It’s been 30 years since John George turned around his first crack house. While living in the Old Redford neighborhood of Detroit — which, like almost every major city in the 1980s, was decaying in large part due to the crack epidemic — he decided one day he was going to give a blighted home a facelift. George repainted the house, repaired the broken windows and tended to the lawn. From there, fixing up derelict houses became a weekly thing. “I’m half Lebanese, half Italian and 100 percent Detroit stubborn. Once we get something in our heart and in our head, it’s almost autopilot,” George tells NationSwell, adding that he never considered simply moving away. “I didn’t think leaving the city was the proper thing to do.” At first George’s goal was to stop property values in his neighborhood from diminishing any further. But as he started fixing up the houses that surrounded his own, he discovered his efforts could have a much larger impact in helping his hometown recover. It’s an idea that has caught on in other cities battling blight: Clean up the streets and empty lots, and you have a recipe for lowering crime and encouraging community engagement and business development. As multiple studies in different cities have shown, vacant lots and dilapidated homes are key indicators of poverty and crime. In Detroit, the problem was particularly pronounced. The mortgage crisis of the 1990s, when propertyownership began to dramatically decline, was soon followed by the 2008 housing crisis. The city declared bankruptcy, resulting in illegal trash dumping in the streets and plenty of burnt-out and abandoned homes. “Things started to deteriorate. Problems started to escalate. We had serious problems with our mayors, and the biggest question people had was how did Detroit get to where it is,” says George, who founded the nonprofit Detroit Blight Busters in 1988. “There’s a lot of blame to go around. But blaming people and things weren’t going to fix anything. So instead of blaming, I thought we should do something.” Every Saturday, George and his Blight Busters cofounder would meet and then go fix something up. A park. A home. A street corner. No project was too small. “We weren’t naive enough to think we would stop crime or anything, but we wanted to at least minimize the decrease of property values,” he says. It was an antidote to the city’s response, which was to simply board up the houses or demolish them completely. “We didn’t want to be part of the problem of tearing down houses, but be part of the solution to make them nice.” With thousands of blighted buildings in the Motor City still standing, George and his crew of volunteers, who so far have more than 1,500 renovations under their belts, remain committed to revitalizing as many of them as they can.
A SCALABLE MODEL CATCHES ON
Other cities have taken up similar initiatives. Durham, North Carolina, was one of the first to ban plywood on abandoned homes, instead covering them up with clear polycarbonate. Officials there claim that the change has helped sell the vacant buildings. In Philadelphia, workers are dispatched to clean up vacant lots and property owners who don’t take care of their land are fined. The city also works with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society through the Philadelphia LandCare program, which has “cleaned and greened” thousands of abandoned properties since 1999. The result has been a noticeable decrease in crime and an upswing in economic mobility for the neighborhoods. “Just by the changing the neighborhoods, people’s attitudes toward their community has changed,” says Thomas Conway, deputy managing director of the city’s Community Life Improvements Programs. “Its given them hope.” Revitalization of the lots include clearing debris, grading the land, planting trees and erecting post-and-rail fencing, essentially transforming the land into de facto parks. In 2010, the city passed an ordinance that mandates private owners of abandoned buildings to install working doors and windows, or face steep fines. “We’ve cleaned and gleamed about 8,000 properties and 23,000 vacant lots with the Horticultural Society, and at the cost of only a few million dollars,” Conway says. “Compare that to incarceration costs per person, or the cost of poverty, and the benefits far outweigh everything else.” A decade-long study of the greening program in Philadelphia looked at lots in four areas that were revitalized. It found a direct association between blighted vacant lots and gun assaults; after those lots were cleaned up, there were statistically significant decreases in firearm violence and an uptick in residents’ overall health. Another study, published in The American Journal of Public Health, backed up those findings. That study examined the results of Philadelphia’s blight-remediation programs on 5,112 vacant lots and buildings, and found that gun violence decreased by 39 percent when buildings were renovated and by almost 5 percent around vacant lots that were beautified. The researches concluded that “there is something unique to firearm violence that makes it especially treatable with programs that transform blighted urban environments.” For every dollar spent on Philadelphia’s blight program, as much as $26 in net benefits were made.
AHEAD OF THE CURVE
Back in Detroit, George has seen similar returns through his work with Blight Busters. The organization has raised over $20 million from local businesses, sports teams and philanthropists to finance their continued revitalization efforts. He says there’s been a noticeable return on that investment. An abandoned high school George helped clean up was eventually turned into a shopping center, a $33 million investment. And two blocks of now-prime retail space that Blight Busters renovated were recently snapped up for $3.5 million. “Because of that $20 million investment, we’ve been able to attract millions of dollars more, [which goes] right back into our community,” George says. The Blight Busters’ success didn’t just raise property values and make Detroit’s streets prettier and safer. It also became a model for other cities. “Our investment, our time and energy, was worthwhile, because it not only saved our neighborhood but the whole city. When everyone left, we were holding down the fort till the calvary returned,” he says. “I know it’s because of our work that Detroit is on the right path to recovery. We were just a little ahead of the curve.”
This story is the second in a multimedia series on states’ victims’ compensation practices. In the first installment, a NationSwell original investigation found that thousands of families of murder victims are denied compensation due to a “contributory conduct” clause — essentially, local officials allege that the victim was responsible for his or her own murder. Read the full investigation here.
