Making the case for Port City United

By Benjamin Schachtman

Published May 31, 2024 at 8:30 AM EDT

New Hanover County's anti-violence department — Port City United — has been mired in criticism and bad press, and will likely be shuttered at the end of June. But the social issues that inspired its creation still exist, so it's worth talking about where the program came from, the good work it did do, and what the future could hold.

Today's guests are Anthony Brumm and Frankie Roberts.

Brumm is a former PCU employee who was fired after a tense conversation with New Hanover County Commissioner Dane Scalise. Brumm, a former Tru Colors employee who came to the county early in PCU’s formation, tells a very different version of the interaction — but he also shared some of his experience working for PCU. He's also started a business with his fellow former Tru Colors and PCU business, Stephen Barnett.

Roberts is the executive director of LINC (Leading Into New Communities), a non-profit that helps people transition from incarceration back into society. Roberts was involved in conversations leading up to the creation of PCU — and has since worked with Community Resource Coordinators (CRCs) provided through PCU.

Introduction transcript:

From WHQR Public Media, this is the Newsroom – I’m Ben Schachtman, thanks for joining us.

On today’s show, we’re talking about Port City United.

Now, over the last couple of years, and especially the last couple of months, there’s been a lot of ink spilled, including by me, over the issues at PCU, New Hanover County’s anti-violence and community safety department.

And, given how much PCU has been in the news, you’re probably familiar with it. But, just in case, here’s some backstory.

In the summer of 2021, there was a shooting at New Hanover High School that sent one student to the hospital and another, eventually, to prison.

Now, there had been violence in schools before, and certainly in Wilmington’s greater downtown area — where it has long impacted the city’s Black population.

But after the New Hanover shooting, affluent – and largely white — residents who had kids at New Hanover High, and even some who didn’t, pushed officials to take action in a way they hadn’t before. And, as I’ll say again later in this show, I’m in no way denegrating residents for using their voice to push their elected representatives to take action, on any issue.

But it is worth noting how quickly action was taken. Within a week, then-chair Julia Olson Boseman had pushed through a plan to tap into $350 million from the hospital sale to address community violence.

Over the last several years, I’ve called this a moral panic. Not because it shouldn’t have been addressed — certainly children shooting children is a critical issue — but because of how it was addressed. A massive amount of money … and no plan.

To try figure out some kind of plan, county officials spent five or six months meeting with many of the area’s nonprofits and community organizations. But ultimately the county chose to stand up its own department. Based on a recommendation from Judge Jay Corpening, a respected community leader who had long dealt with youth violence from the bench, the county adopted the Cure Violence model, specifically Durham’s Bull City United.

A key element of the model was violence interrupters. In theory, these are community members who keep their ear to the ground and their eyes on social media, and who have earned the respect to intervene in the cycle of violence before it turns lethal.

To create this part of its new department, the county poached much of the staff from Tru Colors — the troubled for-profit brewery that had been running its own violence interuptor program.

There was a hitch, though — many of Tru Colors’ employees were, by design, active gang members. Founder George Taylor had long argued that gave them the access and street cred to do the work. Taylor was also a passionate defender of gang membership, noting — correctly — that being in a gang is not in and of itself illegal, and arguing that the system law enforcement uses to quote-unquote validate gang members is applied arbitrarily based on nebulous criteria. That’s an argument I've made and one PCU’s first department head, Cedric Harrison, would echo.

Still, publicly and privately, law enforcement — including Sheriff Ed McMahon and District Attorney Ben David — expressed concerns about the county’s gambit.

But PCU went ahead, launching in the spring of 2022 with the hope that it could thread the needle: taking all of the benefits of hiring gang members — namely, young men who had leadership experience and deep social connections in the communities they were trying to help — while staving off the negatives — namely, criminal activity, which the county said it would not tolerate.

And over the next two years, based on many conversations I’ve had and the reporting we’ve done here at WHQR — PCU did some great work. Second-chance expungement clinics, a 24-hour helpline that could connect residents to resources they might not even know existed, community resources workers providing support and mentorship in the schools.

But the bad press outweighed the good — less than year in, the county fired Cedric Harrison, and in the months afterward commissioners Dane Scalise and LeAnn Pierce raised questions about whether to continue funding PCU, especially the violence interrupters, who had been rebranded as mediation and outreach. The saving grace at the time was that the county had shifted from hospital-sale money to Covid-relief funding – but that ARPA funding was a ticking clock.

This year, things got worse for PCU, with the arrest of Stephen Barnett, the supervisor of the mediation and outreach program.

Barnett, it needs to be said, was fired almost immediately, although it will be some time before he gets his day in court. But the optics were bad: Barnett is charged with driving a juvenile to Houston Moore, and then helping him flee after the young man allegedly shot and paralyzed someone — all while on the clock in a county vehicle.

Just over a month later, another PCU employee was arrested after buying drugs from a confidential informant. In court, Judge Corpening — who, apparently through sheer hapenstance was presiding that day — told the young man he had effectively ended PCU.

And, not that any more bad press was needed, but not long after that, Commissioner Scalise — who had already said he wouldn’t vote to fund PCU going forward — went on a Nick Craig’s morning radio show to claim he was intimidated and verbally threatened by a PCU employee during a tense altercation. We’ll have links on our show page to our reporting on that and to that episode of Craig’s show – but the upshot is that the employee was fired, shortly afterward.

That brings us, pretty much, to now. And realistically, PCU is likely to be defunded and shuttered by the county. Commissioners Jonathan Barfield and Rob Zapple have defended at least parts of the program, but, the writing is very much on the wall.

All of that said, I still think it is important to have some conversations about where the department came from, what it was intended to do, what it did do, and what — in the future — the department, or some other version of it, might accomplish.

To that end, we’ll be talking with Frankie Roberts, executive director of LINC. Roberts reached out to me recently noting that, amid the bad press PCU was getting, few people seemed eager to speak to the good the department was doing. Roberts said he was more than happy to do that – so we sat down and talked about his role in PCU’s formation and his thoughts on the program’s past, present, and future.

First, though, we wanted to speak to Anthony Brumm — he’s PCU employee who was fired after a tense conversation with Scalise. Brumm, a former Tru Colors employee who came to the county early in PCU’s formation, tells a very different version of the interaction — but he also shared some of his experience working for PCU.

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Making the case for Port City United

Links:

Introduction transcript: