the gun charge.
Because of the publicity surrounding Mullen’s arrest, the Mondawmin Safe Streets office was shut down for two weeks.
Despite the guilty plea, Mullen maintained his innocence. But violence interrupters do sometimes legitimately relapse into crime, as a result of their backgrounds and the relatively low pay the job brings. Dante Barksdale’s uncle, Nathan “Bodie” Barksdale — one of the inspirations for Avon Barksdale in “The Wire” — was arrested by federal agents for selling heroin while he worked for Safe Streets. And, in an unrelated incident in July 2015, police raided the McElderry Park Safe Streets office and said they found guns, heroin, and cocaine.
Police often used these arrests as evidence that Safe Streets was inherently crooked — and bad publicity for Safe Streets was good PR for the cops.
Yet Brandon Scott, Baltimore’s City Council president and Democratic nominee for mayor, argues against stigmatizing Safe Streets workers, even in the face of relapses.
“We can’t indict a whole program based off of the actions of one person. If that was the case, we wouldn’t have a Baltimore City Hall, we definitely wouldn’t have a police department in Baltimore City,” Scott told The Intercept.
Even though the Mondawmin Safe Streets office reopened, Mullen says that the city “lost a vital piece of mediation networking” when he was arrested. Sitting in prison, Mullen watched first as the city erupted in protest after the death of Freddie Gray, and then, helplessly, as it erupted in gun violence. There were 11 firearm-related homicides in Mondawmin’s zip code in 2014 and 40 in 2015.
By the end of 2015, Baltimore had endured more than 340 homicides.
In response to the surge in violence, the police department prioritized “proactive policing,” where specialized plainclothes units ride around in “hot spots” looking for “bad guys with guns,” as Baltimore police commissioners are fond of saying. Jenkins received a promotion and began running a new squad, the Gun Trace Task Force, which racked up arrests and gun seizures and collected accolades from higher-ups in the Baltimore Police Department. The task force focused on the same at-risk population Safe Streets dealt with — and with Jenkins as its leader, targeted Safe Streets workers themselves.
Proactive Policing
In August 2016, Safe Streets’ Albert Brown was arrested by Jenkins and the Gun Trace Task Force as he began to pull away from a gas pump. They said they stopped him because he wasn’t wearing his seat belt. During the stop, Jenkins and his squad searched Brown’s van and said they found a handgun and cocaine stuffed in the visor.
“You work for Safe Streets?” Jenkins asked Brown. “Because this is like the third time we got a guy on Safe Streets with a gun.”
Recorded by a body camera, Jenkins pushed Brown for information about shootings and offered to let him walk if he gave the cops names.
“You wanna go somewhere and talk this out? Wanna make it look like we’re arresting you, get out of here so people don’t see it?” Jenkins whispered. “I don’t care about that gun or the drugs. You wanna go somewhere and talk and keep it a hundred or not? Last chance. If you do it, we gotta go now. Wanna go to jail?”
It was an impossible predicament for Brown. Safe Streets cannot provide information to the police, but if they charged him with the gun and the coke, that would cause problems for the program.
“You might as well take me to jail,” Brown said.
Instead of taking Brown straight to jail, Jenkins and the GTTF went to his house and searched it, without getting a warrant. Detective Daniel Hersl stayed with Brown outside while the squad broke in. Hersl pushed Brown for information and lectured him about Safe Streets.
“Safe Streets, boy, I tell you, all them guys are cruddy,” Hersl said. “The whole program’s got to be shut down. That whole program’s got to go.”
Safe Streets suspended Brown. The gun and drug charges were a political liability. He would likely lose his job. Brown claimed the evidence was planted.
Unlike Mullen, who had pleaded guilty, Brown decided he would fight the charges in court. He tried to get the charges dropped based on the cops breaking into his house without a warrant, but the judge wouldn’t listen.
“I guess you may have a good lawsuit, potentially,” Judge Charles Peters told Brown’s lawyer, without dismissing the case.
Like Mullen, Brown learned that the qualities that made him a credible messenger on the streets had the opposite effect in a courtroom.
A Cloud of Epidemic Violence
On March 1, 2017, Levar Mullen sat in the rec room at Allenwood Federal Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania, on the third year of his eight-year sentence.
One of the six televisions clamoring for attention on the wall was broadcasting something about Baltimore cops who had been arrested on federal RICO conspiracy, racketeering, and robbery charges.
An indictment unsealed that morning charged members of the Gun Trace Task Force with a vast array of criminal activity: from stealing drugs and money to dealing drugs, protecting drug dealers, and claiming thousands upon thousands of dollars in false overtime from the city.
Wayne Jenkins (Left/Top) and Evodio Hendrix (Right/Bottom), two of the officers who arrested Mullen and were later charged with federal crimes. Photos: Courtesy of U.S. Attorney’s Office/Getty Images
Jenkins and Hendrix, two of the officers who arrested Mullen, and Hersl, who was involved in Brown’s arrest, were charged along with four others. Frieman was not charged with any crimes and has since left the Baltimore Police Department.