Tyrisha Robinson tenses up whenever she has to remember the day she ended her child’s life. In April last year, her 23-year-old son, Tyree, was shot in the neck in a street shooting. Complications from his injury later landed him on life support at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, where his mother lived. “I didn’t want him to suffer anymore,” she says. “So I watched my boy transition from life to death.” After his funeral, Robinson filed for financial help through the victims’ compensation office in Delaware, the state where Tyree was shot. The disbursement of such funds is something that every state offers as a result of a 1984 law that made restitution available to those affected by violent crime. The amount granted to victims or their families varies by state. But to help recoup expenses that directly result from a crime, such as funeral and burial costs, crime-scene cleanup and lost wages, total reimbursement can range anywhere from $10,000 all the way up to $100,000. Robinson asked for $6,000 to cover a portion of her son’s funeral and the loss of earnings from her job as a medical claims specialist. She was denied. Delaware’s victims’ compensation board had ruled that she was ineligible for the money. Her son had violated his probation (Tyree had previously been in prison for selling drugs), and because of that, they said, he was partially responsible for his own death. Robinson didn’t have thousands of dollars stashed away. The denial was not only a blow to what little savings she did have, but also to her dignity. “Him violating his parole had nothing to do with him being shot, nor me burying him as a result of his injuries,” she says. “I just don’t feel it’s fair that they made this decision based on his [prior] actions.” Though states’ compensation funds dole out millions of dollars each year, there is a litany of reasons why families of homicide victims can be turned away. One of the most controversial is based on what’s known as “contributory conduct,” which allows a state to deny funds to a victim’s family if homicide detectives find that the person killed was in some way responsible for their own death. And while a victim’s actions at the time of death can be helpful in catching the killer, rarely are they ever used in court as evidence for the perpetrator’s motive. Contrast that with claims to victims’ compensation funds, where the behavior of the deceased is a primary driver of whether a family member will receive money. An investigation by NationSwell looked at county data in six states — Arizona, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas — which showed that thousands of families are denied compensation each year because of the contributory conduct clause. Many of them suspect that their race is a factor, but police and state officials flatly reject that assertion. Regulators who process claims say they are just following federal law. But one victims’ services group in Philadelphia, the city with the highest number of compensation claims filed each year in Pennsylvania, is helping families navigate the system and fight for their right to fair treatment.
HELP COMES WITH A CATCH
When Congress first passed the Victims of Crime Act of 1984, it was an anomaly at a time when entitlement spending was being slashed by the Reagan administration. The allocation of federal funds to create state offices gave access to tens of millions of dollars to victims and victims’ rights organizations every year, primarily through restitution payments imposed on convicted offenders. State offices, which are responsible for handling and managing claims, are reliant on federal grants to pay victims as well as fund victims’ advocate services. Delaware, where Tyree Robinson was shot, received over $6 million in federal grants last year, according to the national Office for Victims of Crime. Nonprofits also rely heavily on federal grants to offer services for victims of various crimes, such as sex trafficking or mass shootings. In 2017, for example, $4 million in federal funds went to victims or their families of the 2015 San Bernardino, California, mass shooting that killed 14, not including the two shooters. For mother-daughter team Victoria Greene and Chantay Love, who together run Every Murder Is Real Healing Center (EMIR) in Philadelphia, keeping their organization afloat means working with Pennsylvania’s Office of Victims’ Services. “We receive funding through that office,” Love, EMIR’s program director, says. “Which makes some of our advocacy, well, complicated. We want the state to create policies that allow victims to heal without judgment.” The two are on the ground almost daily visiting the families of homicide victims — sometimes within hours of a murder — to try to get them into therapy, and also help them navigate the compensation process. The latter is integral for hundreds of families in Philadelphia, where the gun murder rate increased 15.8 percent in 2017 despite a drop in overall shootings, according to police records shared with NationSwell. Of the nearly 1,400 murders recorded in the city since 2012, most have been of young black men. In 2015, they accounted for close to 60 percent of homicides. Surviving family members overwhelmingly live in poor neighborhoods and often do not have the immediate resources to pay thousands of dollars for an unexpected funeral. The headquarters of Every Murder Is Real Healing Center in Philadelphia. “Families are living day-to-day simply trying to figure out how to keep food on the table,” says Love. “Once the tragedy of a homicide occurs, survivors are gasping for air. A funeral is not in the budget.” Between 2010 and 2015, Pennsylvania’s Victims’ Compensation Assistance Program (VCAP) shelled out over $77 million to victims of all crimes, including assault and homicide. But, Love says, the problem is not with claims being paid, but in the hundreds of denials that are handed down each year. Data provided by VCAP shows that the state issued 780 denials between 2012 and 2015 based on contributory conduct, making up 37 percent of total denials. And though that number is just over 2 percent of the tens of thousands of claims the office received within the same time span, families affected say it’s unfairly punishing them for crimes they had no part in. The system has lost its original purpose, they say, and now instead of helping victims’ families, it’s criminalizing them. In an email exchange, VCAP manager Jeffrey Blystone said the office is only following the law and that determinations shouldn’t reflect on the family. “A denial of a claim is in no way an attempt to further punish a family,” he said. “VCAP is governed by the Crime Victims Act, and the Act requires VCAP to determine whether the victim’s conduct contributed to the victim’s injuries. The Act also requires that VCAP’s award or denial be based upon that determination.” But of the states studied by NationSwell, Pennsylvania doesn’t have the worst record when it comes to denying families’ claims for reimbursement. In neighboring New Jersey, 60 percent of all denials were due to contributory conduct in the same time period, according to data from the state’s Victims of Crime Compensation Office. Other states have additional regulations that specify if a person committed a felony within a certain time period before their death, their family is also ineligible for reimbursement. In Louisiana, for example, NationSwell found that nearly 70 percent of denials between 2010 and 2015 were based on contributory conduct, which included whether the victim had committed a felony in the five years prior to their death. This, advocates argue, is obverse to the point of jail and prison. “When you commit a crime and go to jail, you are paying for your crime in lost time of your life,” says Amy Albert, a lawyer who helps families in Jersey City, New Jersey, navigate the legal bureaucracy of reimbursement. “So to deny a family reimbursement despite the fact the [victim] had already served their time makes no sense. You’re punishing them twice.” New York, however, has the lowest denial rates for contributory conduct, despite having more claims than most other states analyzed by NationSwell. Between 2010 and 2015, less than 2 percent of denials cited contributory conduct. The state has a sliding scale for reimbursement when contributory conduct has been determined. The family of a person who trades gunfire on a New York street, for example, and then dies as a result would be ineligible for compensation. If that same person was involved in a bar fight, however, and traded insults but not punches, and then dies as a result of a beating, their family could get a small sum of money as opposed to nothing. “The classic 100-percent conduct-contributing denial is where I point a gun at you, and you shoot me. I can’t claim to get compensation, because I caused you to shoot me,” says Elizabeth Cronin, director of New York’s Office of Victim Services. “If a person is a known drug dealer and gets hit by a drunk driver, they’re still a victim. That has nothing to do with whether they’re a perpetrator in another kind of case,” she says. “It’s not fair to use that person’s history to eliminate their eligibility.”
