The first time Justin Fowlkes got shot, he was standing at a bus stop when a stray bullet meant for someone else struck his ankle. The second time, when a bullet slammed into his shoulder, the Baltimore native was its intended target.
“When you’re out in the streets, you know what you sign up for,” Fowlkes, 26, told me, recalling his time in the city’s violent drug trade. “You might get shot; you might go to jail. You’re already preparing yourself mentally for these things. I’ve heard people say before, ‘I’m a dead man walking.’ And honestly, that’s how I felt.”
The program that eventually got Fowlkes to see himself differently—persuading him to leave his street corner and pursue job training after years of cycling in and out of jail—was among several community-violence-intervention initiatives that Donald Trump’s administration abruptly defunded earlier this year. Trump, who has threatened to send federal troops into what he calls the “Crime Drenched City of Baltimore,” is instead relying on a crime-prevention strategy that treats people like Fowlkes, city leaders and criminal-justice experts told me, as irredeemable…