Charged by Emily Bazelon

Author:Emily Bazelon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

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Cure Violence had to coexist with the police and their approach to gangs. In June 2018, Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea testified at a public hearing about a database with 17,500 people the police suspected as gang members. Shea said the database had been cut in half during the de Blasio administration, but city documents showed that during the same period, only 1 percent of the people who’d been added were white. For the first time, Shea explained how the police put people on the list. The criteria included posting on social media with known gang members or a police report that someone was frequently hanging out at a “known gang location.” Shea called the database a “vital tool” given that half the murders in the city over the past year involved a gang member as victim or perpetrator. “We do not want to start at square one each time one of these groups commits violence,” he said, “without knowledge of who they or their associates are.”

Lawyers and social workers at Legal Aid and Brooklyn Defender Services were dubious of the large number of people in the database and the quality of information that got them there. “We see people added to the database based on recycled information from low-level contacts,” said Anthony Posada, supervising attorney of Legal Aid’s Community Justice Unit. “There’s no requirement of a conviction before you get on it. When someone goes on parole, they’re looked at as a source of information. That’s how the police cast a wide net. It makes it incredibly difficult to be integrated back into your community if you’re still treated as guilty and gang involved even if that’s far from true.”

The NYPD had another means of targeting gangs called Ceasefire, launched in 2014. It wasn’t clear how people were being identified for Ceasefire, other than a vague link to the gang database, according to Shea. But once you were on the list, you got a letter warning you that the police were watching and threatening that if you or “any member of your crew” got into trouble, “the District Attorney’s Office will take a hard stance on plea positions for even the most minor offense.”

Community activists and nonprofit leaders, however, saw Ceasefire as a problem. Its tactics of intimidation made it more difficult for them to work with people in the same high-risk pool. “Ceasefire uses people’s backgrounds against them,” said Andre T. Mitchell, who operates Cure Violence sites in Brooklyn as the founder of the group MAN Up. “You’re forever looked at as a perpetrator, and that’s unfortunate, because people should be allowed to grow and develop. We treat their backgrounds as a positive. We ask them to use their experiences and influence to talk down situations that could lead to very violent outcomes. They’re part of the solution rather than the problem. That’s where we get a lot of our success.”

The successes of Cure Violence looked real. A 2017 study by resesarchers at John

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