RACE AS A FACTOR?
Many families interviewed by NationSwell allege that denials are happening primarily to families of color. But despite recent reporting, which anecdotally backs up that claim, NationSwell found no empirical evidence to support it. A source at the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD) — which oversees the Office of Victims’ Services — said that any perceived correlation is likely just a numbers game. For example, Philadelphia is the state’s largest city and also has the most homicides, which happen to primarily affect black men; a high number of compensation claims would logically result in a similarly high rate of denials within the group applying. And Blystone, the VCAP manager for Pennsylvania, said that denials based on race are unlikely, as only half of all claimants opt to include their race on their application. That logic aligns with NationSwell’s findings. According to county data in all six states analyzed, the largest percentage of denials are in counties with larger cities and higher crime rates, which would naturally result in more filed claims. In Texas, for example, both Bexar and Dallas counties encompass two of the state’s largest cities: San Antonio and Dallas. In 2015, the two counties had a higher rate of claim denials than other counties in the state at 29 and 25 percent, respectively. But they also had more violent crime that year compared to Texas counties with smaller populations. There is, however, a noticeable relationship NationSwell found between the proportion of nonwhite residents and the average percentage of reimbursement denials. Lafourche Parish in Louisiana, for example, had a 23 percent nonwhite population, according to the 2010 census, and a 6 percent denial rate for the years between 2013 and 2015. In the same time period, Orleans Parish, which includes New Orleans, had a 69 percent nonwhite population and a 16 percent denial rate. This was a consistent finding in all six states examined, using both public documents and records requested by NationSwell. A NationSwell investigation found a relationship between a county’s percent of nonwhite residents and its percent of reimbursement requests denied. To be clear, this does not prove race is a mitigating factor in deciding reimbursement claims, but it does raise eyebrows for people like Philadelphia civil rights lawyer Angus Love (no relation to Chantay Love of EMIR), who has worked on victims’ compensation cases with EMIR and is the executive director of the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project. In his view, there’s simply too much of an anecdotal correlation between homicide reimbursement claims, black victims and the police who conclude that contributory conduct was in play. “It seems to me that race is entering into the decision-making,” Love says. “I’ve seen too many articles about young black kids in the ghetto, and it’s simply assumed that they’re involved in illegal activities. To make a blanket response is a stereotype and not necessarily what the facts would dictate.” But Capt. Sekou Kinebrew, commanding officer of the Philadelphia Police Department’s public affairs office, says homicide detectives have little to gain from assuming victims are involved in a crime when they are killed. “You’re relying on the words of other people to solve a crime, and in the case of a homicide you rely on family cooperation. Why on earth would the detective do something to diminish that or sabotage their own efforts, especially when we know that the availability of [victims’ compensation] funds relies on this,” he tells NationSwell. “I just don’t see any benefit in a detective doing that.”
‘IN THE EYE OF THE SHITSTORM’
Regardless of fault, EMIR’s Love and Greene are actively trying to shift the narrative around homicide victims. That’s because they know firsthand how the bureaucracy of victims’ compensation, coupled with the acute trauma of losing a loved one, can affect a family. In 1997, the two lost a brother and son, Emir Greene (from which their organization gets its name). His murder received front-page coverage in Philadelphia’s City Paper and launched the mother and daughter, along with Love’s sister, to take on the task of helping families that were going through the same process. “One of the things we noticed immediately was families were not taking care of themselves,” says Love. “They forgot to eat, drink water, the basics. So we initially started as just trying to feed families.” Though the murder rate in Philadelphia has gone down considerably since EMIR first formed, the number still hovers around 300 homicides a year, according to annual reports. EMIR responds to just about every one of them. “Our first course of action is simple: Get families access to services, let them know we’re here and make sure they take one minute at a time and then 15 minutes at a time,” Love says. When families call Love, which happens almost daily, she always ends the conversation with advice on self-care: breathing techniques, drinking enough water and eating enough food. Over the past decade, EMIR has taken on more roles within Philadelphia, specifically by offering counseling and family services to children or parents. Their office has teen, children’s and family rooms where volunteers — almost all of whom have experienced a murder in their own families — offer support and lend a hand in working through trauma or grief. The organization soon became seen as invaluable to the community — and to the police department. “They are one of the first entities that touches families right in the wake of a tragedy. And they truly focus on the healing part,” says Kinebrew, who has worked side by side with EMIR on community-policing strategies. “They put themselves in the eye of the shitstorm.”
