Enough. In 2020, the cry of #BlackLivesMatter went mainstream, the source of beautiful signs and public art painted on American streets. Wokeness—or the desire to achieve it—spread like brushfire, and all institutions seemed to be looking within to consider their own systemic racism. But there is so much to abolish, replace, and repair. Systems of surveillance, hoarding, segregation, inequality, and plunder. Will America atone for its original sins and current damage to descendants in ways that actually transform Black lives?
CHAPTER 9
ABOLITION AND REPAIR
First came love. DeVone Boggan is a blue-eyed Black man with a gruff voice who regularly sports a houndstooth trilby. Boggan, then a youth-development consultant, had never worked on violence prevention, though he was a sharp analyst. He saw gun-toting youth in the hoods of Richmond, California, as “babies growing up in a war zone,” he told CNN.1 In 2007, Richmond was one of the most violent cities in the country. Its homicide rate of forty-six per one hundred thousand was eight times the national average. Chicago, with its reputation for gang violence, had a rate of sixteen per one hundred thousand. The math also revealed something else.
Richmond’s police department concluded that 70 percent of the gun violence in the city was caused by only twenty-eight people. Boggan said a police officer might call some of these young men “‘serial killer’ . . . because of what they’re suspected of doing.”2 He saw them as human beings capable of transformation. Key Richmond leaders were willing to take a chance on Boggan’s idea of focusing not on “hot spots” but on the relatively few “hot people” who were pulling triggers or very likely to shoot. He proposed identifying those who law enforcement considered the most lethal in the city but had avoided prosecution and showering them with positive support rather than the threat of incarceration. His empathy led him to develop a program that healed rather than damaged. As I write this in the revolutionary summer of 2020, only three separate incidents of gun-related fatalities have occurred in Richmond this year, two of which appear to involve domestic violence rather than gang activity. The third was a drive-by shooting in April, with one victim.3
The program illuminates larger lessons about what abolition and repair might look like in historically isolated and preyed-on Black neighborhoods. Before presenting details and independent evaluation of its contributions to Richmond’s dramatic violence reduction, I share the classic, Black American origins of Boggan’s humanity. Where did this lens that was so critical to innovation come from? I wanted to know, so I contacted and interviewed him.
Boggan, too, is a descendant—of great migrants who left agrarian Greenville, Alabama, for Albion, Michigan. The Albion Malleable Iron Company hired Black southerners to fill the labor voids created by World Wars I and II. Boggan’s paternal grandfather, Daniel Boggan Sr., was a frugal farmer who owned land in Greenville but was lured north in 1942 when a cousin recruited him to work for Malleable. In Albion, a hamlet one hundred miles west of Detroit, Daniel Sr. became an ironworker. He held on to the farm in Greenville and also bought and worked a small farm in Albion that helped feed his family and others. He and his wife, Rofie Jean, raised nine children, including Boggan’s father, Daniel Jr.
Boggan’s grandparents were community pillars who, as he explained, “saw themselves as responsible for reproducing the best of themselves [and the race].” “They were always feeding, housing, and teaching people,” he said, marveling that their formal education ended with junior high school. The next generation included Boggan’s father and six uncles, one of whom became a Rhodes scholar. They modeled a striving manhood for Boggan and continued the family tradition of uplifting others. But it took a while for Boggan to understand and embrace this legacy.
When Boggan was nine years old he was shattered to accidentally discover that his biological mother was white and that the only mother he had ever known, his father’s Black American wife, Mary Curtis, was his adoptive mother. This family secret and his Black parents’ bitter divorce distressed young Boggan. Worse for him, his father moved away. As Boggan was coming of age, his father, Daniel Jr., was pioneering through a series of government management jobs across the country—from Jackson and Flint, Michigan, to Portland, Oregon to San Diego County to Essex County, New Jersey. Ultimately, Daniel Boggan Jr. became city manager for Berkeley, California.
