A radical approach to gun crime: paying people not to kill each other | Jason Motlagh

Richmond, California had a murder rate 11 times higher than New York City. A controversial scheme cut the number of victims in half – but not everyone is happy

Late in the afternoon of 22 May 2006, Rohnell Robinson and his partner got a call from one of their associates. Investigators believe that a rival gunman, who had shot at them before, had been spotted at the Hilltop Mall in Richmond, California. As a leader of the group at the centre of the worst gun violence the city had ever seen, Robinson was known for his readiness to go after his enemies. In the words of one officer, he was a “serial killer”.

The target, Brian Jones, pulled out of the mall parking lot in his car, according to court records. Moments later, Robinson’s car rolled up alongside him. A volley of shots missed Jones, but LaQuisha Turner, his 17-year-old girlfriend, was hit in the face and neck. The injury left her paralysed from the neck down and unable to breathe without a ventilator. Over the next three months, a retaliatory cycle played out that resulted in as many as a dozen murders. The following year, the feud between two warring groups, Deep C, based in Central Richmond, and Project Trojans, from North Richmond, led to more than 20 killings.

City officials were desperate to stem the violence, and the groundwork was laid for an experimental programme that would focus on mentoring the young men most likely to kill or be killed. Set up in 2007 and primarily staffed by ex-convicts, the Office of Neighbourhood Safety (ONS) pioneered an unusual approach: it would provide men who had gun crime convictions with incentives to stop shooting. At first, ONS gave them social services referrals and life-skills training to find jobs and earn degrees. Three years later, and more controversially, it offered them a monthly cash stipend and supervised trips outside Richmond.

The year ONS was founded, Richmond, which lies north of Berkeley in the East Bay, across the water from San Francisco, was the ninth-most-dangerous city in the United States, with 47 murders among its 106,000 residents – more than 11 times the murder rate of New York City. In 2014, the number dropped to 11. This was the lowest on record since 1971. (The total rose again in 2015, up to 20.) Murder rates have declined nationwide over the past two decades, but the 77% drop in Richmond is a statistical outlier. Over the same 2007-14 period, homicides in Oakland and New York City fell by about a third.

The success of what soon became known as the “Richmond model” has generated a certain amount of media hype, and attracted the interest of other communities struggling with gun violence. Few people dispute that the ONS has made an impact on the streets where it started. But the notion that a successful publicly funded programme like this could one day persuade the government to attempt something similar on a much larger scale was bound to be unpopular in certain quarters.

Gun violence is the result of multiple forces coming together. Though it is possible to make a causal link between, say, the availability of firearms and deaths by shooting, when the number of deaths goes down, it is harder to identify a single reason. The positive influence ex-convicts may wield over the people pulling the triggers is hard to prove. So how much responsibility can the programme rightfully claim for Richmond’s turnaround?

* * *

Rohnell Robinson, now 30, spent two years in jail, and has been out since 2009. On a cold morning in February 2014, ONS staff member Sam Vaughn drove me and Robinson through the Iron Triangle, a low-income neighbourhood bordered by two sets of train tracks. Billboards for Chevron, the area’s largest employer, alternated with signs that threatened jail time for buying a gun on behalf of anyone without a licence. Corner liquor stores were open, and little else. Bernice’s Chicken Spot, once a favourite haunt of Robinson’s, was boarded up. So was his grandmother’s house. A police car idled on a corner, “just waiting”, Robinson said, “for something to happen”.

On block after block, residential windows were cloaked in sheets and front yards sealed off by wire fencing. The pavements were empty. As we passed the Barretts, a gated apartment complex, Robinson reminisced about how it used to be possible to “chill and get away from everything” there, back when shootouts with North Richmond sometimes happened three or four times in a single day.

“This is where I’m cool,” Robinson said, scanning the street. “Deep Central, my comfort zone.” He sat low in the passenger seat, despite the car’s tinted glass; strict laws prohibit him from returning home to Central Richmond and associating with anyone considered a gang member in the neighbourhood.

In the wake of the LaQuisha Turner shooting, the state attorney general’s office launched an investigation into Deep C that culminated in a November 2008 sweep by local and federal officers. Eighteen members were arrested, and police confiscated cash, drugs and automatic weapons. A female associate employed as a juvenile counsellor with the city parks and recreation department was found with a kilo of cocaine and a MAC-11 rifle. By then, Robinson was already in custody.

One of the attempted murder charges against Robinson was dropped, owing to lack of evidence, but a gun possession charge stuck, and he was sentenced to five years in prison.

Although he accepted the charge against him in order to get out of jail, Robinson denies that he was part of a gang. By his account, he never shared his drug earnings with anyone, never donned colours or threw hand signs, and was never “jumped in” – beaten up by a group to gain initiation. That kind of “Bloods and Crips stuff was in LA”, he said. What mattered in Richmond was where you grew up and who your friends were. If there was a problem, you looked out for your partners, “like someone takes care of their family”.

Four years ago, when he broke probation rules in order to take his four-year-old nephew to a playground in Central Richmond, someone spotted him and tipped off the police, who swept in and cuffed him in front of the boy. Some of the arresting officers had seen him just the day before, at a truancy programme where he was counselling young people as part of his ONS fellowship.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Vaughn said. “You want a young man to be responsible to his community and his family, to make up for their mistakes.”

Robinson sighed. “My name just gets me in trouble.”

“I think they believe he doesn’t deserve anything better due to what he did prior,” Vaughn reflected. He looked at me in the rearview mirror, but the message was for Robinson. “They think, ‘If we had that evidence, we could put him in jail forever, so let’s make his life as hard as we can.’ So as far as revenge and retaliation, they’re doing the exact same thing these young men are doing.”

Vaughn, 39, speaks from experience. A former cocaine dealer who hustled on the streets of North Richmond, a square-mile tract of derelict homes and projects, he spent 10 years in prison (seven in San Quentin) for pistol whipping a man almost to death. In prison, men he had looked up to on the street challenged him to stop wasting time. So Vaughn joined men’s groups, worked at the church, and talked to the troubled youths who came to visit the prison as part of a programme. While incarcerated, he earned a degree and, less than a year after his release, in 2008, he was hired by Richmond’s ONS to cultivate relationships with young offenders. His criminal history gave him credibility with his charges; he could be the model for them that he had never found for himself. “I decided that I’m going to live for them,” he told me.

Robinson first heard about the ONS from his mother while he was in prison. Though qualified to take part in the programme, he initially balked, worrying that his former associates would consider any link to the authorities tantamount to snitching. After talking to ONS staff, he changed his mind: they told him they did not share information with the police. In mid-2011, he accepted an invitation to join a pilot ONS programme.

Vaughn and Robinson got to know each other on an ONS trip to Dallas. Both men are Dallas Cowboys fans, and they visited the team’s new stadium together. Robinson told me that Vaughn’s advice helped him adapt to life after jail. Vaughn called regularly, and reliably replied to text messages. Woman trouble, finding an apartment, paying a phone bill – nothing was too mundane for his attention. The men’s mutual respect evolved into a friendship. “I’m not telling him how he should live his life,” Vaughn said. “I’m just giving him some options.”

Fifteen months into his fellowship, Robinson was charged with credit card fraud. He had got involved in a scheme purchasing stolen credit card numbers from a third party in order to buy Target gift cards and max them out. Vaughn advised him to turn himself in, which he did, then wrote a letter to the judge outlining his progress in the programme. Robinson did not lose his place in the fellowship, in spite of this and other probation violations.

“They expect you to give up on them, and we refuse to do that,” Vaughn said.

* * *

The ONS headquarters sits on the third floor of a brick building that was once a jail. You have to knock to get inside, as the wrong mix of people could get ugly. When I visited in the spring of 2014 to meet the director, DeVone Boggan, the lounge table was stacked with copies of Sports Illustrated and Black Entrepreneur. A sign taped to a wall read: “I Support DeVone Boggan and The ONS.”