Generally, bad police are considered exceptions in need of more training or better equipment, while a violence interrupter accused of a crime is used to demonstrate the problems inherent in the approach. But that general bias in favor of police is changing, especially in the face of widespread awareness of police brutality, and people are calling for police departments, not Cure Violence offices, to be defunded because of the criminal behavior of members.
In 2018, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published a study comparing the effectiveness of the Violent Crimes Impact Section — a police unit that Jenkins once belonged to — and Safe Streets. The study counted the VCIS model as more effective in stopping violence than Safe Streets. But it had no way to quantify the effects that targeting Safe Streets workers or suspending the program had on violence. Or the effect that violence had on police.
“The reality is there’s a cloud of epidemic violence. There’s exposure to violence and the expectation of violence and the police are in that cloud,” Slutkin said. “If they’re causing toxicity, it’s because they themselves have been traumatized too.”
Slutkin is careful to note one major difference when it comes to police: “The systems protect their violence.”
Other recent studies have shown a correlation in police violence and an increase of violence in general. One recent study of the kind of proactive policing that the VCIS and GTTF engaged in found that “contact with law enforcement predicts increases in black and Latino adolescents’ self-reported criminal behaviors 6, 12, and 18 months later.”
By contrast, it’s harder to track the criminal behavior that didn’t occur due to violence interrupters. “People don’t really understand public health,” Slutkin said. “Because most of our successes are invisible.”
“We’re trying to save these young people from killing each other. So, you know, I let bygones be bygones.”
Advocates for Safe Streets say more funding would increase the effectiveness of the program. In 2018, the Safe Streets budget got a $3 million boost when it was moved from the health department to the mayor’s office of criminal justice — but its budget was dwarfed by the $500 million police budget.
For Scott, Baltimore’s presumed next mayor in the deeply blue city, it is apparent that the homicide rate, which has surpassed 300 each year since 2015, is not something that can be fixed solely by police or by Safe Streets. Baltimore needs to reimagine public safety and adjust the budget accordingly, he explained, and part of that is investing more in violence interruption.
“We know that the Safe Streets budget isn’t where it needs to be,” Scott said. “We have to have a very deep and hard conversation about how we can accelerate programs like Safe Streets … so that we have less reliance on police.”
As a result of the GTTF indictments, the cases of both violence interrupters were revisited. Charges against Albert Brown were dropped on March 4, 2016, three days after the GTTF indictments. Brown returned to his job at Safe Streets.
On January 19, 2018, three days after Wayne Jenkins pleaded guilty, Levar Mullen was released from federal prison, his sentence reduced to time served.
“Man, you talking to a motherfucker just been in jail for the last four years dreaming about freedom,” Mullen recalled. “So, it was just a feeling of disbelief — like a dream.”
Mullen had missed out on so much. He lost his horses. His grandfather and brother died, and he couldn’t be there. Now that he is free, he tries to look at it as part of his evolution as a violence interrupter. He now also works for ROCA, a violence interruption program that came to the city in 2018 and teaches alternative approaches to conflict mediation to high-risk youths.
“At the end of the day, we are all geared towards doing the same thing,” he said. “We’re trying to save these young people from killing each other. So, you know, I let bygones be bygones.”
Levar Mullen inside an arabber stable in Southwest Baltimore. Photo: Alpine Labs
After his release, Mullen created a horsemanship program through Safe Streets and ROCA. He will teach a small cohort of high-risk youths the skills of arabbing, such as horse care and riding. Each one of the six to eight youths in the program will have their own horse to care for.
The pandemic put that program on hold, but it never slowed down the rate of violence in Baltimore, so Mullen tries to do what he can to fight both of the epidemics plaguing his community.
For Scott, people like Mullen are precisely what Baltimore City needs more of right now.
“When you have a pandemic and an epidemic at the same time, it’s gonna require credible messengers,” Scott said. “The only way we’re going to reach the people that are most at risk of dying of gun violence and most at risk of contracting Covid is through credible messengers on the ground. People that Baltimoreans can relate to and trust.”
“We have a direct connection to the population that we serve,” Mullen said. “We’re in the community with them all day, every day.”
Portions of this article were adapted from the authors’ book “I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad.”


theintercept--2020-07-26--Reform Prosecutor in Kansas Excluded From “Objective” Task Force on Policing

David Alvey , the mayor of Kansas City , Kansas , said at a press conference in early June inside a mostly empty city hall .
“ But when you have racism in a place where someone has power over another individual , then it can become especially destructive and lethal.
” His comments came as protests were filling streets across the country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police , and amid increasing calls to fundamentally change the mission and scope of law enforcement .
