The Democratic Party’s violence prevention grift

Trayon White , a councilman in Washington, D.C., who represents Ward 8, is hardly the first member of the Council of the District of Columbia to be arrested on corruption charges. Nor will he be the last. The specifics of his case point to a larger national problem of deep corrupt links between the nonprofit sector and the Democratic Party . This corruption puts the lives of millions of people at greater risk.

Ward 8 is one of the poorest in the district, but White lives in a luxury apartment at the Navy Yard in Ward 6, which was where the FBI arrested him last Sunday. Authorities said White took $156,000 in bribes in five payments in exchange for awarding a $5.2 million "violence prevention" contract to a Washington nonprofit organization.

Spending on "violence prevention" was popular even before the death of George Floyd in 2020, but it really took off as Black Lives Matter riots spread. President Joe Biden spent $5 billion on the programs. When Democratic Party activists pushed their “defund the police” efforts, they almost always wanted to divert the money to “violence prevention” nonprofit organizations.

Some small programs work with police and have seen good results, such as in Brooklyn. But the programs generally have a poor record. They differ widely but usually involve grants by a city to nonprofit organizations that then employ violent felons who have served their time to patrol streets and try to stop younger men from committing violence. The nonprofit organizations seek employees with violent criminal records because those are the only people with credibility among young men contemplating violence themselves.

Aside from the risk of felons committing more violent crimes while being paid to stop them, which happens often, violence prevention programs most often suffer because there is no formally accepted best practice. Almost all nonprofit organizations operating in this space have no proven record of good results, so city governments have no way of deciding how to allocate contracts. It is a recipe for corruption.

A complete lack of accountability when awarding “violence prevention” contracts was not unknown to the D.C. Council. In 2021, journalists at D.C. Witness told the council that they had compared areas where “violence prevention” programs were in place and where there was violence and found the programs completely ineffective.

When D.C. Witness sought data showing the programs were effective, “violence prevention” programs did not reply. Despite a complete lack of evidence that the millions of taxpayer dollars were flowing to programs that did not work, the D.C. Council kept splashing out the case. It is reminiscent of the cynical "steam control" referred to by a corrupt city bigwig in Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

White, who is known for claiming that the Rothschild family controls the weather, heads the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, which is in charge of awarding the city’s “violence prevention” grants.

Washington’s story of violence prevention corruption is matched in other cities, such as Minneapolis , Louisville , and San Francisco . Local governments across the nation face budget constraints because of the cost of housing, clothing, feeding, educating, and providing healthcare for illegal immigrants welcomed into the country by the Biden-Harris administration's catch-and-release border policies. They need every dime available to keep law and order. The money wasted on corrupt “violence prevention” should be axed.