‘APPEAL, APPEAL AND APPEAL’
Beyond providing healing services, EMIR has advocated for victims’ rights for over a decade by helping families file reimbursement claims and pushing the state to remove the denial barrier for families touched by homicide. “You have given the killer all the power in that situation, because not only have they taken away your loved one, but then [VCAP] legitimizes their death and victimizes you in the process,” Love argues. Recently, the group successfully resolved a case with the help of Angus Love, the civil rights lawyer. In 2016, high school senior Zion Vaughan, 18, was gunned down near his home. The investigating officer wrote on the victims’ compensation claim filed by Zion’s grandfather, Thomas Vaughan, that the teen had been dealing drugs. Vaughan was confused: How could they know if his grandson was selling drugs, when they hadn’t even found the person who killed him? How could they know he was doing something wrong, especially when he was shot in the back and could have been running away? He refused to believe drugs were involved. “I was shocked,” Vaughan says. “I can’t say that Zion didn’t do drugs, didn’t smoke reefer. But I know he wasn’t selling.” Through appeals, Vaughan, with the help of EMIR, was able to get the decision reversed. This is uncommon in Pennsylvania, where only a handful of appeals has ever led to an administrative hearing and a reversal of an earlier decision, according to PCCD. Vaughan’s case, which determined that the police’s claim of drug involvement was unfounded and hearsay, was one of the first. “It was such good news, because it’s the first time something like this has ever said that the police report should not have been used to deny Mr. Vaughan’s claim,” Love, the lawyer, says. “That’s a huge step for us.” And it gives hope to the frustrated family members of victims, like Robinson, the mother whose son was fatally shot in Delaware, to keep on fighting. For families caught in a similar situation, she has a few words of advice. “Do your research on why you were denied. Make sure you ask plenty of questions, and never give up,” she says. “Appeal, appeal and appeal.”
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This story is the first in a multimedia series on states’ victims’ compensation practices. In the second installment, a NationSwell mini documentary further explores the issues families of victims face when applying for reimbursement. You can watch the video here. Additional data reporting by Malorie Hughes. To read about how NationSwell found and queried the data for this story, visit our writer’s GitHub account, where you can also download the data sets. A previous version of this story included incorrect population data for counties in Louisiana. We regret the error.
At every stop during a drive through the Greenville section of Jersey City, N.J., John “Jay” Gilmore recounts exactly what happened and who was involved — including the name of the person who pulled the trigger. That’s something unique about all the murders in Jersey City: Everyone knows who killed whom. In some instances, the murderer lives right next door to the victim, but no one will talk. “Nobody’s gonna tell the police because nobody’s gonna snitch,” Gilmore, a former member of the local East Coast Bloods gang Sex, Money, Murda, tells NationSwell. “You snitch and you could get killed.” So instead of snitching, Gilmore’s one of many Jersey City residents trying to fix the problem from within.
Life on the Hill
Power players in government (including Florida Man’s son-in-law Jared Kushner) and finance have turned once-barren Jersey City into a metropolis of 264,000 people living in the shadow of Manhattan, just across the Hudson River. But as of October this year, there have been 16 homicides and 98 total shootings in Jersey City. Most have occurred around the Greenville neighborhood, an area referred to locally as “The Hill.” Almost all of the deaths were caused by guns, according to an independent analysis conducted by NationSwell. Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop says that additional law enforcement patrols and proactive policing in high-crime areas are addressing the problem, but NationSwell’s analysis — which only includes reported shootings published in local papers and cross referenced with reported shootings via the Gun Violence Archive — reveals that Jersey City has seen a 200 percent increase in the number of shootings in the past three years. The total number of homicides recorded by Jersey City police in monthly CompStat reports — the system that logs city crimes — does not specify the number of murders by gun deaths, nor does it record number of shootings without injury. Multiple requests for more accurate records to the Jersey City Police Department on shooting data were not made available to NationSwell. With gunshots being heard almost every night, a neighborhood resident says the area is tantamount to a war zone. “It’s kill or be killed in Greenville,” says Hessie Williams, a Jersey City mother whose 17-year-old son was murdered in 2016. When there’s a shooting, more kids take up guns to protect themselves, an issue that the Mayor’s office has said is part of the problem. “I get why they carry [guns]. When you’re running from bullets almost every week, it makes sense,” Williams says. A pin commemorates the one-year anniversary of the loss of a young man to gun violence. Fulop, a Democrat that recently won re-election, has consistently made gun violence part of his campaign, but even he’s admitted that the problem can’t be solved through changes to policing or legislation alone. “These situations did not develop overnight and we know it will take time, dedication and long-term efforts to bring lasting change…There are many factors that impact public safety and violence,” says Fulop. “While we have hired more police and increased walking tours and community policing — and have found that to be positive — we have also more than doubled the number of recreation programs, created a partnership with the [Board of Education] for more youth activities after school and have hired over 4,000 youth over the past four summers.” Additionally, 8,000 jobs have also been created and other community programs have been launched during Fulop’s administration. But families of gun violence victims don’t feel that City Hall’s actions are sufficient. “If the kids being killed were white kids, the city would be doing everything in their power to stop this. Nobody cares about my son. They think my son isn’t important,” says Theresa Franklin, a Jersey City mother whose child was killed in May 2016. To stop the shooting, regular citizens are borrowing a technique from the gangs ravaging their streets. They’re taking matters into their own hands.