Boggan, who is 49, wore a houndstooth hat tilted over his piercing blue eyes. He had been working at a consulting firm specialising in youth mentoring in Oakland, 12 miles away, before he was hired to advise Richmond’s violence prevention department. Richmond officials had been spending millions on violence prevention programmes that did not produce results. It did not take Boggan long to see that trust in law enforcement was low and community services were poor. He became convinced that the only way the city would be able to combat the violence was through an agency not associated with law enforcement.

Boggan launched the Office of Neighbourhood Safety in 2007, with a small staff of outreach workers, all but one of them ex-convicts. They focused their efforts on Richmond’s Central district, less than five square miles in size. More than half of the 47 killings the previous year were in this area. Just three firearms-related homicides were recorded in the same area a year later; the conflict was now concentrated in the sprawling Southside, where a patchwork of cliques affiliated with the Project Trojans and Deep C fought. The shift suggested that focused, consistent attention worked.

But the next year, the ONS’s staff of four “change agents”, as they are called, was stretched thin trying to cover both the central and southern districts, and the death toll surged to 45. At a meeting with law enforcement officials, Boggan was stunned to learn that some 70% of the 45 homicides and 200-plus firearm assaults in 2009 were suspected of having been committed by just 17 people. He reckoned that if the perpetrators could somehow be engaged directly and intensely, in a spirit of partnership, gun violence would plummet.

ONS agents spent hours in the neighbourhoods most affected by gun violence. They played dominoes or basketball, and talked to people. The information they collected was used to develop a focus group of 50 candidates. More “touches” were made with the prospects until rapport was built, and they would be offered a spot in the 18-month, voluntary Operation Peacemaker Fellowship.

To win the first recruits over and keep them coming back, Boggan knew he had to impress them. On arriving at the city manager’s conference room, the candidates were given a sit-down lunch; every place setting had a plaque on which the guest’s name was engraved. Dressed in a pinstripe suit, Boggan made his pitch: if the city was going to live in peace, he said, it would have to come through the men in that room. If they agreed to participate in the fellowship, which included drawing up a “life map” detailing career and family goals, he told them the $1,000 cheque they received at the end of the meeting would be just the beginning. Four of the men invited to this meeting had refused straight off; they flashed guns under their belts and announced that the police would have to earn their pay. But the rest agreed to join.

In a city with scant economic opportunities for law-abiding people, ONS was criticised for rewarding criminals with taxpayers’ money, or “paying for peace”. Courtland “Corky” Boozé, a former member of the city council, argued that more deserving ex-convicts could be bypassed for not being dangerous enough, adding that the ONS had not been transparent in showing how it spends its money. Another community leader complained to me that the programme was spending too much on lavish trips in which the ratio of staff to fellows was about equal.

Boggan explained that although ONS received $1.2 million from the city for its operating budget in 2014, the money for the stipend and travel comes exclusively from private donors. Fellows are eligible for payment and travel privileges only after six months, and to earn the full $1,000 payment each month thereafter, they must fulfil the goals on their life map. Fewer than half of programme fellows have received the full amount, and Boggan has cut a lot of cheques made out for a single dollar. He added that the money given to the fellows is a pittance compared with what Richmond police department must pay for overtime, or what the city pays for the cost of a criminal trial, or medevac helicopter rides to take shooting victims to hospitals.

The programme’s record is remarkable: of the 68 fellows who have taken part so far, 64 are still alive, and Boggan asserts that it is a result of better decision-making on the part of the participants. “Our theory of change is simple,” he said. “I want them to desire to live.”

Nearly 10 months after Boggan started the ONS, his younger brother Dhanthan, then 32, was shot dead in Michigan. Boggan went home for the funeral. His brother’s friends told him they knew who did it and asked Boggan if they should retaliate. He told them that the police would handle it. Yet he found the officers helpless, unable to answer basic questions. At the memorial service, the man who was rumoured to have shot his brother turned up and offered condolences. Boggan was enraged. He advanced his return flight, knowing that if he didn’t, he might do something he would regret. “I’m the neighbourhood safety director with all the abilities to know better, and I’m feeling this way,” he recalled, “telling myself on the flight, ‘You could have done something. You could have done something.’”