It was time for discussion in Kansas City too @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the creation of a local Task Force on Community and Police Relations .
The task force would include Alvey , the county sheriff , the interim chief of the city ’ s police department , a county commissioner , and a smattering of other local leaders .
But there was one name conspicuously absent from the list : Mark Dupree , the county ’ s district attorney — and the first Black elected prosecutor in Kansas history .
The omission quickly caught the attention of the local media .
In a statement , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kansas City Star that Dupree had been excluded because the task force was meant to be an “ objective panel.
” The group was merely gathering community input to pass on to local officials but would “ not be making recommendations for change based on that input , ” the paper reported .
As explanations go , it was pretty weak , suggesting that no one with a point of view or ideas about specific reforms would be included .
Dupree told The Intercept that he was startled by the snub , though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s just wrong , ” he said .
“ It is wrong , and it is political.
” And the exclusion — and the alleged reason for it — raises fundamental questions about the purpose of the task force .
If meant as a vehicle to actually reform policing , then prosecutors , who have long had a symbiotic relationship with police , must be part of the equation .
Yet even as calls for policing reform increase , in many jurisdictions across the country , including Kansas City , the election of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quo has been met with aggressive institutional pushback — most often from police agencies and cop unions .
So long as that is the case , true reform — not only of police but of the broader criminal justice system — will likely remain elusive .
To Dupree , the mayor ’ s task force looks like an attempt to sidestep real structural change .
“ This is the same , old traditional way of when something happens : ‘ Hey , we want to calm the masses , let ’ s throw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wait six months , eight months , and then say , ‘ Hey , we talked to you guys .
Now let ’ s go back to business as usual , ’ ” said Dupree .
“ Frankly , I ’ m not that type of guy.
” To put the decision to leave Dupree off the task force in context , you have to know about Lamonte McIntyre , who was wrongly sentenced to life behind bars based on an astonishing and toxic combination of police and prosecutor misconduct .
McIntyre was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ being exonerated in 2017 .
On April 15 , 1994 , Doniel Quinn and Donald Ewing were shot multiple times at close range as they sat in a parked Cadillac on a residential street , a contract slaying connected to the theft of drugs from a stash house .
There were plenty of leads that could have helped detectives solve the crime quickly and correctly , including an eyewitness who said she knew the killer .
But police never interviewed her .
Instead , they focused on 17-year-old McIntyre , who was with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the crime scene .
No evidence has ever linked McIntyre to the crime or the victims .
Still , just months later , McIntyre was tried and convicted based on two witness identifications that had been coerced by police .
And instead of vetting the detectives ’ sloppy and truncated investigation , the prosecutor abetted it — first by taking the mess to trial , then by threatening a witness who tried to recant her identification of McIntyre before taking the stand .
That prosecutor , Terra Morehead , not only failed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the witness ’ s recantation — as she was required by law to do — but also ushered the perjured testimony into evidence .
McIntyre maintained his innocence , and for years , a team of lawyers including local attorney Cheryl Pilate , the Midwest Innocence Project , and Centurion Ministries doggedly investigated the case , ultimately determining who had committed the double murder ( a foot soldier for a major dealer ) .
They also uncovered the reason McIntyre became a suspect : He was framed by veteran Kansas City , Kansas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decades , Golubski , who is now retired , sexually assaulted vulnerable Black women in the city — sometimes inside the precinct house — without ever facing consequences for his actions , which were well known within the police department , according to a pending federal civil rights suit .
At times , the suit alleges , Golubski would stalk and harass those women — one of whom was Rose McIntyre , Lamonte ’ s mother .
Rose rebuffed Golubski ’ s advances , prompting the detective , aided by colleagues , to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rose repeatedly rejected Golubski ’ s advances , but his harassment did not stop .
She was forced to move to a new home and change her telephone number to avoid him , ” reads the lawsuit .
“ By moving , Rose thought that she had permanently escaped Golubski and prevented him from ever harming her or her family again .
She was wrong .
Several years later , Golubski orchestrated the wrongful conviction of her son Lamonte.
” In legal filings , Golubski has denied the accusations and tried to have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blocked that effort and a trial is slated for March 2022 .
Golubski ’ s attorneys did not respond to The Intercept ’ s request for comment .
When Dupree finally dug into McIntyre ’ s case , he was horrified .
He agreed with defense lawyers that the conviction was a “ manifest injustice , ” clearing the way for McIntyre ’ s release from prison in late 2017 .
The case prompted Dupree to set up a conviction integrity unit , also a first in Kansas .
“ The Lamonte McIntyre @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in-depth this can run , ” he said .
“ It said to me , if there is one case , there are more.
” Not everyone was thrilled ; both the sheriff and the police chief — at the time , a man named Terry Zeigler , who was a former partner of Golubski ’ s — joined police union officials to pen a letter to state Attorney General Derek Schmidt in an attempt to stop Dupree .