A Cure for Jersey City
Jersey City’s Booker T. Washington Apartments, just one mile north of Greenville, have a long-standing reputation for being lethal. For the better part of the 1990s, the housing project was known for its gun violence and drug trade. In the past five years, crime has decreased, shootings are rare (though they still happen) and residents are starting to feel safe in their own homes. Though the city has deployed a significant number of uniformed police officers to the area, the drop in crime has much more to do with a cultural change brought about by a group of young men who live there. One of those residents, Courtney Hemingway, 30, sits in the project’s recreation center every Thursday with at least 15 of his peers and a motley crew of career professionals, including a volunteer lawyer, a jobs mentor, a social service counselor and a motivational speaker. Dwayne Baskerville, a longtime Booker T. Washington resident, is also there. “One thing that Courtney probably won’t tell you is that he put a hit out on me,” says the 55-year-old Baskerville. “So I went to him and told him my life’s story and at the end of it, I said, ‘So do you wanna do this? Or do you wanna play some basketball?’” They ended up shooting hoops. (Today, both guys refer to the incident as “a misunderstanding.”) Every week, a group of Booker T. Washington residents meets to vent frustrations and share ideas for the community. That was back in 2006. Their initial interaction inspired Hemingway to form a de facto peace treaty between rivaling groups in the Booker T. Apartments and nearby Marion Gardens houses that resulted in 104 days of no shootings. Ever since, Baskerville has been leading a program that’s unofficially replicating the Cure Violence model, which takes a public-health approach by identifying those that have personally committed violent crimes and using their influence within their community to cool tensions. His group encourages youth to shed their lives of violence and crime by holding weekly sessions to talk about frustrations (they want to be less policed) and troubles they’re facing (they want careers, not just jobs). As a result, a handful have been able to hold down steady career jobs or go to school. Cure Violence has proven successful in some of America’s most economically- and socially-depressed neighborhoods, including Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, where gun injury rates declined by 50 percent, and the South Bronx, which experienced a 63 percent reduction in shootings, according to a study by CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. Last year, Camden, N.J., one of America’s100 most dangerous cities, adopted the model. Maalik Jackson, an outreach supervisor for the local chapter Cure4Camden, says that homicides, shootings, and stabbings have significantly decreased in the four neighborhoods they’re focusing on. Jackson recently visited Jersey City to learn why Baskerville’s group is so successful. “The thing that I noticed from the beginning was that there were a lot of similarities in what they want to do to what we’re doing, but they lack the backing,” he says, referring to the fact that Cure models are typically set up through government channels and are heavily financed. “They were able to apply our model within this one area — with no funding, with no help — and [are] still achieving a high level of success.” Dwayne Baskerville leads a program that’s helped reduce violence at the Booker T. Washington housing project in Jersey City.
“Put down your guns, y’all.”
The Booker T. group empathizes with residents in Greenville. They know people from the neighborhood who have been murdered, or at least hear the stories. But they’re far removed from it. “We don’t have the same kind of issues that the people up on The Hill have. Not anymore,” Hemingway says. “They’re shooting at each other like crazy up there.”
Gilmore, the former gang member, has first-hand knowledge of the struggles faced by Greenville youth. Convicted of drug possession, he served a six-year-long prison stint before making his way back to his hometown in 2017 to find that many of the people he raised in the gang had been killed. Upon his return, Gilmore began talking to kids who may have beef with others, using his connections on the street and “working the chirp,” — listening in on a gang communication network — in an effort to mitigate gun violence. His efforts are similar to the work being done at the Booker T. Apartments. “Sometimes these kids listen, but they really only listen to people their age or those they look up to,” Gilmore says. “They’re not gonna be listening to the police or their elders. So I talk with them because they know me.” He’s also involved with A Mother’s Pain, a group of dogged mothers of fallen children that was started by Williams. In August 2016, her son, Leander “Nunie” Williams, was killed, shot twice in the back of the head at a school event. After her son was shot and killed in 2016, Hessie Williams (right) founded the group A Mother’s Pain to advocate against gun violence. Williams was devastated — but not shocked — by Nunie’s death, who she says was “no angel.” He had been running around with troubled neighborhood kids and a year prior, had been expelled from school for carrying a gun, which he had bought illegally. Williams and A Mother’s Pain have been working Greenville’s streets at least once a month, carrying posters plastered with the pictures of local kids who have been killed. They meet with city council members and the mayor’s office in hopes of elevating their profile and highlighting their work. They lead caravans where dozens of cars block traffic and have sit-ins with gun-toting gang members. On the one-year anniversary of Nunie’s death, NationSwell participated in one of those caravans, which visited seven locations where mothers in the group had lost loved ones and Nunie’s gravesite. A handful of his friends had gathered to show their respect. “Come on, y’all,” Williams pleaded with the group of six boys. “If you really loved Nunie, you’d stop shooting. Put down your guns, y’all. Put ’em down.” Just a week later, she’d be doing the same thing after another teenager was murdered. A Mother’s Pain also counts the rebellious religious leader Dr. Rev. Herbert Daughtry among its ranks. Daughtry, 86, has mastered the art of protesting against neighborhood violence within black communities. He’s been using his experience and connections to a national network of black leaders to help the mothers in Williams’s group, whom he refers to as “wounded healers.” Growing up in Jersey City and nearby Brooklyn, N.Y., Daughtry used to run with local gangs and the mafia before he was incarcerated for armed robbery and assault — a crime that led him to becoming a fourth-generation preacher. Since then, Daughtry (dubbed “The People’s Preacher”) has been successful at elevating human rights alongside Rev. Jesse Jackson and former Mayor David Dinkins. He was also Tupac Shakur’s spiritual advisor, according to Jet Magazine. The action that A Mother’s Pain is taking now, Daughtry did 30 years ago in the notoriously violent neighborhoods of Brooklyn. “We’re taking to the streets, kinda like how we did in the radical days. That’s how we raise awareness and try to stop these kids from shooting [each other].”