* * *

Richmond, with its five oil refineries and three chemical plants, sits on the east side of the bay, its industry-heavy economy mostly impervious to the tech boom in San Francisco. Chimneys and knots of petroleum piping punctuate the skyline. Local activists say that steady pollution from the Chevron refinery accelerated an exodus of the city’s once-sizeable middle class and kept would-be investors away, leaving a majority black and Latino population. Industrial accidents have plagued the community, notably a 2012 refinery fire that sent more than 15,000 area residents to medical centres with respiratory ailments in a single afternoon. Child hospitalisation rates are nearly twice the state average.

But the tough circumstances have attracted ambitious and dedicated politicians. In 2006, Green party progressives took over the city council and have since enacted policies more radical than anything in famously liberal Berkeley – including a compulsory purchase campaign to bail out homeowners and forgive debt, and a “ban the box” ordinance that forbids employers from requiring job applicants to reveal their criminal histories. The city also hired Chris Magnus, an openly gay police chief from North Dakota, who helped to reform the police force (he departed for Tuscon, Arizona late last year). “Richmond to me is a story of pragmatism,” said Barry Krisberg, a criminologist at the University of California in Berkeley. “This idea that we’re going to step away from a purely ideological, moralistic approach to try new things and see what works.”

Krisberg told me that Richmond’s worst cycles of violence, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then again in the mid-2000s, coincided with a deluge of crack cocaine on the streets. The surge a decade ago was compounded by cuts in state budgets that resulted in mass prisoner releases and a shortfall in funding for parole and re-entry programmes. Lifelong criminals with no prospects of legitimate work went back to making a living in the drug trade while police tried, without success, according to Krisberg, “to arrest their way out of the problem”.

As with other cities across the country, there have been many reasons for the decline in violent crime, Krisberg said. Gentrifiers and working-class immigrants attracted by some of the lowest rents in the Bay Area have had a generally restorative effect. More money is being spent to upgrade schools and after-school programmes; playgrounds have fresh coats of paint. The chief of police has also taken steps to win local trust by orienting his force towards community policing. Magnus instated a gun buy-back programme that incentivised people to trade in weapons for gift cards, and gave officers more regular patrol beats, dispensing with aggressive street sweeps and multiple arrests. ONS’s role in the reduction of violence is difficult to quantify, but in July 2015, the National Council on Crime & Delinquency published a long-term study of the programme concluding that it appears to be working.

“Most social service programmes do not count outcomes such as mortality or injury,” the report acknowledged, but “using these measures is paramount for an effort designed to reduce lethal violence.” Still, the NCCD hedged: “It is impossible to disentangle the ONS approach from other concurrent city-wide violence reduction interventions.”

For ONS detractors, the infamous “City Hall Brawl” was evidence that the programme’s grip on its charges was tenuous. On 14 October 2011, members of two rival groups showed up to collect their stipends at the same time. After trading insults in the parking lots, they went to the ONS office , where only administrative staff were present, and a melee broke out. Local and national media picked up the story after a police report was leaked that included the allegation from a responding officer that ONS staff had impeded the investigation. The timing of the leaks underscored the aversion some within the police department felt, and continue to feel, toward the ONS. No charges were brought.

Police officers involved in the event were reluctant to speak about it. But Detective Matt Anderson acknowledged that residual tensions from the incident have not entirely subsided in the department. He added that there has never been any formal training inside the department about the particular nature of the ONS’s work: “I think it’s all a misunderstanding.”

For his part, Boozé, the former councilman, refuses to let the City Hall incident go. “What if one of the men had drawn a gun and accidentally shot a girl,” he exclaimed when we met at Casper’s Hot Dog stand, opposite City Hall. “Maybe [the ONS is] doing something, they are talking to people,” he conceded. But its strategies still rankled. “I’ve said it a thousand times: I’m a little upset about having to pay people to stop shooting each other. Because in the community I come from, if you give someone the opportunity to take advantage of you, they will.”