In agreeing that McIntyre ’ s case should be overturned , they wrote , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fulfill its role as an advocate for the homicide victim ( s ) and the state in this case.
” Allowing the district attorney unfettered discretion to review old cases was causing them “ great concern , ” and they asked Schmidt to provide “ oversight ” of whatever actions Dupree ’ s conviction integrity unit might take .
A group of criminal justice leaders from across the country organized by Fair and Just Prosecution pushed back .
“ Elected prosecutors should not be expected to await the actions of others to correct @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ethically required to proactively address such issues , ” the group wrote in a letter to the Kansas City Board of Commissioners , which was considering Dupree ’ s request to fund the unit .
“ These obligations to the pursuit of justice and the exercise of independent judgment are not , as some have claimed , at odds with community safety or victim support .
In fact , victims are safer … when communities trust that their law enforcement officials seek the truth rather than a ‘ win.
’ ” While Schmidt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to intervene in Dupree ’ s conviction integrity unit , he made a sideswipe at the prosecutor in 2019 , saying that McIntyre should be denied compensation for his wrongful conviction because there wasn ’ t sufficient evidence to demonstrate that he was innocent .
Schmidt ultimately dropped his opposition in February , and McIntyre was awarded $ 1.5 million .
Dupree said he was “ appalled ” by the pushback from the community ’ s other law enforcement leaders .
“ I do not understand how anyone who can take the oath @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one and to uphold integrity can , literally , flat-footedly stand against … integrity.
” Of course , Dupree isn ’ t the first progressive prosecutor to face pushback for challenging the law enforcement status quo .
In St. Louis , Missouri , the city ’ s first Black elected prosecutor , Kim Gardner , has weathered racist attacks for her efforts at reform , while state Attorney General Eric Schmitt waged a legal battle against her efforts to free an innocent man .
More recently , Schmitt attacked Gardner in connection with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her of letting “ looters and rioters ” go unpunished .
Next door in St. Louis County , news that Wesley Bell had beat the incumbent prosecuting attorney to become the county ’ s first Black elected prosecutor prompted lawyers in his office to seek to join the police union .
State officials subsequently sought to grant the AG power to prosecute cases Bell might seek to dismiss .
State lawmakers in Pennsylvania have similarly tried to wrest power from DA Larry Krasner .
Former Florida Gov .
Rick Scott moved two dozen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ayala — the state ’ s first Black elected prosecutor — after she said she would decline to seek the death penalty .
Earlier this month , the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court shot down the efforts of four male elected district attorneys to intervene in a case that is being handled by Suffolk County ’ s first female elected prosecutor , Rachael Rollins , about whether young adults should face sentences of life without parole .
Rollins called the move “ nothing more than a misogynistic wolf in sheep ’ s clothing.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , California , DA Jeff Rosen announced a robust package of reforms that his office would implement , the police union was quick to act .
Rosen said he would stop seeking the death penalty , which the union called “ reckless.
” And in response to his decision to no longer prosecute standalone cases of “ resisting arrest , ” which disproportionately impact the county ’ s small Black population , the union blustered that the plan would “ purposely ” escalate confrontations between police and the public .
Nor is Dupree @ @ @ @ @ @ @ broad discussions of race and police reform in the wake of Floyd ’ s murder .
In June , when President Donald Trump showed up in Dallas for a discussion of policing , he failed to invite the city ’ s progressive DA John Creuzot — though , to be fair , Trump left all three of the city ’ s top law enforcement officers off his guest list : Creuzot , the Dallas police chief , and the county sheriff , all of whom are Black .
Indeed , a skewed set @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the administration ’ s recently created Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice are in part what prompted the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund to sue to halt its work .
Of the commission ’ s 18 members , just four are people of color and just six are women .
All 18 are current or former members of law enforcement .
Among the topics the group is directed to address is the need to promote “ respect ” for police .
A group of 75 criminal justice leaders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Enforcement Executives , organized by Fair and Just Prosecution and American Oversight , have signed on to an amicus brief in the case .
“ A flawed process aimed at guiding the future of policing is the last thing a nation in crisis needs at this critical moment in time , ” they wrote .
Leaving reformers out of these conversations — let alone harassing or deriding them — is just “ cutting off your nose to spite your face , ” said Miriam Krinsky , FJP ’ s executive director , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decade .
“ In those tough-on-crime kind of days , ” there was an assumption “ that prosecutors and law enforcement are in lock step and jointly subscribed to the view that we can arrest our way out of all of society ’ s problems , ” she said .
“ That just wasn ’ t a smart assumption .
We weren ’ t making communities safer by what we were doing .
In fact , we were causing a lot of damage — damage to individuals , damage to families , damage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ getting eroded.
” Reform-minded prosecutors and police leaders understand that , she said .
And where prosecutors are concerned , they have been elected precisely because the communities they serve want change — a fact that law enforcement leaders , and unions , should heed .
