(Updated) Raheem Vaughn had no idea when he left court Wednesday that New Haven planned to offer young drug offenders a second chance as part of an experiment in smart policing.
Vaughn (pictured), who’s 19, showed up with a checkered Dickies backpack in Courtroom A of the Elm Street state Superior Court to answer charges of possessing a “mini-ziplock” bag of pot and of previously selling $50 worth of marijuana. He was caught up in a Feb. 18 sweep of suspected dealers as part of an ambitious-sounding new program called “Project Restart.”
The city trumpeted the sweep that day as first signs of success of the program, modeled after a similar ballyhooed effort in High Point, N.C. The city received federal money to replicate the High Point effort after a community outcry for a return to community policing. The idea is to avoid just rounding up low-level street dealers just to see them return to the streets later with bigger arrest records. Instead, the cops in High Point spend months gathering surveillance on drug sales and target higher-level dealers. Then they develop ties with suspects’ families. Finally they make arrest sweeps, then bring the suspects and families before cops and federal prosecutors who reveal the extensive evidence against them. Harder cases are prosecuted. Younger dealers with less of a record are offered immediate alternatives to jail, like job-training or education.
Click here to read about the heralded High Point program.
On Feb. 18, the city pulled out its battering ram for the TV cameras and rounded up suspects to unveil its version of the High Point program, renamed “Project Restart.”
Eleven weeks later, the cops haven’t yet gotten around to the High Point part of the program. The “Restart” part. The part that differs from the ’80s-style “Drug War,” with door-busting round-ups of dealers big and small that lead to a revolving-door of short-term arrests that jam the criminal justice system.
Lower-level young suspected dealers like Raheem Vaughn haven’t heard from any outreach effort. Nor have their relatives.
It turns out Vaughn never will.
State prosecutor Brian Leslie said before court began that he was planning to offer Vaughn a plea deal: an eight-year sentence with a minimum of four years served.
The case was continued before it got that far.
Outside the courtroom Vaughn and a woman he identified as his aunt said no one from the police department had mentioned any alternatives to incarceration.
“They just came there with a warrant,” Vaughn said. They said they had video” of him dealing. He said he’s struggling to finish his last year at Hillhouse High School, but the case is getting in the way.
“They’re not giving anyone second chances,” the aunt argued. “Instead of going after bigger people, they’re going after little people that smokes weed. They’re trying to make weed legal, ain’t they?”
Indeed, the police department still hasn’t finished compiling a list of which arrestees to offer alternatives to, let alone reach out to their families or line up social services of educational or job opportunities.
While the Feb. 18 sweep cases make their way through a clogged court system, the department has identified a cop to handle the alternatives-to-incarceration outreach for Project Restart. Her name is Officer Monique Cain, the department’s victim services officer.
“I have no clue” whom she’ll be working with yet, or how, Cain said Wednesday. “I’m just waiting to be notified who is in the program. I don’t even have the names yet. It hasn’t gotten off the ground yet. It’s still with [Assistant] Chief [Pete] Reichard.”
Too Hardened
Reichard said Wednesday afternoon that people like Raheen don’t qualify for the alternative route because they already have a prior arrest for selling drugs. Even if it’s one arrest for selling $50 worth of weed.
“Even though it’s just marijuana, selling it is a felony,” Reichard said.
New Haven “tweaked” the program from the High Point template, according to Reichard.
The Project Restart team served 21 out of 34 warrants that first day, Feb. 18, Reichard said. Those 21 people will not qualify for alternatives to going to jail, he said.
The others had no prior felony convictions. He said it has taken time to work through the list with the state’s attorney’s office and line up the social service providers and community activists who will participate in the program. He also wants to find out what sentences the first batch of arrestees receive, so officials can then tell the first-time offenders what kind of jail sentences they face if they don’t sign up for a last chance to go straight instead.
When that’s all done, the team is preparing for a “call in meeting” with the arrestees, Reichard said.