Killed Over a Dice Game
But gangs and the problems within their communities have changed since the 1980s, as social media has made people excitable and even tiny issues get out of hand. “Every other day we hear about another kid getting shot,” says Dennis Febo, an advisor at the Booker T. Apartments’ weekly meetings, in reference to a two-month period this past summer when two people were killed by gunfire and another 26 people were shot. One of those shootings erupted from a dice game. “I mean, how do you even address that?” “Every other day we hear about another kid getting shot,” says Jersey City resident Dennis Febo. The problem is particularly vexing in Jersey City. Dozens of residents from The Hill point to the demolition Montgomery Gardens, a public housing project just a block away from the Booker T. Apartments that was once home to 434 families, as stirring up long-standing geographic boundaries between feuding rivals, some of whom were kicked out of their apartments and forced to relocate to areas that weren’t necessarily welcoming. “The people who lived in the Montgomery houses may have had issues with people up on The Hill,” says Pamela Johnson, executive director of the New Jersey Anti-Violence Coalition Movement. “That beef between families has been transferred down from generation to generation. Now with the displacement, they live next door to an arch enemy they had their entire life.” Public Safety Director James Shea tells NationSwell in an email that preventing these crimes is much more than just mitigating generational rivalries and requires smarter policing practices. “Eye-for-an-eye justice is a definite problem and the cause of many instances where one incident sparks a series of retaliatory actions,” he says. “While there are definitely long-standing differences between groups related to specific public housing locations, and that is part of the investigation strategy, it is not the sole cause.” In January of this year, Mayor Fulop vowed to reduce gun violence by hiring more police, increasing the Jersey City force from under 800 to 922 officers in the past two years, the largest it’s been in 20 years. The city has also put into place new procedures when a shooting occurs, including swarming the area with plainclothes officers who build relationships with community members that can lead to arrests. It’s believed that a larger, and more visible police force, helps deter crimes. An overnight solution isn’t possible, Fulop and Shea say, because the issues facing Jersey City are so deeply rooted. Even policing won’t solve it, completely. “Any number of shooting deaths is too many but these issues aren’t issues that are unique to jersey city [sic] and the reality is they are issues that no city can only police their way to a solution on,” Fulop wrote in a Facebook post in June 2015. “Many of the issues have taken decades to get here and they won’t be solved by pure police.” Many residents and volunteer advocates praise the mayor’s work, but stop short of saying the administration has helped reduce violence or shootings on their streets. Dennis Febo and Dwayne Baskerville at the Booker T. Washington Apartments.
A Community, Together
A Mother’s Pain has yet to see the significant drop in violence that’s been achieved by the group in the Booker T. apartments. The mothers, however, do take credit for a two-week period of no shootings in Greenville — a significant moment considering residents complain about gun violence virtually every day. Mayor Fulop says that conversations with the group have helped inform the city’s newest anti-violence strategies. As for Gilmore, he’s taken kids off the street to teach them boxing in Williams’s backyard. “I do it as a way to keep them from being bored. Keep ’em busy,” he says. “I’d much rather these kids — if they’re gonna beef — learn to use their fists than some guns.” Back in August, Gilmore noticed a boy, no older than 12 years old, carrying a gun in his waistband. Gilmore demanded that he hand it over. The tween argued back, claiming that he needed it for protection from guys outside his school, waiting for him. “From now on, I’m walking you to and from school,” Gilmore told the boy. The situation, Gilmore acknowledges, is complicated for black communities, where more policing might reduce crime but increases distrust among the community it serves. He is confident, though, that one thing will work: Getting the entire community to come together to take a stand for a better quality of life. Visit Joseph Darius Jaafari’s GitHub page to learn how the data in this article was captured and analyzed.
Update: Since the reporting of this article, Courtney Hemingway pled guilty to several counts, including aggravated assault on a police officer. Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Hessie Williams’s son was killed at age 19. He was 17. NationSwell apologizes for the error.
Solar Now Provides Twice As Many Jobs As the Coal Industry, Co.Exist While the coal industry faces a sharp decline, solar power is growing at record levels — adding jobs at a rate 17 times faster than the overall workforce. The industry is also a more lucrative option for people without higher education. As one advocate puts it, “This is just an incredible example of the opportunities that exist for people that need these opportunities the most.” Building Trust Cuts Violence. Cash Also Helps. The New York Times A radical approach to gun violence has helped reduce the homicide rate by nearly 60 percent in Richmond, Calif., formerly one of the nation’s most dangerous cities. Spearheaded by DeVone Boggan, a NationSwell Council member, the program identifies those most likely to be involved in violent crimes and pays them a stipend to turn their lives around. Aside from the cash benefits, participants receive mentoring from “neighborhood change agents” who have come out of lives of crime themselves. Iceland Knows How to Stop Teen Substance Abuse but the Rest of the World Isn’t Listening, Mosaic Science In the last two decades, Iceland has implemented an ambitious social program that’s nearly eliminated substance abuse among teens. After research showed that young people were becoming addicted to the changes in brain chemistry brought on by drugs and alcohol, experts decided to “orchestrate a social movement around natural highs,” offering extensive after-school programs in sports, dance, music — anything that could replicate the rush of drugs. This, coupled with stricter laws and closer ties between parents and schools, led to a huge societal makeover. Proponents of the program hope to recreate it in the U.S., but funding and public opinion remain obstacles. Continue reading “Solar Trumps Coal When It Comes to Jobs, Cash Handouts Deter Crime in California and More”
Every Friday, during a weekly book hour at a public middle school in Bergen County, N.J., a little girl picked out the same Scholastic pamphlet about Alcatraz Island. Delores Connors, the class’s reading instructor, couldn’t figure out why. What was so captivating about a defunct federal penitentiary?
When Connors asked the kids to share what they were reading, the girl’s arm shot into the air. “I really like this book,” she announced, showing her classmates a picture of a cell. “Now I know what it looks like where my dad sleeps.” Connors tensed. She didn’t want the girl to disclose too much. As the daughter of a convict (Connors’s mother was incarcerated while pregnant with her), she wanted the girl to feel dignified talking about her dad, the way other children are.