“ The objective needs to be , what are we doing to strengthen our community ?
” she said .
“ What are we doing to ensure that this is a healthy community and what do measures of success and progress look like that are predicated on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ number of arrests , the number of prosecutions and length of sentences , how do we create a new way of thinking about even metrics ?
” First , communities have to deal with the racist foundations of the criminal justice system and then make a conscious shift toward a more equitable future , said Jamila Hodge , a former Washington , D.C. , prosecutor who is now director of the Reshaping Prosecution Program at the Vera Institute of Justice .
“ I ’ ve never met a person who said , ‘ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because I want to lock up as many Black and brown people as possible , ’ ” she said .
“ But it doesn ’ t take long doing the job and recognizing , like , wait a minute ; there ’ s got to be a better way to respond to this than just do I prosecute or not prosecute ?
Is this conviction actually making this particular neighborhood safer ?
Is it really a deterrent ?
” These are the questions that prosecutors — and police — need to be asking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Motion for Justice , a joint project with the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice that seeks to “ disrupt , decrease and rectify the decisions and policies ” that have targeted Black people and to “ inspire prosecutors across the country to adopt these efforts.
” Motion for Justice is piloting the new program in three jurisdictions — among them Boston , where Rollins is DA — and will provide policy recommendations , including that prosecutors should not consider a person ’ s past involvement with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to charge or what an appropriate punishment would be , a long-standing practice that perpetuates the criminal justice system ’ s revolving door .
They ’ ll also collect and analyze data on racial disparities that can be used to inform systemic change .
“ The law can and will be used as an instrument of change , ” Rollins said .
“ We need that change now.
” Hodge notes that prosecutors can play an important role pushing for police reform .
They can decline to charge certain cases , for example @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And ideally , police and prosecutors would be working together to make the system more equitable .
“ We all have the goal of a safe and thriving community , it ’ s just that we recognize that a lot of what we ’ re doing is inconsistent with that , ” she said .
“ Just because we ’ ve always done it doesn ’ t mean we have to continue to do it.
” But she also notes that in jurisdictions where police have actively fought against reforms in prosecution , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that ’ s the case , she said , voters who support reform need to rally their power to create additional change .
Hodge uses Gardner , the prosecutor in St. Louis , as an example .
There , advocates , organizers , and voters who defend her also need to be proactive .
“ The same outside pressure that got her elected has to be extended to other leaders who continue to now be the obstacle to change , ” Hodge said .
“ The reason we have this moment where we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ platforms of change and then winning has been because folks have organized and said , enough ; they have said enough .
So , I just think the movement has to continue .
Don ’ t stop at the lead prosecutor , now go after the mayor.
” It wasn ’ t long after he ’ d been elected DA that Dupree learned about the noose .
Apparently , it was an office tradition ; whenever a prosecutor ’ s case ended in a hung jury , they ’ d return to their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” there .
The only Black prosecutor in the office before Dupree took over told him , look , if that noose ever shows up on my desk , we ’ re going to have a problem .
“ That was my first time knowing about it , ” Dupree told The Intercept .
“ It was just mind-boggling to me that that was considered OK. ” Dupree got rid of the noose .
He has also instituted implicit bias training for the office ’ s lawyers and staff , implemented a mentoring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Community Liaison Board that provides him quarterly feedback regarding their concerns about crime and public safety .
He ’ s pressed ahead with his conviction integrity unit , and now has a plan to expand it into a “ community integrity unit ” that would also provide independent investigation of complaints against police — among the recommendations contained in the final report of the Obama administration ’ s President ’ s Task Force on 21st Century Policing .
The unit would gather and investigate complaints , provide the results of investigations to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is warranted , consider criminal charges where appropriate , and release related information to the public .
Dupree described the expanded unit during the first meeting of the city ’ s new task force , where he ’ d been invited to speak .
Judging by the expressions on the faces of task force members , who convened via Zoom , many appeared supportive of the move .
But there was clearly some skepticism too .
Isn ’ t it possible that this level of transparency might make police feel “ too scrutinized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that individuals might shy away from careers in law enforcement ?
Dupree disagreed .
If reforms are “ going to be meaningful , ” he said , “ we ’ ve got to be bold .
”

“Racism exists everywhere,” David Alvey, the mayor of Kansas City, Kansas, said at a press conference in early June inside a mostly empty city hall. “But when you have racism in a place where someone has power over another individual, then it can become especially destructive and lethal.”
His comments came as protests were filling streets across the country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, and amid increasing calls to fundamentally change the mission and scope of law enforcement. It was time for discussion in Kansas City too, and Alvey was there to announce the creation of a local Task Force on Community and Police Relations.