The Gamut
A review of some of the affidavits filed from the Feb. 18 arrest sweep makes clear that, as intended, Project Restart rounded up a range of alleged dealers, from hard-core repeat offenders to young men relatively new to the court system.
Steven Charles Spearman was among those with a court appearance scheduled Wednesday. He’s 29, and his record stretches back to at least January of 1998. A registered sex offender, he’s been convicted of assault, risk of injury, burglary, and repeated crack dealing in the Hill.
Most recently, he was pinched twice in August of 2008 and once this past Feb. 12 for allegedly selling three bags of crack to a “cooperating witness” sent by local cops working with the statewide narcotics task force and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms.
Under Project Restart, based on information from two confidential informants about Spearman’s alleged continuing dealing, the cops executed a search warrant at his home on Liberty Street. According to the arrest warrant affidavit filed by Officer Karl Jacobson, they found “two clear bags with apple logo,” “numerous empty ziplock bags of difference sizes, “ and “Latin King literature and two bandanas, one red and one green.”
Prosecutor Leslie said he was preparing to offer Spearman a 15-year sentence suspended after eight if he pleads guilty.
While Spearman seems an unlikely candidate for the carrot part of the High Point/Project Restart carrot-and-stick approach, another alleged dealer from the Hill wearing a baseball cap to court Wednesday had the makings of a candidate, although in the New Haven version of the program he apparently doesn’t qualify. He’s 19; he has an outstanding warrant for an arrest last August for allegedly selling a confidential police informant six bags of “piff” or marijuana.
The young man, who asked not to be identified by name, claimed he’s innocent of the charges. He thinks.
“I don’t remember” what happened on the day in question, he said. “You feel me? I can’t plead guilty to something I don’t remember.” This was his second arrest, he said.
He didn’t know about Project Restart. No one told him he’d have an option other than going to jail, he said. “I’ll take the program!” he said when told about the concept.
Any particular program? A “not being in jail” program, he said.
Found In A Closet
Raheem Vaughn has already been through one program, at Project MORE, an drug counseling program. He claimed he has stopped smoking marijuana since. He claimed he stopped selling marijuana two years ago and has been concentrating on trying to graduate, with an eye toward a two-year community college in Atlanta, then eventually attending a four-year program at a “place like Morehouse.”
According to his court file, Vaughn had an outstanding warrant for selling a controlled substance, and doing so within 1,500 feet of a school. When Detective Richard Pelletier and several colleagues showed up at Vaughn’s home during the Feb. 18 sweep, a woman let them in and directed them downstairs to Vaughn’s room, according to the arrest warrant affidavit.
“Raheem Vaughn was located standing just inside the room in a closet,” Pelletier wrote. He reported that a subsequent search of Vaughn’s pockets produced “a single clear mini-ziplock bag containing a green plant-like substance. That through my police training experience I did recognize this to be marijuana packaged for street-level sale.” The amount seized fell under the minimum category of under four ounces.
Vaughn was asked Wednesday why he’d been hiding in the closet when the cops came in.
“I didn’t know who was coming down,” he replied. “I thought it was my friend or my brother. They do it too — we hide in a closet and try to scare” each other.
When he saw flashlights he realized his visitors weren’t his friend or brother, he said, and he emerged form the closet. He also insisted the weed in his pocket wasn’t his. “I was holding it for someone else,” he claimed.
It’s unclear at this point if he’ll end up telling that to a judge. He won’t get the chance to tell that to Project Restart.
Previous coverage of High Point/Project Restart:
• Top Brass On High Point
• A Cry Goes Out: Bring Back Community Policing
• Edgewood Patroller Heralds High Point
• High Point Diary
• Community Policing Moves South
• Witness to the “Call In”
• Drug Market Closed
• Chief, in Dixwell, Reveals High Point Delay
translation: it's all whitey's fault.