WHQR's Sunday Edition is a free weekly newsletter delivered every Sunday morning. You can sign up for Sunday Edition here.
Over the last year and a half, my colleagues and I have drilled down on each of the four 'pillars' of the New Hanover County Endowment, the now $1.6-billion philanthropic foundation formed from the sale of New Hanover Regional Medical Center to Novant. We each planned to report on an issue and organize one of our Cape Fear Conversations (a public forum, hosted graciously by Waterline Brewing Co.) to unpack the nuances and details with a panel of experts.
Kelly Kenoyer looked at affordable housing, a major part of 'community development.' Camille Mojica dug into 'health equity.' Rachel Keith is working on 'education' and I'm looking into 'community safety.'
These are all challenging issues, but — at the risk of making excuses for myself — ‘community safety' has proven especially thorny. To help explain what I mean, let me take you back, over a year.
In mid-November of 2023, I attended a ‘Breakfast with Buster,’ hosted by William Buster, then the CEO and president of the New Hanover Community Endowment. This was part of a series Buster designed to foster conversations about each of the Endowment’s four pillars of investment.
I was the only journalist at the breakfast, alongside about fifteen or sixteen other attendees, most of whom represented nonprofits (then-District Attorney Ben David was one notable exception).
The meeting was held under Chatham House rules, which means I can give you a rough idea of what happened but not quote individuals. I think it’s fair to say that the format helped people be a bit more candid (even with a reporter in the room). That’s good, because the issue of community safety is particularly tough — especially where it bumps up against racially charged topics like economic inequality, youth violence, and gang-related crime.
It’s also tricky because the Endowment’s pillars — or ‘buckets,’ as they’re sometimes called — are notoriously vague. That’s deliberate, I’m told, because the founding members of the Endowment didn’t want to foreclose good ideas on a technicality. But that fuzziness left attendees at the breakfast struggling for consensus. What is it, to paraphrase Raymond Carver, that we talk about when we talk about 'community safety'?
While the Endowment had released a strategic plan for its four pillars, community safety was a bit inchoate compared to more well-defined buckets. Take community development and its sensibly interlocking affordable housing and economic development goals. They might be challenging to achieve, but they’re easy to describe (cheaper rent, better jobs, basically).
In addition, the Endowment hadn’t hired a network officer – an expert who could build connections among local non-profits and experts — to focus on this particular bucket. (Over a year later, they still haven’t.) Early in the meeting, we found that even defining the individual words — ‘community’ and ‘safety’ — was harder than you might imagine.
The singular form of the word ‘community,’ for example, seemed misleading, at best. Sure, we’re all human, all New Hanover County residents — but does ‘community’ mean the same thing on Figure Eight Island as it does in Creekwood?
Some tried to draw some deeper throughlines: addiction, mental health, and child abuse were suggested as issues you could find in any zip code. But on other topics, our region's socio-economic stratification — and Wilmington’s long history of racism and segregation — made it hard to pretend every household has equivalent needs.
Last month I was taking a Lyft downtown and the driver put it to me starkly, “there are two Wilmingtons. The beach and the block. I pick up people from both sides, but they don’t cross paths.” That’s probably an oversimplification, but I don’t think anyone could argue our region is financially — or racially — homogeneous, and few would suggest those two are unrelated.
All of that is sometimes hard to square with calls for the Endowment to ‘benefit all residents equally,’ a tension that crops up regardless of the topic. And it gets compounded in a particular way when it comes to ‘safety.’
Again, ‘safety’ is a deliberately capacious and vague word, which threatens to spill over into the Endowment’s other categories. For example, looking at the Endowment’s 2023-2025 strategic plan, there’s a bit of crossover between community safety and community development. Or consider potential responses to gun violence at schools: armored vestibules, security cameras and metal detectors, and additional school resources officers. Is that safety, or education, or both?
During the breakfast, we teased out some of what safety could actually mean. There were some interesting outside-the-box takes but much of the conversation kept coming back to crime.
Maybe that’s because crime has such a high media profile, or because community safety calls to mind ‘public safety,’ the budgetary bywords for law enforcement. Or maybe it’s because, for many middle-class residents who have squared away the lower rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy, crime is the easiest threat to imagine.
When you talk about crime, you’re often talking about drugs, gangs, and gun violence. At this point, race again enters the chat. Because when you talk about violence (the opposite of safety), you’re talking about a disproportionate number of Black people perpetrating violent crime — but also a disproportionate number suffering from it.
This is a daunting conversation: ‘Black on Black’ violence has long been a dog whistle, but it’s also a statistical fact: high crime areas are high victim areas, as David frequently said as DA. The difference between trafficking in stereotypes and searching for a solution comes down to empathy and perspective. Are you trying to own the libs, or do you really want to bring peace to communities that are hurting? At the same time, we've seen too often seemingly well-intentioned white people charge in head first with a plan to 'save the day,' without really engaging with the Black community — a posture that's almost guaranteed to foreclose meaningful conversation and lasting progress.
There is a workable space for white folks (like me, and many of the people who were at the breakfast), something between White Savior Syndrome and sticking your head in the sand. But it takes some work.
I think many (though not all) of the people I've spoken to were aware of that. And nearly everyone I've spoken with, regardless of race, gender, or tax bracket, has seemed earnestly eager to help. But even given the Endowment’s considerable resources and the freedom to spitball new ideas, I think it’s fair to say the breakfast attendees had a tough time pinpointing solutions.
Many in the room agreed: economic inequality is a serious part of the problem behind drugs, gangs, and violence. When it feels like the economy, if not society writ large, is closed off to you, then the fraternal appeal of a gang is going to be that much more powerful and that much harder to reject when violence rears its head.