The task force would include Alvey, the county sheriff, the interim chief of the city’s police department, a county commissioner, and a smattering of other local leaders. But there was one name conspicuously absent from the list: Mark Dupree, the county’s district attorney — and the first Black elected prosecutor in Kansas history. The omission quickly caught the attention of the local media. In a statement, Alvey’s office explained to the Kansas City Star that Dupree had been excluded because the task force was meant to be an “objective panel.” The group was merely gathering community input to pass on to local officials but would “not be making recommendations for change based on that input,” the paper reported. As explanations go, it was pretty weak, suggesting that no one with a point of view or ideas about specific reforms would be included.
Dupree told The Intercept that he was startled by the snub, though not entirely surprised. “It’s just wrong,” he said. “It is wrong, and it is political.” And the exclusion — and the alleged reason for it — raises fundamental questions about the purpose of the task force. If meant as a vehicle to actually reform policing, then prosecutors, who have long had a symbiotic relationship with police, must be part of the equation. Yet even as calls for policing reform increase, in many jurisdictions across the country, including Kansas City, the election of a reform prosecutor who challenges that status quo has been met with aggressive institutional pushback — most often from police agencies and cop unions.
So long as that is the case, true reform — not only of police but of the broader criminal justice system — will likely remain elusive. To Dupree, the mayor’s task force looks like an attempt to sidestep real structural change. “This is the same, old traditional way of when something happens: ‘Hey, we want to calm the masses, let’s throw a task force at it,’ wait six months, eight months, and then say, ‘Hey, we talked to you guys. Now let’s go back to business as usual,’” said Dupree. “Frankly, I’m not that type of guy.”
Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree speaks at a news conference in Kansas City, Kan., on March 14, 2017. Photo: David Eulitt/The Kansas City Star via AP
A Toxic Combination
To put the decision to leave Dupree off the task force in context, you have to know about Lamonte McIntyre, who was wrongly sentenced to life behind bars based on an astonishing and toxic combination of police and prosecutor misconduct. McIntyre was locked up for 23 years before finally being exonerated in 2017.
On April 15, 1994, Doniel Quinn and Donald Ewing were shot multiple times at close range as they sat in a parked Cadillac on a residential street, a contract slaying connected to the theft of drugs from a stash house. There were plenty of leads that could have helped detectives solve the crime quickly and correctly, including an eyewitness who said she knew the killer. But police never interviewed her.
Instead, they focused on 17-year-old McIntyre, who was with relatives that afternoon more than a mile from the crime scene. No evidence has ever linked McIntyre to the crime or the victims. Still, just months later, McIntyre was tried and convicted based on two witness identifications that had been coerced by police. And instead of vetting the detectives’ sloppy and truncated investigation, the prosecutor abetted it — first by taking the mess to trial, then by threatening a witness who tried to recant her identification of McIntyre before taking the stand. That prosecutor, Terra Morehead, not only failed to tell McIntyre’s defense about the witness’s recantation — as she was required by law to do — but also ushered the perjured testimony into evidence.
Instead of vetting the detectives’ sloppy investigation, the prosecutor abetted it — first by taking the mess to trial, then by threatening a witness who tried to recant.
McIntyre maintained his innocence, and for years, a team of lawyers including local attorney Cheryl Pilate, the Midwest Innocence Project, and Centurion Ministries doggedly investigated the case, ultimately determining who had committed the double murder (a foot soldier for a major dealer). They also uncovered the reason McIntyre became a suspect: He was framed by veteran Kansas City, Kansas, police detective Roger Golubski.
For decades, Golubski, who is now retired, sexually assaulted vulnerable Black women in the city — sometimes inside the precinct house — without ever facing consequences for his actions, which were well known within the police department, according to a pending federal civil rights suit. At times, the suit alleges, Golubski would stalk and harass those women — one of whom was Rose McIntyre, Lamonte’s mother. Rose rebuffed Golubski’s advances, prompting the detective, aided by colleagues, to retaliate by framing her son. “Rose repeatedly rejected Golubski’s advances, but his harassment did not stop. She was forced to move to a new home and change her telephone number to avoid him,” reads the lawsuit. “By moving, Rose thought that she had permanently escaped Golubski and prevented him from ever harming her or her family again. She was wrong. Several years later, Golubski orchestrated the wrongful conviction of her son Lamonte.”
In legal filings, Golubski has denied the accusations and tried to have the case dismissed. A federal judge blocked that effort and a trial is slated for March 2022. Golubski’s attorneys did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
When Dupree finally dug into McIntyre’s case, he was horrified. He agreed with defense lawyers that the conviction was a “manifest injustice,” clearing the way for McIntyre’s release from prison in late 2017.
The case prompted Dupree to set up a conviction integrity unit, also a first in Kansas. “The Lamonte McIntyre case really opened my eyes to how in-depth this can run,” he said. “It said to me, if there is one case, there are more.”
“The Lamonte McIntyre case really opened my eyes. … It said to me, if there is one case, there are more.”
