On Friday, New Hanover County announced that Courtney McNeil had been arrested and dismissed from his employment. It’s the second arrest of a Port City United (PCU) employee in the last two months, and potentially the death knell for the department.
During McNeil’s first appearance on Friday, prosecutor Jason Smith told Chief District Court Judge J. Corpening that, until this week, McNeil had a steady job. He was hired by PCU in November of 2022; according to county records, his salary was just shy of $50,000 a year, not including the county's generous benefits package.
Smith said McNeil had admitted that, sometime this year, he had begun buying and selling crack cocaine. These drug transactions, some of which allegedly took place while McNeil was "on the clock" with PCU, had not yet led to criminal charges because a confidential informant had been involved, Smith said. (In essence, arresting McNeil right after a transaction with a CI would effectively ‘out’ the informant.) However, Smith said he expected more drug charges would come later.
Authorities searched McNeil’s residence, which he shares with his mother and brother, and found three Glock handguns in his mother’s room. This led to several charges being filed against McNeil’s mother, including drug possession and misdemeanor child abuse. When presenting those charges, District Attorney Ben David noted that two of the three weapons were accessible to two young children — ages 3 and 11 — living in the house.
“Disaster was narrowly averted,” Corpening told McNeil’s mother.
Smith detailed McNeil’s criminal history, noting he was a validated Double ii Blood gang member and asking Corpening to increase his secured bond from $150,000 to $250,000. Corpening agreed, and also mandated electronic monitoring and house arrest if McNeil is released from jail on bond.
[Editor's note: 'Gang validation' is the process by which law enforcement agencies identify likely gang members, based on a variety of criteria; it is not a criminal conviction. Some have criticized gang validation as violating due process since there is not a simple judicial appeal procedure for people who are not in gangs or who have since left gangs; others have called the criteria too broad or too vague — and note that being in a gang is not, under most circumstances, in and of itself illegal.]
McNeil respectfully pushed back against some of the prosecution’s version of his criminal history — but acknowledged the seriousness of the charges he is currently facing.
“I understand, I made my bed, I’ll lay in it,” he told Corpening.
Corpening, in return, criticized McNeil harshly.
“You occupy a position of trust as a county employee. You have violated that trust. You have basically sealed the deal on the end of Port City United, more than likely, as a result of your actions. That places this community at higher risk. You placed your mother at risk. You placed your brother at risk,” Corpening said.
McNeil has his next court appearance in several weeks.
David noted that Corpening's presence at the hearing allowed him to speak on an issue that was close to his heart:
“I know this is something very personal to him because he, after all, was the one who first suggested that we bring this best practice to Wilmington,” David said.
David’s concerns
PCU has its origins in the fall of 2021, in the wake of a shooting at New Hanover High School, when local leaders convened a meeting of the New Hanover County Board of Education, Board of Commissioners, Corpening, David, and other leaders. Under enormous public pressure to address the violent incident, the county approved significant funding. Then-chair Julia Olson-Boseman essentially called an audible during the meeting — and although the other commissioners got on board, the plan initially lacked clear direction on how to proceed.
The county ultimately went with a version of the Cure Violence Global model, specifically Durham’s Bull City United. But, unlike many other Cure Violence iterations, New Hanover County’s Port City United hired active gang members — many from Tru Colors, the troubled for-profit brewery that sought to decrease violence by hiring active gang members with the credibility and connections to effectively seek out discord and preempt lethal violence.
For many, the decision felt rushed and not thought through. Asked if he thought it was fair to call the situation a “moral panic,” David said “yes, it is fair.”
“Everyone wanted to react to that situation with the school shooting. And I'm not going to call this an overreaction, the right way to have gone, and that is to be proactive to try and prevent crime and not just react to it, I believe that. But I don't believe we did it the right way. When we basically took what we had at Tru Colors and brought it under the county umbrella. It is one thing for a private individual to do that. It's quite another for government,” David said.
While the county maintained PCU was substantially different than the violence interuption program run by Tru Colors, David said he had concerns. With a hint of frustration, he noted that he had never been consulted as the county put its program together in a way that generated some of the same problems he’d seen at Tru Colors.