Yet there is evidence that this is not the case. Research by GiveWell, an American non-profit organisation that evaluates the cost-effectiveness of charities, suggests that a little money can have a disproportionate impact on people living in dire circumstances. In a survey of hundreds of charities, they found direct cash transfers “have the strongest track record” for most interventions.

* * *

Of all the perks offered by the ONS programme, trips outside Richmond are the most coveted. With funding from private foundations such as the California Endowment and Kaiser Permanente, and the California Wellness Foundation, the ONS has taken fellows on all-expense paid journeys to New York and Washington DC, and as far as Dubai and South Africa. Fellows are treated to steak dinners and four-star hotels, and given access to professional athletes and politicians on Capitol Hill. There is just one caveat: they must agree to travel with a rival.

In May 2014, Vaughn let me tag along on a day trip to Marin County with Robinson and Rasheed Shepherd, a former fellow from the Southside who was once known for wielding an outsized Desert Eagle pistol. The first time the rivals had travelled together, to Texas for the evangelical preacher TD Jakes’ ManPower conference, neither wanted to sit in the front seat for fear of having the other behind him. On the drive to the airport, Vaughn had thought, “This a huge mistake”. A conversation about football relieved some of the pressure, but it was not until they were on the plane that they gave up their posturing, too airsick to care. Seventeen hundred miles from Richmond, they realised they had more in common than not. “We were having fun, and it was like, damn, this guy isn’t that bad – he’s cool,” Robinson said.

In Marin, the plan was to go horse riding. Robinson led, yanking the reins and digging his heels. In the rear, Shepherd worried aloud that he didn’t want to hurt the animal. When we stopped for lunch at Point Reyes Station, Robinson excused himself to call his girlfriend, to whom he marvelled that a place so serene was no more than an hour’s drive from Richmond. Our final destination was Drake’s Bay, where we sampled the oysters. I bought a half-dozen and clumsily demonstrated how to open them. Robinson looked on as Shepherd, cringing, slurped one down.

It was hard to believe that there had been a time when the mere sight of each other could have prompted them to draw their guns. “We’re talking ambulance and a fatal situation,” Robinson said. “Survival of the fittest,” Shepherd agreed. I asked if they considered themselves friends now. They hesitated, each waiting for the other to speak. More like “associates”, Robinson started, with a “different type of understanding”.

“Just because we get along doesn’t mean his other 10 friends are gonna be cool with me,” Shepherd said. Each said they had caught flak for travelling with people from the wrong part of town, although, Robinson said: “The same folks will turn around later and go, ‘Yo, how can I get on one of those trips?’”

Vaughn and I sat by ourselves for a while at a picnic table, and he informed me that the decision to pair Robinson and Shepherd had been strategic; they each had status on the street, and a rapprochement could ease the tension between their groups. When ONS first proposed that the two men travel together, Vaughn promised them that although they would probably feel uncomfortable, they would never be unsafe. This was their six or seventh trip, and “they no longer see themselves locked in war”, Vaughn said.

The light was starting to fade. In front of us, Robinson and Shepherd were standing together at the water’s edge, skipping oyster shells.

* * *

By the end of 2014, Richmond had recorded the lowest murder rate in the city’s history. At an annual community memorial for homicide victims, held on the steps of the library, the outgoing mayor, Gayle McLaughlin, declared that Richmond’s “old reputation is dying off” and commended the ONS for its work with the city’s youth. When it was Boggan’s turn to speak, he thanked the young men “historically responsible for gun violence” for making better decisions about how they “navigate everyday conflicts”.

Nevertheless, the new year began badly: on the evening of 13 January, 23-year-old Sirmonte “Sirdy” Bernstine, a promising rapper from a Richmond family well-known to law enforcement, was killed in a triple shooting in the Southside Crescent Park apartments. Within a week, 10 people were arrested, eight of them on gun possession charges, as police sought to pre-empt retaliation that was being threatened on Facebook and Instagram. Two weeks later, Keyon Wilson, 21, and Lamarea Mims, 23, brothers from Crescent Park, were shot dead in Vallejo in the space of eight hours. As usual, Vaughn and the ONS staff went to the funeral.

Robinson had known Sirdy since he was a boy. Several weeks before his death, they hung out in the recording studio as Sirdy finished his album. “Man, I love him – what I don’t love is his decision-making,” Robinson told me in April. “But I can’t judge him, ’cause that was me.” In the days after the shooting, Robinson knew that people around Richmond were speculating on whether or not he might seek revenge. His stress increased after the Crescent Park brothers were killed because he had been on good terms with their clique. Now both sides were potential liabilities: if he showed solidarity with one, the other might come at him. He decamped to Los Angeles for a few days to let the situation cool down.

When he returned, we had lunch at his favourite Vietnamese restaurant. The place was on the border between Central and Southside, the kind of spot where you might run into someone you don’t want to see. In white jeans and a sweatshirt, with diamond studs in his ears, Robinson sat facing the door, more out of habit than nerves.

Hustling ran in the family, Robinson told me. His grandfather was a prominent coke dealer in the 1980s, whose arrest, during which Robinson was in the car, was featured in a documentary. His stepfather cut him in on his first drug deal when he was 12, and he was caught by police at 14. In his teens, he and a group of friends protected a block in the heart of the Iron Triangle against a group of men twice their age. He remembered the early days fondly. Marijuana and cocaine were the main products. Robinson could make as much as $1,000 a day. Robberies grew with profits, and he started carrying a gun when he was in high school. And yet, barring the occasional street fight, he said, gun violence was rare.

The feuding started with a car accident. A man from North Richmond collided with a man from Central as he pulled out of a driveway. He agreed to pay for damages, but later reneged and was killed. Before long, a personal dispute erupted into a neighbourhood conflict. “It’s been on ever since,” Robinson said. At one funeral, a man was shot in the face.

One day in March 2005, Robinson’s closest friend, 18-year-old Byron Mott, was shot. The week before, he had been cheering Robinson on the football field. The incident was a turning point, Robinson told me: the moment he “lost it”. More than 10 of his friends have perished over the years.

I asked if his course might have been different had he found ONS as a teenager. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “You can’t tell a youngster nothing.” Back when he was a “big factor” in Central, he had houses, expensive clothing, and a reputation for toughness. When he got out of jail, there was only his girlfriend and his friends at ONS. “Everything was ass-backwards, and they helped me see farther.” He said he felt grateful. “This is once-in-a-lifetime help, man. I’m smart at the end of the day, not stupid.”

Robinson drove me back to downtown Richmond in a late-model black Dodge Charger that reeked of pot. He was still hustling a little here and there, he told me, but he swore he was “done with the hardcore street stuff”. He and his girlfriend had recently moved to a gated apartment in a suburb where nobody knows him. And in a few weeks’ time, he was scheduled for a hearing to end his probation early, which, if it happened, would allow him to travel without restrictions – or leave the area altogether.

* * *

Lt Arnold Threets used to chase Robinson back in the days when Deep C accounted for more than half the 300 reported shootings in Richmond. “If you thought of any dirt that was happening in the city at the time, Rohnell Robinson’s name came up,” he told me. Threets, who is African-American, is a former marine with more than 25 years on the force. He was sceptical when he heard about the ONS experiment; many idealists had come and gone. Safety on the streets wasn’t just a matter of making nice with violent offenders and encouraging police to do the same. Boggan told me that he spent months courting Threets because he respected his intelligence and savvy. He figured that if Threets came around, anything was possible. Eventually, he won the officer over. “DeVone got my trust because he wasn’t a bunny hugger,” Threets told me. “He wasn’t telling me these guys aren’t dangerous.”

The Richmond police department gained notoriety in the 1980s for a thuggish group of white officers who wore boots and called themselves “The Cowboys”. Brutal police beatings of African Americans led to multimillion-dollar civil rights settlements with victims. Threets, who arrived after the scandal, stressed that tactful, community-oriented policing has helped the department recover from the mistrust induced by that period. “We play hard but we play clean,” he said. According to department records for 2015, officers used force in about 6% of arrests and received 12 complaints about use of force.

