D.C. Anti-Crime Program: Bribed Officials, Ex-Con Hired as Violence Interrupter Charged with Murder

The scandals keep piling up in the District of Columbia’s ill-fated program to curb violence with an ex-con charged with two felonies since D.C. officials hired him to be a violence interrupter, a disgraced councilman—Trayon White—busted for taking tens of thousands of dollars in cash bribes to help extend violence prevention and youth services contracts and another high-ranking official pleading guilty to bribery for using her official government position to help a friend get contracts and grants. As millions of taxpayer dollars pour into D.C.’s questionable anti-violence initiative fraud and corruption continue to rock the program, and crime remains high in the neighborhoods it is supposed to help.

The repeat criminal works for Cure the Streets, a public safety program launched by former D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine to reduce gun violence by treating it as a disease that can be interrupted and stopped from spreading. Cure the Streets typically hires people with criminal histories as violence interrupters because they know first-hand about the challenges that residents of crime-infested communities live with. Racine, a two-term D.C. Attorney General who is currently a partner in a major corporate law firm, claimed the “transformed criminals” hired by his program perform community-driven public safety work that can avoid using police by interrupting potentially violent conflicts because they have relationships and influence within targeted neighborhoods. The program operates in notoriously high-crime sections throughout D.C., which are broken down by wards, including Eckington/Truxton and Trinidad in Ward 5, Marshall Heights/Benning Heights in Ward 7 and Bellevue, Washington Highlands, and Congress Heights in Ward 8.

A Cure the Streets employee, Cotey Wynn, was recently arrested and faces a first-degree murder charge related to a nightclub shooting in which a 31-year-old former college basketball player was killed. Wynn has an extensive rap sheet and had served ten years in prison when Racine, D.C.’s then chief legal officer, hired him as a violence interrupter. His record includes felony murder, first degree murder, possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine, and distribution of a controlled substance, according to the Metropolitan Police Department. The most recent criminal charge is not the first since becoming a D.C. violence interrupter. In 2020 Judicial Watch reported that Wynn got arrested and charged for fatally shooting a 53-year-old man in 2017 near the Trinidad neighborhood in Northeast Washington. At the time of that arrest Wynn was under the supervision of the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia, a federal agency that believes preventative detention should only be a last resort for defendants, who should live in the least restrictive conditions while awaiting court.

The public officials embroiled in bribery scandals are part of the D.C. Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE), the umbrella agency that more broadly focuses on reducing violence in the nation’s crime-infested capitol area. White, recently expelled by the D.C. Council and scheduled to be tried in 2026, took $156,000 in cash payments in exchange for using his position as a D.C. councilman to pressure government employees at ONSE and the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) to extend several contracts. “The contracts at issue were valued at $5.2 million and were for two companies to provide Violence Intervention services in D.C.,” according to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which reveals that the disgraced lawmaker took payments of $35,000 in cash on four separate occasions. Just a few days ago, the agency disclosed the most recent ONSE official nabbed in a bribery scheme, a former deputy director named Dana McDaniel who has pleaded guilty to accepting at least $10,000 in exchange for using her position to award contracts and grants to businesses owned by a Maryland-based associate. As ONSE deputy director, McDaniel managed agency programming and community-based services focused on providing resources and interventions for at-risk individuals in at-risk communities impacted by violence in D.C. She faces 15 years in prison.

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