As a young teen, Boggan lived with Mary, a registered nurse, and two younger brothers in the Coronado Gardens housing cooperative on the Black, west side of Lansing, Michigan. Boggan uses several adjectives to describe his teenage self: confused, mad, angry, undisciplined, and obnoxious. Boggan confesses that while he never engaged in gang activity or became a hard-core criminal, he did sell marijuana joints for extra income and hung in the streets. Two Black male mentors reached and changed him. The first was a volunteer at the Lansing Boys and Girls Club. Andre Williams was a senior at Michigan State, and Boggan said of him, “He just started talking to me and got through my shield. . . . He was different from any other adult. He was there. He reached out. He made me feel good about myself.”
In that period, Boggan was estranged from his father and a constant challenge to his mother, Mary. He recalled one time when he “got into it with Mom” and she “popped me on the head with a cast iron skillet” while Andre was present. Andre left but returned two days later. The critical message to Boggan, who had tried to scare his mentor away, was “he was not leaving,” he was going to be there, even through tough times, even when Boggan deserved punishment, though not violence, from exhausted Mary.
Clyde Ethington, Boggan’s tenth-grade history teacher, was the first Black male teacher Boggan had ever had. Ethington made it clear he thought Boggan was smart, college material and held him accountable, daily, for doing the work required of an aspiring collegian. Every previous parent-teacher conference in his life had been “bad,” Boggan said, with the teacher pointing out his deficits. At his first conference with Ethington and his mom, Boggan explained, Ethington was able to take all of his student’s negative energy and “wrap it in a package as a positive.” It was the first parent-teacher conference that made Boggan’s mother smile.
Boggan’s academic life shifted, and he began to lean into his studies. Still, Mary sent him to live with his father. “My mom said that I had become uncontrollable and ‘incorrigible,’” he said. “Essentially, at sixteen, I thought that I was grown,” Boggan concluded. He went on to graduate from the University of California at Berkeley and then earned a law degree attending evening classes at Golden Gate University.
Boggan reconciled with and admired his father and replicated, in his own way, Daniel Jr.’s engagement with making cities better. He has a positive relationship with his mother, Mary, and, among the “fiery women” in his life, he remains particularly influenced by his blunt maternal grandmother, Essie Curtis, another community icon in Albion. After completing his education, Boggan tried to give other youth similar opportunities for transformation. For more than a decade, he worked as a consultant and advocate for youth mentoring and development programs.
The city of Richmond was desperate for change when his idea and proposal was accepted and ratified by the city council. The Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS) was born and Richmond’s city manager recruited Boggan to serve as its first director. ONS was created with a $611,000 general fund commitment from the city; Boggan raised approximately $600,000 from private sources.
Boggan insisted that ONS operate completely independent of law enforcement. He hired “neighborhood change agents,” a new employee classification within Richmond city government. They conducted what Boggan calls “street outreach” in the neighborhoods most beset by shootings, to anticipate and mediate conflict, and disrupt retaliatory cycles of gun violence. The change agents would talk to all sides in any “beef” to defuse the situation and get them to stand down. The change agents also acted as informal mentors to the young people they encountered in these neighborhoods and as case managers to those formally tied to an ONS
program. Having a felony record and intimate knowledge of the codes of the street were effective prerequisites in a job that required building trust with hardened individuals and traumatized communities. These outreach workers would hunt, surveil, and target those potentially most violent young actors, not to frisk or arrest them, but to love them madly.
