In September, 2023, a 31-year-old real estate agent named Blake Bozeman was shot and killed at a nightclub in Washington, D.C. Police have now charged two men in connection with the shooting, and it turns out that both suspects were collecting a paycheck for serving as "violence interrupters" at the time of the killing.
41-year-old Cotey Wynn was charged in Bozeman's death last March, and this week prosecutors filed charges against 43-year-old Frank Johnson as well. As the Washington Post notes, "Johnson’s arrest raises questions about the D.C. government’s policies for its violence intervention program, in which workers are dispatched to neighborhoods where gun violence is frequent to persuade potential shooters to put down their firearms."
The Washington Post found in an investigation published last week that poor oversight by the D.C. Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE), which runs the violence intervention program, allowed one organization called Life Deeds, which had roughly $3.6 million in grants, to misuse thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds in 2024 in ways that a top city official said undermined the program. Agency officials said they had since made significant oversight reforms.
Johnson previously worked for Life Deeds, according to documents The Post obtained through a records request. He was terminated from Life Deeds in December 2023, three months after the fatal shooting of Bozeman, after he was charged with an unrelated felony gun possession offense. Johnson was convicted — only to be rehired as a violence interrupter last year for a different organization receiving D.C. government grant funds. Now, he has been fired again following the murder charge, according to the Rev. Judie Shepherd-Gore, the executive director of InnerCity Collaborative Community Development Corporation, where Johnson had worked as a violence interrupter since last year.
The idea behind hiring convicted felons and (supposedly) former gang members with a violent past to serve as mediators that can de-escalate feuds and keep triggers from being pulled is that these guys have credibility with their target audience that someone who's walked a straight and narrow path lacks.
While there might be something to that, at least in theory, the problem is that its incredibly difficult to ensure these individuals have actually changed their ways.
Take Hector "Big Weasel" Marroquin, for example. The city of Los Angeles gave Marroquin's organization "No Guns" $1.5 million in grants to fund his gang intervention programs. But Marroquin, who belonged to the 18th Street gang, continued to actively participate in criminal activity along with his gang-banging son Hector, Jr. (also known as "Little Weasel"), who was paid to serve as a youth counselor for No Guns. In a 2006 expose of L.A.'s violence intervention programs, L.A. Weekly noted that several anti-gang programs were being "financed by taxpayers, at a cost of $26 million per year, including L.A. Bridges, yet City Hall bureaucrats cannot provide any concrete figures proving they have reduced gang activity."
Criminal justice expert Connie Rice went further: She declared the entire citywide gang-reduction system broken.
With almost half of the 49 recipients of L.A. Bridges money now employing former gangsters, the inability of the Community Development Department to keep watch over the City Council’s dream project, launched in 1996, strongly suggests that taxpayers have underwritten a boondoggle that operates with few safeguards.
That was twenty years ago, and yet many Democrat-controlled cities are still spending millions of dollars on violence interruption programs that can't point to any hard data showing their success and are plagued by a lack of accountability and transparency.
Which brings us back to D.C. and the two "violence interrupters" accused of the most violent crime of all: murder.
Wynn had been a violence interrupter with Cure the Streets, a separate program that was run through the D.C. Office of the Attorney General. Wynn and Johnson worked in different areas of the city, but court documents say that they knew each other and that authorities found Wynn’s contact information in Johnson’s phone. Wynn has since been terminated and remains in jail.
Police say in the affidavit that security camera footage appears to capture Johnson raising his arm at waist level, pointing toward Bozeman, just as Bozeman walked past him. Bozeman immediately collapsed. The shooter continued firing while also stumbling and falling, as people fled amid the chaos, according to the affidavit. Wynn, meanwhile, calmly remained at the bar, not taking cover or dropping to the floor “as nearly every other person,” police wrote in the affidavit, before motioning to Johnson as if to say it was time to go.
The Washington Post spoke to several officials, including Kwelli Sneed, who seves as executive director for the District's ffice of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, which oversees these violence interrupter efforts.
Sneed defended Johnson's hiring, even after he was arrested and charged with felony gun possession in 2023, arguing that “an individual who has been convicted of a gun charge is not necessarily disqualified from working as a violence interrupter as we value lived experience and the credibility that may grant a violence interrupter in working with those most at-risk of gun violence.”
Again, it's all about street cred. And to be fair, the 2023 conviction was for a possessory offense, not for a crime of violence. Still, these violence interrupters are supposed to have turned their life around, and another felony conviction is a pretty good indication that hasn't happened. It would be one thing if Johnson was told to come back and re-apply after keeping out of trouble for a year or two. Instead, it looks like he was put on the payroll almost immediately after serving his sentence.
D.C.'s crime rate is plunging, but the same is true for the vast majority of cities across the country, and there's no evidence that "violence interrupters" are behind the historic drop. The financial improprieties alone are enough to shut down these programs. The fact that those getting paid to interrupt violence are instead being charged with instigating violent crimes is just another reason to put a halt to these efforts. Instead, though, Democrats are going to keep funding these "violence intervention programs"... and the violent criminals who are collecting a paycheck from far too many of them.
