Trayon White, a Washington, D.C., city councilman representing the 8th District, is not the first District of Columbia Council member arrested on corruption charges. And he won’t be the last. The details of his case point to a larger national problem, namely deep corrupt ties between the nonprofit sector and the Democratic Party. This corruption puts the lives of millions of people at risk.
Precinct 8 is one of the poorest in the district, but White lives in a luxury apartment in the Navy Yard in Precinct 6, where the FBI arrested him last Sunday. Authorities said White accepted $156,000 in bribes in five payments in exchange for a $5.2 million “violence prevention” contract with a Washington nonprofit.
Spending on “violence prevention” was popular before George Floyd’s death in 2020, but it really took off as the Black Lives Matter unrest spread. President Joe Biden spent $5 billion on the programs. When Democratic Party activists pushed their efforts to “defund the police,” they almost always wanted to redirect the money to “violence prevention” nonprofits.
Some small programs work with the police and have had good results, such as in Brooklyn. But the track record of these programs is generally poor. They vary widely, but usually they are grants from the city to nonprofits, which then hire violent felons who have completed their sentences to patrol the streets and try to deter younger men from violent crimes. The nonprofits look for employees with a record of violent crimes because only such records have credibility with young men who are considering violence themselves.
Aside from the risk that felons paid to prevent violent crimes will commit more violent crimes (which often happens), the main problem with violence prevention programs is that there are no officially recognized best practices. Almost all nonprofits working in this field have no track record of good results, so municipalities have no way of deciding who to award contracts. That’s a recipe for corruption.
The DC Council was no stranger to a complete lack of accountability when awarding “violence prevention” contracts. In 2021, DC Witness journalists reported to the Council that they had compared areas where “violence prevention” programs existed and areas where violence occurred and concluded that the programs were completely ineffective.
When DC Witness sought data to prove the programs’ effectiveness, the “violence prevention” programs did not respond. Despite the complete absence of evidence that millions of taxpayer dollars were being spent on programs that were not working, the DC Council continued to trumpet the case. It is reminiscent of the cynical “steam check” mentioned by a corrupt city bigwig in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Violence Prevention Act. The Purgatory of Vanities.
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White, known for his claim that the Rothschild family has control over the weather, heads the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, which is responsible for awarding city grants for “violence prevention.”
In Washington, corruption in violence prevention is similar in other cities, such as Minneapolis, Louisville, and San Francisco. Local governments across the country are facing budget constraints because they must cover the costs of housing, clothing, food, education, and health care for illegal immigrants let into the country through the Biden-Harris administration’s catch-and-release border policy. They need every available penny to maintain law and order. The money wasted on corrupt “violence prevention” should be cut.