Joseph McCoy, an ONS outreach coordinator, told NPR, “We do something real simple that folks just don’t realize how, how powerful it is. . . . We come from a sincere place that we love each and every last one of the people we touch and we try to touch as many people as possible.”4 As Richard Wright wrote in 12 Million Black Voices, a poetic account of the lives of rural- and ghetto-poor descendants during the Great Depression, “Our scale of values differs from that of the world from which we have been excluded . . . and our love is not its love.”5
The outreach workers identified their targets, developed trust, and brought them to ONS to make a pitch. If the young man—and they all happened to be men—agreed to refrain from “hunting,” as the workers put it, stay in contact daily, and avoid trouble as much as possible, he would participate in an eighteen-month Peacemaker Fellowship. The fellowship offered 24/7 support from an assigned case manager and an individually tailored LifeMAP (Management Action Plan) that identified what obstacles the target faced, what he needed, and what he would do to overcome them, and specific goals like getting a GED or a driver’s license. Peacemaker Fellows also received cognitive behavioral therapy, help navigating social services, substance abuse treatment if needed, connection to job training, internships, and jobs, and the chance to travel, from across town to South Africa. Most innovatively, if they met goals from their LifeMAP, addressed conflict in healthier ways, and promoted community peace, they could also receive a monthly stipend of as much as $1,000 for nine months. Donations from partners like the Kaiser Foundation paid for the stipends.6 Almost every target decided to become a Peacemaker Fellow, though some took repeated attempts to convince.
Boggan’s theory of change was simple: give these young men the kind of constant, unconditional love and support that most well-resourced parents give their children. Boggan also had a critical insight, perhaps borne of his own youthful digressions. Though these young men, who had engaged in thuggish behavior, were probably among the most violence-prone Richmondites, that very experience made them potentially the most powerful change agents in the city. If they developed a desire to live and disentangled themselves from the codes of the street, they could influence others around them and the next generation. That is, they could begin to change the codes by which boys in the hood were living. “The stipend is a gesture of saying you are valuable, your expertise is valuable, your contribution to this work of creating a healthier city is valuable,” Boggan told radio station KQED in 2016.7
Paying potential criminals to promote peace created controversy and attracted critics, including a Black American who served on the Richmond city council, Courtland “Corky” Boozé. According to Mother Jones magazine, Boozé wanted ONS and Boggan brought “to their knees” and demanded proof of the program’s impact.8 Boggan frequently found himself explaining and defending ONS’s comprehensive approach and his theory of change. Once when he was about to begin a media interview, one of his outreach coordinators suggested he don a hat that he usually wore on the weekends. Grandmother Essie had given it to him. It belonged to his maternal grandfather, Tom Curtis, whom Boggan described as “a light-shining Black man,” and also a great migrant—from Bradenton, Florida, to Albion, Michigan. Boggan had inherited Curtis’s collection of hats and the trilby symbolized the grandfather’s dignity and strength. Boggan wears them as he advocates for new generations of descendants.
Anecdotal and empirical evidence did validate the impact of ONS and the Peacemaker Fellows. The Peacemaker Fellowship began in 2010, and by 2017, gun assaults and homicides had fallen by 66 percent in Richmond.9 Boggan believed that ONS and its fellows had to have played a role. “When you actually focus on the very people involved in gun violence, I think you can’t argue that they’re not contributing to the safer environment happening in this city,” he told CNN. But he also credited the contributions of “police work and an improved economy.”10
DeVone Boggan
A peer-reviewed independent study facilitated by the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley found that the Peacemaker Fellowship program was associated with a 55 percent annual reduction in gun-related deaths. Researchers also concluded that, with less shooting, the fellowship program may have contributed to a 16 percent annual increase in violence by other methods.11 When I raised this surprising possibility with Boggan, he demurred: “I can tell you that Peacemaker Fellows didn’t start killing or harming . . . by other means [like] knives and fighting.”
Researchers at the University of Southern California’s Price School of Public Policy conducted an independent cost-benefit analysis of the Peacemaker Fellowship. They conservatively estimated that the nominal cost of the program produced outsized benefits, in their words, “a net present value (NPV)” of over $535 million to the city of Richmond from the first five years of the program.12 According to an independent evaluation conducted on the Sacramento Peacemaker Fellowship Program, modeled on Richmond’s, for every dollar invested Sacramento received eighteen to forty-one dollars in benefits due to costs avoided through violence reduction.13 Perhaps the men who have graduated from Richmond’s Peacemaker Fellowship constitute the most profound evidence of success. By 2019, of the 127 fellows who had gone through the program in Richmond, 122 were still alive, the vast majority of which were no longer gun-violence suspects.14 As sons and brothers, and often fathers to someone, still present and different from how they used to be, individually and collectively, they have helped to stop a spiral and begin a more virtuous cycle.