“Let the record reflect that no one has ever asked the District Attorney's office about what we've thought about this Port City United model. When I learned that validated gang members were hired into those positions, and specifically, some of them were former Tru Colors employees that had just recently lost their jobs because of the bankruptcy that had occurred there just in the same few days around the forming of PCU, I called a meeting. I called a meeting with not only our chief district court judge [Corpening], the chief of police, and the sheriff, but also senior county staff, including at the time, Cedric Harrison, who ran PCU, Stephen Barnett, Rashad Gattison, and against some senior staff from the county. I expressed my grave concern that I know how this movie is going to end. And we're not going to like it. I specifically laid out some scenarios that went to the very heart of where we're here now,” David told WHQR.
David said he supported second-chance hiring initiatives and efforts to involve people of color and from low-income backgrounds, but that he drew the line at criminal behavior. David said he couldn’t accept any version of PCU that didn’t work with local law enforcement — something PCU had declined to do under Harrison's leadership, David said.
He also acknowledged that PCU has done good work, including the call center, and said he appreciated the work of Rashad Gattison, who is now running PCU. He said he even supported the idea of violence interruption as a “a theoretical construct,” but not the way the county is running it.
“We shouldn't get rid of that idea. But the execution of that idea with this current model is broken, and it needs to stop. We don't need to be throwing good money after bad and we need to find a different way to fight youth violence than what we're doing right now,” David said.
PCU’s precarious situation
PCU got off to a rocky start. Just a few months after its creation, an employee was fired after she was charged with accessory to murder after the fact; those charges were apparently later dropped, but a black eye out of the gate for PCU was not the tone county leaders had hoped to set. Less than a year into the program, in February 2023, director Cedric Harrison was fired.
A few months after that, as the county workshopped its budget for the following year, commissioners Dane Scalise and LeAnn Pierce raised questions about how effective PCU had been — or if its work could even be evaluated. At the time, PCU was still being funded by ARPA funds — federal relief money that local government organizations had to spend down.
Now that ARPA funding is running out, Scalise and Pierce have again asked questions about PCU as the county prepares for a new budget. But this year the questions have sharper edges, in large part because of the arrest of Stephen Barnett.
McNeil is one of several “mediation specialists,” formerly known as violence interrupters, working in the PCU Department. In March, Stephen Barnett, who supervised the ‘mediation and outreach’ program, was fired after he was charged with felony accessory to an attempted murder at Houston Moore. According to prosecutors, Barnett drove the suspect in the shooting — which left a victim paralyzed from the waist down — and then helped him flee, all while on the clock and driving a county vehicle.
Related: The Dive: This could be the end for Port City United
Following that incident, the county suspended the mediation and outreach program for an internal review. Scalise and Pierce both expressed concern about PCU, and suggested the funding could be used more wisely elsewhere — including to help with the New Hanover County Schools district’s budget shortfall. And, while commissioners Rob Zapple and Jonathan Barfield highlighted the positive work PCU had done, Scalise made it clear he wouldn’t vote for a budget that supported PCU in its current form. It’s worth noting that Barnett and McNeil are both innocent until proven guilty – but as with the arrest in the early weeks of PCU’s existence, the optics aren’t good. And that’s likely to further imperil PCU’s future, which was already in question.
The program was set to be temporarily reactivated for a Mother’s Day event, but according to the county, that’s no longer on the table.
“The entire mediation and outreach team, including Mr. McNeil, had been on administrative leave since March 26, 2024, while the county conducted an in-depth review of the program. However, the team was temporarily in an approved status starting Thursday, May 9 to assist with PCU’s Mother’s Day event. This approved work status was expected to last three days, until Saturday, May 11, for the team to assist with the event. However, an administrative decision has been made for the mediation and outreach team to no longer be part of the Mother's Day event, so the remaining mediation and outreach specialists are back on administrative leave,” according to a county spokesperson.
The internal review of PCU has wrapped up, according to the county, and commissioners are expected to discuss it in the coming days. That’s likely to take place at the county’s budget planning meeting scheduled for Monday afternoon. If past debates are a reliable precedent, the discussion will be spirited. It remains to be seen if it’s just the violence interruption program that ends up on the chopping block — a near certainty — or the department as a whole. It may depend on whether Zapple and Barfield will have more concerns following McNeil’s arrest. But Scalise, who attended Friday’s hearing, didn’t need more convincing.
“There isn’t much more I can say beyond what I’ve been saying,” Scalise wrote in a text. ”PCU is a dangerous liability that needs to be shut down. I will continue to advocate for the department to be closed. I hope the other four commissioners will join me in doing so.”
Correction: This article originally stated that Judge J. Corpening made a special appearance for Friday's hearing. Corpening later clarified he was scheduled to appear based on a court calendar published in April. WHQR regrets the error.