“From that moment, I began to think, ‘How many other kids don’t share?’” Connors wondered.
She teamed up with her colleague Mary Joyce Laqui to ease communication about loved ones who are locked up, launching the greeting card line Write to Matter. Inscribed with Hallmark-style messages, the notes cut past stereotypes about the incarcerated as dangerous criminals to express affection for people who’ve made a mistake. While the enterprise is still in its infancy, it could eventually provide an invaluable service to those dealing with the corrections industry, including an estimated 44 percent of black women with a family member behind bars.
“Our greeting card line came out of that need, people who need to be able to communicate with their loved ones,” Connors says. “Because when your family member or the person you love gets in trouble, you still have to show up at work. Your church member knows your son got arrested; they don’t want to mention it, but they want to say something. The cards give us access to do that.”
The schoolteachers initially stamped the cards’ front cover with their own artwork. But after meeting an artist through Fortune Society, they’re pairing with inmates (current or former) who provide photos and drawings that adorn the outsides.
At first, Connors and Laqui set up Write to Matter as a social enterprise, selling cards at a profit that could be reinvested in the company’s operations. But something felt wrong about charging a fee. Now in the process of applying for nonprofit status, the teachers send cards to whomever emails them. They’re also planning to distribute them at Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal to families heading to prisons upstate and right outside Rikers Island, New York City’s troubled jail, to those about to enter the visiting room.
Despite their distance, each inmate still matters to his relations on the outside; Write to Matter’s words are making it just a little easier to say so.
Just one boarded-up home can disfigure an entire city block. Studies have shown that crime rates shoot up by 19 percent within 250 feet of a vacant foreclosure, while surrounding property values plummet by $7,386 — a huge blow to weakened housing markets. Perhaps worst of all, these unoccupied, unmaintained buildings can sever neighborhood ties, driving more residents to move out.
In May 2014, officials in Durham, N.C., tested out a novel idea to battle blight. The college town, home to Duke University, couldn’t afford drastic changes, like bulldozing every vacancy or subsidizing new home ownership. But they could disguise the eyesores. To do so, the city banned all plywood boarding on abandoned homes. Instead, they turned to clear, hard plastic.
“We’ve found that it makes an enormous difference for the feel and health of the neighborhood,” says Faith Gardner, a housing code administrator who enforces the ordinance. “It tends to let housing prices stabilize, even with a number of vacancies. We’re not seeing the same drop in real estate prices and increases in crime.”
To date, a construction company contracted by the city has installed the see-through, sturdy plastic sheets on 64 properties. (The high-density plastic, known as polycarbonate, is also used for eyeglasses, airplane windows and motorcycle windshields.) According to officials, the change to plastic has helped sell more of these vacant buildings. Back in 2011, when the city began targeting blight, there were nearly 500 boarded-up homes; as of the new year, the city has cleaned up 90 percent of the problem. Only 56 abandoned buildings remain. An abandoned house in Durham, N.C., before plywood boards were replaced with polycarbonate coverings.
The trend has also taken off in other cities, becoming official policy in Phoenix and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. This month, Ohio became the first to mandate “clear-boarding” statewide.
Back in Durham, officials hope that the new material will deter vandalism, prostitution and drug use in the empty structures. Durham’s police department did not respond to a request for the latest stats, but the reasons why public safety might improve are clear. For one, it’s harder for a wrongdoer to pick out which lots might make a good hideout. “You can look at a certain angle, and you might get a reflection [from the plastic] that clues you in. But, really, you have to look hard to figure it out,” says Gardner. Police, meanwhile, can easily look through the transparent plastic to check for illegal activity.
The new material is also far harder to break. Previously, “they’d rip off the back door and go in,” Gardner adds. But “you can hit the [polycarbonate] with a baseball bat, and it won’t shatter.”
The one downside? Polycarbonate doesn’t come cheap. A 4-by-8-foot sheet of plywood costs around $11, while a plastic window cover the same size runs closer to $115. A door with several locks boosts the price by another $395. But to Gardner, the benefit to homeowners is “immeasurable.” She only has one regret about how Durham has implemented the change: “We really wish we had done it sooner.” Continue reading “Battling Blight With … Plastic?”
A Swarm of Controversy, WIRED Can environmentalists and Big Agriculture come together to save honeybees? It’s a question Jerry Hayes, a former hive inspector turned Monsanto scientist, asks constantly. As conservationists blame Hayes’s company for colony collapse, he asks humans to learn something from the bees: how to cooperate for the hive’s sake.
Welcome to Uberville, The Verge An experiment in an Orlando suburb could change the face of public transit. As part of a contract between Altamonte Springs, Fla. and Uber, local government subsidizes intra-city rides with the startup and fronts additional funds when connecting with mass transit. Critics argue that the plan isn’t accessible to low-income and disabled riders, but Altamonte officials say the deal was the only affordable way to connect the suburb’s sprawl.
Chicago Tackles Youth Unemployment As It Wrestles with Its Consequences, Chicago Tribune Applying for a first job in Chicago can feel “like trying to go across Lake Michigan,” insiders say. Rap sheets or typo-laden résumés can ward off employers, and inaccessible transit through high-crime areas can discourage adolescents — disconnecting 41 percent of the Second City’s 18–24 year olds from work or school. Fortunately, a bevy of groups are helping this vulnerable group land work.
Jason Hernandez never thought he would see the outside world again.
Since 1998, he had been serving a life sentence in federal prison for selling crack cocaine in his native McKinney, Texas. It was his first criminal offense, but due to the Drug Act of 1986 and the mandatory minimum sentences it required, Hernandez found himself locked up at the age of 21. Then, in 2013, his prayers and petitions were answered: He was granted clemency by President Obama.
