ST. LOUIS — For the second time, a person hired to prevent violence in St. Louis has been charged with a crime.
Samir Simpson-Bey, 37, was charged in October with knowingly distributing more than 40 grams of Fentanyl. Police say that’s the equivalent of 20,000 lethal doses.
In detention hearings, federal prosecutors described the Simpson-Bey and the other two dozen people he was arrested with as "members or associates of the Black Mafia Family." Court documents allege BMF is a drug trafficking and money laundering organization distributing large quantities of narcotics in the St. Louis area and elsewhere.
At the time of his arrest, Simpson-Bey was also one of about 20 people working for an anti-violence program out of the Mayor’s Office for Violence Prevention, led by Wilford Pickney.
“It’s unfortunate,” Pickney told the I-Team. “The key to this work, when you're looking at street outreach and people who are out there engaging people to try and prevent violence, is that you are going to engage and hire people who have that type of past.”
Simpson-Bey earned about $57,000 a year to supervise three people, who concentrated in the Clinton-Peabody neighborhood just west of downtown. Their job was to connect people at risk for crime with resources, Pickney explained.
Pickney says the program, which doesn’t yet have an official name, is different than the Cure Violence program, which was featured on Nightly News in November 2021. Lester Holt interviewed one of the employees in that program, Jerome Williams, whose job was to work as a violence interrupter – working to solve problems in high crime neighborhoods before violence erupted.
Seven months after that special aired, Williams was federally charged after police say he helped cover up a murder in the city’s Penrose neighborhood in April 2022.
Williams had served about 30 years in prison for a kidnapping before getting a job with the city.
Simpson-Bey’s alleged drug dealing happened months before he was hired to work for the city’s anti-violence program in November 2022, but his criminal charges didn’t come until the fall. City officials have yet to provide his final date of employment.
Special Agent in Charge of the FBI St. Louis Division, Jay Greenberg, described the investigation that led to the arrest in a press release in October: “This week’s take-down demolished multiple drug trafficking organizations which were the main suppliers of methamphetamine, fentanyl, and cocaine into the St. Louis region. Today’s arrests of more than two dozen suspects by the St. Louis Gateway Strike Force is a culmination of a 4-year investigation into a world of violence frequently associated with drug trafficking. The St. Louis Gateway Strike Force is a collaboration of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to combat violent gang crimes and drug trafficking throughout the bi-state region.”
Pickney says despite the two arrests, he believes employing people with criminal histories is still the right model.
“These are people who have done wrong in community and now say, ‘Hey, I want to right that wrong. I want to go back into the communities where I've done harm and I want to make up for that and atone for that by going out and engaging people and trying to show them that there's a better way.”
Other cities like Baltimore, Louisville and Chicago have similar anti-violence programs that send people with criminal pasts into high crime areas to prevent violence.
A June 2023 ProPublic piece titled, “Can Community Programs Help Slow the Rise in Violence?” noted how millions of federal dollars have flowed into cities since Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA. Many cities are spending it on “community violence intervention,” the catchall term for non-police approaches to reducing violent crime, according to the article.
So, does the concept work?
Part of what makes that question hard to answer is each city’s program is different. Most focus on small areas. And workers are hard to recruit and retain, according to University of Missouri-St. Louis criminology professor Lee Slocum.
“The jury is decidedly mixed on this issue,” she said. “Oftentimes, it's very focused on a very small place, so it's hard to get the data to see if it's been effective in that place.
“And the evaluations tend to be short term rather than long term. So it's not clear if the program has a longer-term influence.”
Several violence interrupters and anti-violence workers have been killed on the job across the country.
“The job is very mentally taxing,” Slocum says.
Pickney agrees.
“They're walking around without a gun, without a bulletproof vest, they're putting themselves in harm's way,” Pickney said. “But we do expect them to abide by the law.
“We don't expect them to be out there engaging in criminal activity. And we make that clear. So that will not be tolerated.”
Pickney says the program Simpson-Bey was a part of is also too new to evaluate, and says he doesn't want the mistakes of two people to tarnish the work that about 20 others are doing.
“It is an extensive process for someone to get this job, there are drug tests, so we're not taking it lightly,” Pickney said. “But we are looking for people who have that credibility.
“Not that you have to have served time in jail, but we're looking for you to be able to go in the street and have people who are engaged in that type of activity listen to you. So I do think it's the right model.”