The Richmond police department is officially aligned with Operation Ceasefire, which holds night walks through violent neighbourhoods and hosts events for troubled youth. If police work has become more surgical, Threets said, it’s because lowering homicides is the top priority and most of the killings are committed by a handful of shooters. “This is where it gets a little dirty,” he told me. “I didn’t care so much if you messed with credit cards. As long as you were going to stop killing people, I could work with you.” The trouble is that there exists a newer crop of shooters for whom scams and drug dealing are less of a priority. They don’t care about the money; they want the respect that comes from seeking vengeance without showing remorse.

Not all the shooters were converted by the programme. Robinson was unusual. “He got it, man. Not overnight, but it clicked,” Threets said. Robinson’s progress visibly moved him. “You’ve got to realise who Rohnell Robinson was – it’s like Al Capone finding Jesus.”

Threets said that there have been a number of poorly managed social programmes that have allowed participants to “take advantage of our collective good intentions”, and hustle the system. He has no evidence that this is the case with the ONS. “Ironically, the level of public scrutiny they receive has guarded them from these types of abuses,” he said.

In his view, criticism of the programme mainly comes from people who refuse to face complex reality. “ONS has been successful, albeit not perfect, where others have failed,” Threets said. “That kind of success can engender a good dose of envy, and has the potential to divert resources away from other traditional methods for addressing urban violence.”

Resistance to the ONS method may also reflect a more broadly American stigma against handouts. While the use of tangible incentives such as cash stipends and travel are very much in line with prevailing capitalist values, the very act of giving them away for free – especially to those who may still operate outside of society’s lawful boundaries – would seem to conflict with a deep-seated ethos in our culture that opportunity must extend from merit.

“I would tend to agree [ex-felons like Robinson] don’t necessarily deserve the ONS fellowship,” Threets conceded. “But … by definition mercy is something you receive that is unmerited.”

* * *

When I arrived at the gate for our flight to Seattle on another ONS trip, no two members of the Richmond crew were sitting together. The fellows were scattered around, playing with their phones. Boggan, Vaughn, and Kevin Muccular, an agent much loved for his warmth and humour, knew better than to enforce a group dynamic. They would ride to the downtown Hilton in a white Mercedes Benz SUV, eat at a restaurant, and attend an exhibition of Marcel Duchamp at the Seattle Art Museum, with detours to serve dinner at a soup kitchen and visit a youth group in a poor part of town.

Robinson was not coming. Boggan told me, smiling, that he had been offered overtime at work. Boggan had many reasons to be upbeat. He had recently become director of Richmond’s ailing recreation department. The position gave the ONS a network with which to attract and serve at-risk youth before delinquent behaviour turned into felonies. A new 18-month fellowship was under way and the participants were younger than before. It was a sign that the programme is “selling itself”, Boggan said.

Indeed, consulting opportunities for Boggan and the ONS staff were multiplying around the country, from Miami Gardens, Florida, to Toledo, Ohio. In March, the Washington DC city council unanimously voted to adopt a version of the Richmond programme, in response to a wave of homicides there last year. But it is still a contentious matter. Mayor Muriel E Bowser insists that the programme has not been properly evaluated, and refused to allocate funds in her proposed 2017 budget. Members of the council counter that they will shift money from the mayor’s other law-enforcement priorities to get the programme running. In March, Boggan stepped down from his ONS post to develop a national non-profit organisation, Advance Peace. He will continue to consult city governments, including Richmond.

While some private-sector funding has clearly served the Richmond programme well, allowing the ONS to defend its controversial stipends and trips, I wondered what would be lost if such social services are not publicly supported. Boggan said the programme needed to be adapted in ways that “make the best sense for each city working on it”.