Watch the video above and see how Hernandez uses Crack Open the Door, his sentencing advocacy nonprofit, to spotlight and fight for the release of other first-time nonviolent drug offenders serving life without parole. MORE:Criminal Justice Reform Is Imminent. Here’s Why
Kalief Browder spent three years in jail despite never being convicted of a crime.
He was arrested for a stealing a backpack in the Bronx — a crime the then 16-year-old maintained he didn’t commit. His mother was unable to put up the $3,000 bail, so he was locked in solitary confinement on Rikers Island, New York City’s central jail, for roughly two years as he awaited trial. Browder tried to commit suicide several times — once with shredded bed sheets hung from a light fixture — and suffered physical abuse from guards and inmates alike, as detailed in The New Yorker.
In 2013, prosecutors dismissed the charges, and he was released. Last month, Browder committed suicide, sparking a wave outrage against the system that had imprisoned a young man for years only on the basis of an accusation. With its “unfortunately-long history of horrible abuses,” Rikers Island became an “example of failing to save jail for people who are convicted, as opposed to people who have just been accused,” Karin Martin, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, tells NPR. “We’re realizing that we can’t afford, both financially and kind of morally, the horrible impacts of mass incarceration.”
In New York City, the emotional outpouring that resulted from Browder’s premature death recently crystallized into real reform as Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a sweeping, $18 million overhaul of the city’s bail system. Since 2009, the Big Apple had tested alternatives to monetary bail at a jail in Queens, offering “supervised release” through a nonprofit to low-level or nonviolent offenders. The only requirement? That a person had to do was check in regularly. Nearly nine out of 10 defendants — 87 percent — still showed up to court. Similar to programs in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Charlotte and Phoenix and states like Kentucky, Arizona and New Jersey, nonprofits in the Big Apple will be following up with text messages reminders, visits with case managers and other check-ins to ensure that people keep their date with the judge.
“We know that there are thousands of people who are now being held pre-trial in the city’s jails simply because they cannot afford to pay a few hundred dollars in bail. Instead, they are held at great expense in jail and frequently lose their jobs, have to drop out of school and lose daily contact with their children and families,” Michael Jacobson, executive director of the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance, says in a statement. “Using risk as a standard for pre-trial detention as opposed to how much money someone has will increase public safety, reduce unnecessary and costly detention and make our pre-trial system more fair and just.”
Jails don’t get the same attention as their larger counterparts, state and federal prisons, but the average American is 19 times more likely to be locked up locally than thrown in the slammer. On any given day, 731,000 people are in jail; about 12 million people are admitted in the course of a typical year, according to research by the Vera Institute of Justice. Some are serving out a sentence, but most are simply waiting for their case to be resolved, either through a trial or a plea.
Though the cash bail system is intended to ensure that a person shows up for trial, it’s the most significant reason why some remain locked up and others are released. Put simply, if the accused or his family can’t find the cash for baile fast enough (or at all), he or she will remain behind bars. Most of the time, bail isn’t astronomically expensive. In New York, more than half — 54 percent — of inmates held through the end of their case were behind bars because they couldn’t post bail of $2,500 or less, mostly for misdemeanors.
“There’s no reason to keep people in jail at great costs, when they are no threat to anybody,” says Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of New York State. It “strips our justice system of its credibility and distorts its operation.”
To aid cities and states in determining whether a person is likely to reoffend, the John and Laura Arnold Foundation developed risk assessment tools. Among the key factors that are considered are the person’s age and criminal history, including any prior incarcerations and failures to appear in court, as well as whether the current offense is violent, Anne Milgram, the foundation’s vice president of criminal justice, tells NationSwell. Drug use, employment and other criteria traditionally weighed at arraignment hearings are almost meaningless, she adds.
The judges who used the Arnold Foundation’s criteria have seen notable drops in the jail population and correlated drops in crime. In Charlotte, for example, the number of inmates dropped 20 percent.
“The central challenge of our work has been getting people on board thinking a little differently about how these decisions are made,” says Milgram, a former criminal prosecutor. “There’s a lot of individual discretion for police, prosecutors and courts, but we haven’t used objective data to inform those decisions. We’re not taking away any decision making; we’re providing information that you both need and should want.”
New York will likely develop their own “updated science-driven risk assessment tool” in the near future (Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance called for one), pending an update to state law in Albany.
There’s been some criticism leveled at the latest changes in Gotham by some of bail reform’s biggest promoters. Robin Steinberg, executive director of The Bronx Defenders, a legal aid service, and David Feige, board chair of The Bronx Freedom Fund, which assists those charged with a misdemeanor make bail for $2,000 or less, both called the reforms “long overdue” but stressed that the city must not intrude too far into the lives of defendants. There’s no benefit in being released from jail, they say, if an organization can impose even stricter pretrial requirements, the violation of which could result in reincarceration or other penalties.
“Here’s how it works: A young man arrested for shoplifting might plead guilty and be sentenced to perform one day of community service. But that same defendant who is innocent of the charge might, as a condition of his release, be ordered to attend a one-day drug education program, report to a pretrial-services officer every week, and undergo drug treatment or testing — all because he claimed to be innocent and sought to challenge his arrest,” Steinberg and Feige write in an op-ed for The Marshall Project. “The problem with the pretrial-services model is that these ‘services’ … are often identical to, and sometimes far more onerous than the sentence one would receive for actually being guilty of the crime.”
Natalie Grybauskas, assistant press secretary for the city, tells NationSwell that the only conditions for release will be “whatever check-ins are deemed appropriate by the provider.” Any added services, like a referral to drug education, will be voluntary.
The city expects to select providers from a group of applicants in the fall, she adds.
