The Dive: Divided United

This week, New Hanover County suspended the mediation and outreach division of Port City United, the county department created in 2022 to help address community violence. This followed the arrest of Stephen Barnett, a top PCU employee who ran the division that was formerly known as the Violence Interrupters. He was fired by the county shortly afterward.

After a shooting last Thursday at the Houston Moore public housing complex that left a victim paralyzed from the waist down, Barnett was charged with felony accessory after the fact to attempted murder. Prosecutors allege he drove the 17-year-old suspect to the scene of the crime and then helped him flee, while on the clock and driving a county-owned van. 

This is far from the first problem with the program, and saving what’s still promising and beneficial about it depends on whether officials can identify what went wrong.

The program came to be after a summer 2021 shooting at New Hanover High School. Facing intense public pressure, the school board and commissioners called a joint meeting where then-chair Julia Olson-Boseman pushed through a poorly defined $350 million plan to address community violence. Later, commissioners Rob Zapple and Jonathan Barfield added guardrails–but the pressure was still high, and the vision was still blurry. 

Part of the plan was replicating Durham’s Bull City United, an anti-violence program based on the Cure Violence Global model aimed to intervene in shootings in specific neighborhoods. Many of PCU’s initial staff members, including Barnett, were poached from TRU Colors, the troubled for-profit brewery that sought to decrease violence by hiring active gang members.

On paper, this gave the county the advantage of hiring people who already knew the dynamics of gun violence in the city and had mediation experience. But in doing so, commissioners accepted two liabilities, whether they acknowledged them publicly or not.

The first: The county was hiring people with known ties to gangs and criminal activity. Just months after PCU was founded, it fired an employee facing an accessory murder charge. Since then, many in the county and in law enforcement who spoke to me on background said they’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The second: TRU Colors had never been able to prove its impact. Founder George Taylor often took credit when gun violence went down, but so did the police department, churches, and local nonprofits. And when shootings spiked, Taylor would argue that it would have been worse without Tru Colors–but it’s of course hard to prove a negative. 

PCU’s initial director, Cedric Harrison, caused his own issues. Harrison had survived a bullet to the face and been involved in a number of nonprofits in the Black community, but he was unqualified to run a multi-million dollar government department. After less than a year, he was fired for a host of policy violations and generally unprofessional behavior. Little about the hiring process was clear, and while county officials couldn’t discuss his tenure on the record, citing personnel concerns, many felt like it was at best an “outside the box” move. Several said, it felt like a TRU Colors move.

As a private enterprise, TRU Colors could assume some liabilities that few elected officials would feel comfortable with. Commissioners Dane Scalise and Leann Pierce made that point last year, with Scalise referencing “pretty serious questions” about PCU and public comments from District Attorney Ben David advising against hiring active gang members. 

But the bottom line was the multi-million dollar price tag for a program that was having a hard time demonstrating the return on investment, or even proposing a rubric by which you could measure its success. 

The expiration of the federal COVID-relief money that had helped fund PCU also led to comments during county budget meetings earlier this year about “taking a closer look” at some programs.

And that was before this week’s arrest.

Now, Scalise says he will vote against funding PCU “in its current form” in the county budget this June. 

There are, no doubt, serious concerns about PCU, and the optics right now make it politically difficult to stick up for the department. And while Barnett still has the right to appeal his termination, and he’s still innocent until proven guilty, it’s not clear if PCU will get the same level of due process.

Still, the door’s been left open for some of PCU’s work to continue: “second chance” expungement clinics, helping the victims of the housing authority’s mold crisis, and the hotline that connects community members to other services. Those might lack the flashy drama of stopping shootings, but their impact is clearer, more consistent, and far less risky.

–Benjamin Schachtman

Read this newsletter online or contact The Dive team with tips and feedback at wilmington@theassemblync.com.

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Last week, Charlotte-area NPR affiliate WFAE featured our story on the shrimp crisis in North Carolina. Catch up on that conversation here. 

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Around the Region

A Dam Dilemma: Contractors are fixing Boiling Spring Lakes dams that broke during Hurricane Florence, but the city manager is worried that the thick lakebed vegetation that grew in the aftermath won’t be removed in time, the State Port Pilot reports. 

Diggin’ Up Bones: What’s believed to be an ancient ocean dinosaur fossil has become a downtown attraction, The StarNews reports, after a bar owner discovered it in Wrightsville Beach a few months ago. 

Good Credit: Business loan recipients in New Hanover County have among the lowest default rates in the nation, Greater Wilmington Business Journal reports. Live Oak Bank’s founder recently discussed new federal incentives that encourage smaller business loans, a long-overlooked segment. 

Eviction Conniption: Wrightsville Beach evicted the history museum from its Bordeaux Cottage last week. Port City Daily reports the issue arose over the museum’s decision to discontinue a summer camp’s use of the property.

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Around the State

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