Not everyone was thrilled; both the sheriff and the police chief — at the time, a man named Terry Zeigler, who was a former partner of Golubski’s — joined police union officials to pen a letter to state Attorney General Derek Schmidt in an attempt to stop Dupree. In agreeing that McIntyre’s case should be overturned, they wrote, Dupree’s office “failed to fulfill its role as an advocate for the homicide victim(s) and the state in this case.” Allowing the district attorney unfettered discretion to review old cases was causing them “great concern,” and they asked Schmidt to provide “oversight” of whatever actions Dupree’s conviction integrity unit might take.
A group of criminal justice leaders from across the country organized by Fair and Just Prosecution pushed back. “Elected prosecutors should not be expected to await the actions of others to correct legal wrongs; indeed, they are ethically required to proactively address such issues,” the group wrote in a letter to the Kansas City Board of Commissioners, which was considering Dupree’s request to fund the unit. “These obligations to the pursuit of justice and the exercise of independent judgment are not, as some have claimed, at odds with community safety or victim support. In fact, victims are safer … when communities trust that their law enforcement officials seek the truth rather than a ‘win.’”
While Schmidt didn’t take any direct action to intervene in Dupree’s conviction integrity unit, he made a sideswipe at the prosecutor in 2019, saying that McIntyre should be denied compensation for his wrongful conviction because there wasn’t sufficient evidence to demonstrate that he was innocent. Schmidt ultimately dropped his opposition in February, and McIntyre was awarded $1.5 million.
Dupree said he was “appalled” by the pushback from the community’s other law enforcement leaders. “I do not understand how anyone who can take the oath to make sure public safety is number one and to uphold integrity can, literally, flat-footedly stand against … integrity.”
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, right, and Ronald Sullivan, a Harvard law professor, arrive at the Civil Courts building on May 14, 2018. Photo: Christian Gooden/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Obstacles to Change
Of course, Dupree isn’t the first progressive prosecutor to face pushback for challenging the law enforcement status quo. In St. Louis, Missouri, the city’s first Black elected prosecutor, Kim Gardner, has weathered racist attacks for her efforts at reform, while state Attorney General Eric Schmitt waged a legal battle against her efforts to free an innocent man. More recently, Schmitt attacked Gardner in connection with protests against police violence, falsely accusing her of letting “looters and rioters” go unpunished.
Next door in St. Louis County, news that Wesley Bell had beat the incumbent prosecuting attorney to become the county’s first Black elected prosecutor prompted lawyers in his office to seek to join the police union. State officials subsequently sought to grant the AG power to prosecute cases Bell might seek to dismiss. State lawmakers in Pennsylvania have similarly tried to wrest power from DA Larry Krasner. Former Florida Gov. Rick Scott moved two dozen cases out of the office of Aramis Ayala — the state’s first Black elected prosecutor — after she said she would decline to seek the death penalty. Earlier this month, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court shot down the efforts of four male elected district attorneys to intervene in a case that is being handled by Suffolk County’s first female elected prosecutor, Rachael Rollins, about whether young adults should face sentences of life without parole. Rollins called the move “nothing more than a misogynistic wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Most recently, after Santa Clara County, California, DA Jeff Rosen announced a robust package of reforms that his office would implement, the police union was quick to act. Rosen said he would stop seeking the death penalty, which the union called “reckless.” And in response to his decision to no longer prosecute standalone cases of “resisting arrest,” which disproportionately impact the county’s small Black population, the union blustered that the plan would “purposely” escalate confrontations between police and the public.
(A similar vitriol has also been leveled at Dupree. An editorial published this week in the Kansas City Star essentially accuses Dupree of creating a rise in violent crime and leans heavily on former prosecutors — one of whom fought against efforts to exonerate Lamonte McIntyre — and a current political opponent to make its case.)
Nor is Dupree the first to be left out of broad discussions of race and police reform in the wake of Floyd’s murder. In June, when President Donald Trump showed up in Dallas for a discussion of policing, he failed to invite the city’s progressive DA John Creuzot — though, to be fair, Trump left all three of the city’s top law enforcement officers off his guest list: Creuzot, the Dallas police chief, and the county sheriff, all of whom are Black. Indeed, a skewed set of priorities and lack of diversity on the administration’s recently created Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice are in part what prompted the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund to sue to halt its work. Of the commission’s 18 members, just four are people of color and just six are women. All 18 are current or former members of law enforcement. Among the topics the group is directed to address is the need to promote “respect” for police.
A group of 75 criminal justice leaders and the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, organized by Fair and Just Prosecution and American Oversight, have signed on to an amicus brief in the case. “A flawed process aimed at guiding the future of policing is the last thing a nation in crisis needs at this critical moment in time,” they wrote.