Boggan left ONS and founded Advance Peace, an organization dedicated to helping other cities replicate its systems change model. To date, more than twenty cities across the country have opened offices of violence prevention similar to ONS. In California, the cities of Sacramento and Stockton have created peacemaker fellowships, and both cities have begun to see reductions in gun-related homicides.15 Other cities have shown similar bravery and are seriously considering starting peacemaker fellowships. In Richmond, ONS and its Peacemaker Fellowship continue, run by Sam Vaughn, a veteran ONS street outreach worker.
As I concluded my interview with Boggan, I asked him whether he observed multiplier effects in Richmond neighborhoods from which the original Peacemaker Fellows sprang. He told me that while these very poor neighborhoods felt safer, economic development had not reached them, though gentrification was happening elsewhere in the city. When he was directing ONS, it appeared to him that the main “instruments” operating in the fellows’ hoods were the police and ONS.16
There are larger lessons to be gleaned from Richmond’s experience. Repair began with the people who would pull the trigger. Young Black males are much more likely than others to be a victim of gun violence. It makes sense to apply a tourniquet where it will most stop the bleeding. Peacemaker Fellows stopped shooting and began promoting peace in themselves and influencing others. Boggan’s strategy of focusing on hot people rather than hotspots made this intervention much cheaper than targeting entire neighborhoods with aggressive policing. Richmond was not a rich city, but it could afford this transformative experiment. In fact, the city was so blood-soaked and overcome that it couldn’t afford not to try Boggan’s idea. The hoods of Richmond have not been fully remade; there is still much work to do in creating and connecting descendants to opportunity. But a better, more humane relationship between the city and these neighborhoods began by applying a lens of love to the most feared descendants, seeing them as assets and investing directly in them. Now all descendants breathe freer of police and gang predation in their hoods, and all Richmondites enjoy a much less violent city.
Our nation is now in a position similar to the dilemma Richmond faced. We are at a cross
roads and a time of choosing which political vision and which public policies to conquer intersecting crises of COVID-19, climate change, and racial injustice. There was an alarming spike in homicides in Black neighborhoods over the summer of 2020, much larger than the ritual rise and fall of the season, though crime overall remained at generational lows. Murder rates were stable in white neighborhoods but rose precipitously in Black ones. Criminologists theorized on the whys, while community folk on the predominantly Black East Side of Kansas City pointed to a new sense of despair in a year of pandemic and prominent police killings of Black people. A reverend in Kansas City who, like Boggan, ran a program to provide social support to those most prone to violence, told the New York Times that “many of his clients [feel] hopelessly trapped in a system in which they will never thrive.”17
The pandemic and conflict between uprising citizens and militarized forces threatened to overwhelm some places. Deaths rose in Baltimore, from the virus and an uptick in gun-related homicides.18 Similar patterns emerged in the District of Columbia, Chicago, Milwaukee, and other cities thick with descendants.19 Once again, communities that have been most vulnerable and abused in America’s racial caste system shoulder a disproportionate burden of the country’s social and economic crises—a role they were designed to play.
A silver lining of the pandemic was that the mutuality of American suffering was utterly transparent. A virus that exploited every human and societal vulnerability thrived in a separate and unequal nation. More investment in Black and brown neighborhoods in healthcare, testing, and tracing and prior development of amenities that determine health would have lessened the spread of and deaths from the pandemic. Meanwhile, Baltimore tried a novel, privately funded experiment of flying surveillance planes from the sky, in a desperate gamble that this would somehow stop gun violence on the ground.20
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