Related: A tale of two economies
One group of ideas I’ve heard, at the breakfast and elsewhere, is some form of direct financial assistance, including ambitious proposals for universal basic income and more modest suggestions like expanding and retooling existing rental assistance and food stamp programs. (I heard a rumor that Endowment staff had batted around something called “Buster bucks,” but I don’t know if that idea ever had legs.)
How these proposals move forward into more public discussion will be shaped by pushback from those who want to see the Endowment spread its funding more evenly around the county — and by debates about the merits of assistance versus empowerment.
And of course, those conversations take on a racial dimension — implicitly or explicitly — because of the racial inequities in our region. I’ve heard some conservatives privately voice concerns that the Endowment will become a back door for reparations — and some in the Black community say they hope it does. Others are focused on creating opportunity rather than directly subsidizing those on the losing side of Wilmington’s bifurcated economy (Here, I think about my conversations with Girard Newkirk about supporting and accelerating startups for Black and minority entrepreneurs).
At the Endowment’s December public meeting, new CEO Dan Winslow acknowledged Wilmington’s particular racial dynamics, including 1898’s devastating impact on the Black middle class. He tried to split the difference on how to address socioeconomic inequity in general.
“We know that we will have to give a man a fish a lot here in this county, and we know that the people most in need will get a larger amount of the money,” Winslow said, adding, “we also, when we can, want to teach a man to fish. We want to empower people to lift themselves to prosperity.”
As important as economic factors are, they don't feel like the whole picture. Statistically, the correlation is there. But not every impoverished person turns to crime (and wealthy people commit crimes all the time, although they frequently fare better in the criminal justice system), so what else is at play?
One issue, raised by some of the Black attendees, was parenting. Specifically, the permissiveness of parents who failed to adequately discipline their children or weren't sufficiently engaged. (While discussing the idea of providing transportation to afterschool activities, one attendee laughed, and said, "oh, they can get to the activities. They can get there. That's not the issue. If they can get to the club they can get there.") Some of the white attendees blanched and few chimed in here. There are, I think, some spaces where maybe white people, no matter how badly they want to help, should probably hold their tongues.
One suggestion that most attendees seemed to get behind was seeing crime through the lens of ACEs — adverse childhood experiences. These are factors like food and housing insecurity, incarcerated parents, drugs and alcohol in the household, and physical and emotional abuse.
Related: ACEs and oxygen masks
Anecdotally, this approach makes sense. I’ve known people, including some friends, who have fallen into crime and it’s not hard to see the psychological trajectory from a broken home, an abusive or drug-addled parent, or a violent neighborhood to a series of bad decisions that gets someone in front of a judge, facing prison time. I’ve sat in many courtrooms listening to judges, who are largely constrained by structured sentencing, try to reconcile the crimes people have committed with the cruel circumstances into which they were born.
Near the end of the breakfast, someone put forward a bold, if logistically challenging, idea. The proposal was essentially to monitor the ACEs of every infant born at Novant NHRMC and follow up with wrap-around services for the family, providing housing, pre-K educational support, employment assistance, vouchers for medical care, and so on. The idea poses some legal issues (dealing with HIPAA and other privacy issues while sharing personal information with multiple non-profit service providers) and would require cooperation (and buy-in) from Novant. And because the Endowment insists its funding stay in New Hanover County, there would likely be debates over how (and if) mothers from the surrounding counties would be helped.
But those hurdles notwithstanding, I personally thought it was a good first draft. More importantly, it was a proposal on the same scale as the problem.
Not long after that idea was discussed, the breakfast wrapped up and a year has passed without it surfacing again.
And what a year it's been. Buster was pushed out as Endowment CEO and a new president was hired. Ben David left office to head up the new Community Justice Center (CJC), and Jason Smith was elected as the first new District Attorney in two decades. Port City United, the successor to Tru Colors' violence interrupter program, imploded under the weight of its inherent contradictions as a government-run department employing active gang members.
Other organizations — LINC, Communities in Schools, Sokoto House, Voyage, etc. — have continued their work. They're all great programs, but their scope, scale, and success are all limited by funding, and by the fact that they're all focusing on parts of community safety. There's been limited space for addressing, or even publicly discussing, the gestalt, the big picture.
David's work at the CJC does aim to pull together multiple resources, but it's for victims (and to a lesser extent perpetrators) of crime. I've heard some criticisms of the center, including that victims will be hesitant to seek out services knowing that perpetrators might be in the same building, or that, more generally, victims of crime — who have often had negative interactions with law enforcement — will avoid a building run by prosecutors and the former DA.
"If you've gotten off on the wrong foot with the cops, you're not gonna run into a building crawling with cops — cops, prosecutors, whatever, it's law enforcement — even if there are good services there," one person working in community safety told me on condition of anonymity, hoping to avoid blowback from the Endowment and other funders for criticizing the CJC.
I prefer to give David's CJC time to get rolling and see how it works. But I will say that the way the CJC is set up, it seems like it can only really 'step in' after a crime has been committed. Like the work of specialty courts for veterans, substance abusers, and juveniles, it's set up from the point of view of the criminal justice system. That's important, but it's just one perspective, and I suspect we'll need more points of view, not one singular angle.
That's why I've set out to talk to as many people as I can this year about the issue of community safety. This week I got started, sitting down with Jason Smith, who's taking over for David as District Attorney (you can listen to our conversation on the latest edition of The Newsroom). It's not the last word on community safety, and it won't be the last episode we dedicate to the issue, but I think it's a good place to begin.
You might not agree with Smith, or the criminal justice system in general, on the issue — but it's worth noting that Smith is the first to admit he is only offering one perspective, that he’s not the best person to speak in some rooms, and that his greatest contribution might be convening other people who have different insights.
I feel the same way, actually.