Rasheed Shepherd gestured me over. Nearly a year had passed since our trip to Marin County, and he stood to greet me. He had left Richmond for another city several months before, he told me on the plane. His girlfriend had landed a steady job. He could look after his five-year-old son now without concern over which blocks were off-limits. “We just get on our bikes and ride,” he said. Calls still came in from Southside associates grumbling about the latest drama, but, Shepherd said, he had “grown up” and lost interest. Many friends remained incarcerated. The frequent calls he received from them, guys who used to hassle him for dealing with the ONS, kept him focused. His experiences on the outside had given them a glimpse of a better life. Plus, he added, they needed him to keep their phone cards full.

“Truth is, I can’t go back to the way I was even if I wanted to,” he said. He ticked off the destinations he had visited with the programme: New York, Dubai, South Africa. The last time he visited Seattle was for a firefighting workshop, part of a merchant-marine training course that the ONS sponsored. “When you start doing things folks said you’d never do, when you start seeing things done the right way, you think, man, that’s a great way to live,” he said. “And you don’t make excuses no more.”

* * *

In early May 2015, Robinson had a probation hearing at the county court house. It was a bad day. The judge postponed his decision until he had a chance to review Robinson’s brimming case files in full. Robinson was cruising back on the I-580 highway, not far from where LaQuisha Turner was shot, when a black car pulled up along side him, and a window started to drop. He ducked as a barrage of bullets sent the car into a guardrail. Robinson was unharmed; the Charger was written off. He did not report the shooting: if word got back to the authorities, he reasoned, his chances of getting off probation would be jeopardised.

But news of the drive-by reached the district attorney’s office anyway. At his second hearing, the judge grilled him about the incident, which he took to be a sign of continued gang activity, and ordered Robinson to formally register with Richmond police as a gang member. At the news, Robinson’s temper flared. He shouted all the way to the street, where office workers peeked at him from their windows. Vaughn, who had accompanied him, let him finish before responding. “What they just said is that you’re an animal. And you can’t even take it, a little criticism. You get all upset. You know what that tells a reasonable person. ‘Damn, if he responds like this, how would he respond if that happened.’ You helping them out. Cut it out.”

“This is bullshit,” Robinson said. “I’m tired of getting treated like this, man.”

“I get it. But you’re in an arena where you don’t understand how it works. At least pay attention to folks that do, bro. You were supposed to keep your face straight and your mouth shut, that was your only job. And you couldn’t even do that.”

Robinson paced back and forth, cursing and fiddling with his paperwork. “You can’t say nothing right; everything is wrong.”

Vaughn stayed in step next to him, puffing a Newport. “That’s not true.”

“At the end of the day that judge gonna go with what the fuck the DA say,” Robinson insisted. “You been in the system, you know this shit.”

“When I was in the system,” Vaughn replied,I was playing a victim and I was angry and I looked just like you. And who the fuck wants that living next door to them? Anger has no place in that room bro, it just doesn’t. You lose your argument. And I know that’s hard, and I know that’s frustrating. And I know it’s a game we ain’t used to playing. But that’s why it’s a game we always fucking lose.”

Several weeks later, Robinson’s last attempt at a probation dismissal was denied, meaning he would have to wait even longer before he can get free and clear of his Richmond stalkers, as well as the associates urging him to pick up his pistol and strike back. The last time I saw him, he was in his suburban apartment. His mother and baby nephew were visiting to celebrate a birthday. He told me he had no idea who was responsible for the highway shooting. I understood that even if Robinson knew, he would never say so. That part of his street code held firm.

For the moment, he seemed at peace. We stepped onto a porch with a view of rolling hills and cypress trees. “When the storm comes, it comes,” he told me with a shrug. “That’s all right, though. I just don’t want to fight it any more. I’m gonna leave it alone.” I believed Robinson; vengeance no longer drove him. But his enemies were many, and carrying such debts as his always ended badly in Richmond. Real freedom demanded a self-imposed exile, from home and family and his old identity. Sooner or later, he would have to leave Richmond for good.

Jason Motlagh is an International Reporting Fellow with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

  • This article was amended on 3 August 2016 and 19 March 2019 to remove personal information.

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here

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