FBI Chief Tells Half The Story

The FBI’s embattled director came to town to tout his enlightened past remarks on race and policing and to credit a federal program for cutting New Haven’s gun violence.

He didn’t mention his more recent remarks that have inflamed racial tensions. Or the skyrocketing gun violence in another city, Bridgeport, with the same federal program.

FBI Director James Comey (pictured at right) made those remarks — and didn’t make those remarks — at a national confab held Monday at New Haven’s Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School.

The confab was entitled ​“Building Bridges: The Community and Law Enforcement.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office organized the conference with the Greater New Haven Clergy Association, led by the Rev. Boise Kimber, in the stated interest of improving relations between police and communities of color. In addition to Comey, the conference featured national NAACP Chair Roslyn Brock among the afternoon’s worth of speakers. (Click here to read Markeshia Ricks’ report of Brock’s remarks.)

“I imagine two lines in America in law enforcement,” Comey told the law enforcement officials and community activists scattered amid the seats in the lower level of Coop’s theater. ​“One is made up of people who serve and protect. The other is made up of communities we serve and protect. Especially communities of color. I feel those lines arcing away from each other. I feel this has been going on for much of this year. In some ways I feel that arcing accelerating.”

To try to bridge the gap between law enforcement and communities of color, Comey continued, he gave a speech this past February at Georgetown University about ​“hard truths.” At that time he called for candid reflection on all sides of the divide, including law enforcement, about racial bias.He called for examining his own agency’s past misdeeds (while denying the existence of any current or lingering problems under his own watch). The speech was a hit, celebrated as an enlightened contribution to a difficult national discourse.

Comey gave another highly publicized speech on the subject much more recently. On Oct. 23. At University of Chicago Law School. A speech that led to calls for his resignation and earned a rare rebuke from the White House for ignorantly stoking racial tensions and blocking public accountability of law enforcement’s misdeeds.

He didn’t mention that speech in New Haven Monday.

In New Haven on Monday, Comey did pop a question, though. Violent crime has shot up in cities across America in the past ten months. ​“What could be driving an increase in murder in all these cities at the same time?” he asked.

Comey didn’t provide an answer Monday. He did provide an answer in that Oct. 23 speech. In that speech, he blamed the ​“Ferguson effect.” ​“Nobody says it on the record, nobody says it in public, but police and elected officials are quietly saying it to themselves,” he claimed then. ​“And they’re saying it to me, and I’m going to say it to you… In today’s YouTube world, are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime? Are officers answering 911 calls but avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad guys from standing around, especially with guns?”

In New Haven Monday Comey did not use any of his allotted speaking time (nor did he offer an opportunity to field questions) to address ​“hard truths” people raised about those remarks. Such as: What evidence exists to back up that assertion? And: Given that those famous YouTube videos often showed out-of-control cops killing defenseless African-Americans, would he prefer the cops not be recorded committing such acts?

Counter-Facts Ignored

While he offered no new theories to explain the uptick in violence, Comey did offer a partial solution in New Haven Monday: New Haven itself. Where for four straight years violent crime has plummeted, defying the national trend.

He identified what he called the reason for that drop: Project Longevity, which the Justice Department (where he works) launched with city and state cops and the New Haven community. The project identifies the small number of gangbangers most responsible for shootings, then presents them a choice: accept help going straight or face intense prosecution on federal charges. Click here to read about one Project Longevity ​“call-in” where that choice was presented. And here for a story of how the project helped nabbed a particularly murderous crew.

“New Haven offers hope and inspiration” for the nation thanks to Project Longevity’s success, Comey said.

Comey offered evidence for his conclusion: a study released late last month by Yale researchers led by Andrew Papachristos (pictured). Comey said the study showed that Project Longevity cut New Haven’s rate of violence.

It did — sort of. Comey didn’t mention that the study’s authors themselves acknowledged that Project Longevity doesn’t account for most of the decline in violence. New Haven has had other programs up and running that have also contributed, such as Youth Stat and a revival of community policing. It’s impossible to quantify how much each effort contributed to the decline, the authors acknowledged. Yet they somehow managed to come up with a precise number for the amount of shootings prevented by Project Longevity: 4.6 per month. (Click here to read about their reasoning.)

Social-science math quibbles aside, Comey left out a far bigger caveat to his claim: The feds have also revved up Project Longevity right down I‑95 in Bridgeport. And shootings have gone up there, not down. Way up. So far this year, shootings are up in Bridgeport — by 200 percent, according to this CT Post article, though in fact the real increase is 20 percent, according to statistics provided by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Comey didn’t touch on that or field any questions. He did praise some great anti-violence efforts his son observed in Bridgeport and texted about. He made no mention of the dismal anti-violence results.

He wasn’t the only one who came unprepared to address the obvious question. Papachristos hosted an entire panel session on Project Longevity’s New Haven success to demonstrate that the idea works. No mention was made of the numbers in Bridgeport (or Hartford, for that matter, which also has Project Longevity). Click on the video at the top of this story to watch Papachristos, then two Project Longevity officials — Charles Grady, who ran the Bridgeport Project Longevity program for the U.S. Attorney until taking a new job with the FBI; and statewide Longevity chief Brent Peterkin, who’s also temporarily overseeing Bridgeport — respond to questions about why Project Longevity should take credit for the New Haven violence drop without also taking blame for the Bridgeport rise. Peterkin said the shooters in Bridgeport tend to be juveniles who aren’t Project Longevity targets; he said a new effort has begun to target the trigger-happy juveniles. Papachristos noted that many factors go into declines or rises in violence …

“Good” People Don’t Question Law Enforcement

Perhaps Comey’s most consequential omission was made in passing.

He regaled the crowd with successes he helped oversee in reducing drug-related violence in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1990s He spoke of a ​“weed and seed” effort that locked up black drug gang members for long sentences in order to allow the rest of the city to reclaim their neighborhoods.

At the time, he said, ​“some” people criticized the mass lock-ups. Comey himself said ​“you cannot arrest your way to a healthy neighborhood.” But he called the sweeping arrests in Richmond necessary to pave the way for progress.

Not everyone criticized the arrests at the time, Comey said. ​“Good people” supported the effort, he said. He identified those ​“good people” as black ​“ministers” and activists who understood the need to lock up criminals for a long time.

He never said who the ​“bad people” were who criticized the drug war, who questioned the wisdom of mass incarceration. He never elaborated on what it means when the director of the country’s most powerful law-enforcement agency with broad powers to monitor and suppress dissent lumps together people who question its policies as bad people.

Unlike when he last visited New Haven in May, basking in the glow of his Georgetown speech (see above video), Comey didn’t allow questions from the press this time around. Nor did he entertain questions from the crowd. He slipped in and out of Coop High through a back door, leaving such unanswered questions hanging portentously in the air.