Leaving reformers out of these conversations — let alone harassing or deriding them — is just “cutting off your nose to spite your face,” said Miriam Krinsky, FJP’s executive director, who was a prosecutor for more than a decade. “In those tough-on-crime kind of days,” there was an assumption “that prosecutors and law enforcement are in lock step and jointly subscribed to the view that we can arrest our way out of all of society’s problems,” she said. “That just wasn’t a smart assumption. We weren’t making communities safer by what we were doing. In fact, we were causing a lot of damage — damage to individuals, damage to families, damage to communities of color and trust was getting eroded.”
“We weren’t making communities safer by what we were doing. In fact, we were causing a lot of damage.”
Reform-minded prosecutors and police leaders understand that, she said. And where prosecutors are concerned, they have been elected precisely because the communities they serve want change — a fact that law enforcement leaders, and unions, should heed. “The objective needs to be, what are we doing to strengthen our community?” she said. “What are we doing to ensure that this is a healthy community and what do measures of success and progress look like that are predicated on those sorts of objectives? Rather than number of arrests, the number of prosecutions and length of sentences, how do we create a new way of thinking about even metrics?”
First, communities have to deal with the racist foundations of the criminal justice system and then make a conscious shift toward a more equitable future, said Jamila Hodge, a former Washington, D.C., prosecutor who is now director of the Reshaping Prosecution Program at the Vera Institute of Justice. “I’ve never met a person who said, ‘I signed up to be a prosecutor because I want to lock up as many Black and brown people as possible,’” she said. “But it doesn’t take long doing the job and recognizing, like, wait a minute; there’s got to be a better way to respond to this than just do I prosecute or not prosecute? Is this conviction actually making this particular neighborhood safer? Is it really a deterrent?” These are the questions that prosecutors — and police — need to be asking.
Earlier this month, Vera announced Motion for Justice, a joint project with the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice that seeks to “disrupt, decrease and rectify the decisions and policies” that have targeted Black people and to “inspire prosecutors across the country to adopt these efforts.” Motion for Justice is piloting the new program in three jurisdictions — among them Boston, where Rollins is DA — and will provide policy recommendations, including that prosecutors should not consider a person’s past involvement with the criminal justice system in deciding how to charge or what an appropriate punishment would be, a long-standing practice that perpetuates the criminal justice system’s revolving door. They’ll also collect and analyze data on racial disparities that can be used to inform systemic change. “The law can and will be used as an instrument of change,” Rollins said. “We need that change now.”
Hodge notes that prosecutors can play an important role pushing for police reform. They can decline to charge certain cases, for example, or join police training efforts. And ideally, police and prosecutors would be working together to make the system more equitable. “We all have the goal of a safe and thriving community, it’s just that we recognize that a lot of what we’re doing is inconsistent with that,” she said. “Just because we’ve always done it doesn’t mean we have to continue to do it.” But she also notes that in jurisdictions where police have actively fought against reforms in prosecution, some strategies might not work. Where that’s the case, she said, voters who support reform need to rally their power to create additional change.
Hodge uses Gardner, the prosecutor in St. Louis, as an example. There, advocates, organizers, and voters who defend her also need to be proactive. “The same outside pressure that got her elected has to be extended to other leaders who continue to now be the obstacle to change,” Hodge said. “The reason we have this moment where we see reform-minded prosecutors running on these amazing platforms of change and then winning has been because folks have organized and said, enough; they have said enough. So, I just think the movement has to continue. Don’t stop at the lead prosecutor, now go after the mayor.”
Community Integrity
It wasn’t long after he’d been elected DA that Dupree learned about the noose. Apparently, it was an office tradition; whenever a prosecutor’s case ended in a hung jury, they’d return to their desk to find the “noose award” there.
The only Black prosecutor in the office before Dupree took over told him, look, if that noose ever shows up on my desk, we’re going to have a problem. “That was my first time knowing about it,” Dupree told The Intercept. “It was just mind-boggling to me that that was considered OK.”
Dupree got rid of the noose. He has also instituted implicit bias training for the office’s lawyers and staff, implemented a mentoring program for young people, and created a Community Liaison Board that provides him quarterly feedback regarding their concerns about crime and public safety. He’s pressed ahead with his conviction integrity unit, and now has a plan to expand it into a “community integrity unit” that would also provide independent investigation of complaints against police — among the recommendations contained in the final report of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. The unit would gather and investigate complaints, provide the results of investigations to law enforcement administrators to determine whether discipline is warranted, consider criminal charges where appropriate, and release related information to the public.
Dupree described the expanded unit during the first meeting of the city’s new task force, where he’d been invited to speak. Judging by the expressions on the faces of task force members, who convened via Zoom, many appeared supportive of the move. But there was clearly some skepticism too. Isn’t it possible that this level of transparency might make police feel “too scrutinized,” one member asked, such that individuals might shy away from careers in law enforcement? Dupree disagreed. If reforms are “going to be meaningful,” he said, “we’ve got to be bold.”