Michelle Cummings should be alive. The justice system failed to protect her time and again. The mother who was dropping off her son, a newly inducted midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, died (according to charges filed against him) at the hands of a violent criminal with a long rap sheet named Angelo Harrod, who should never have been on the streets.
But on June 29, only a week after President Joe Biden announced his “Comprehensive Strategy to Reduce Gun Crimes,” Harrod allegedly shot and killed the Houston mother on her hotel patio while taking aim at others in a nearby car.
The president pledged his plan is to “go after the people who flood our streets with guns and the bad actors who decide to use them to further terrorize the communities. It means saving lives.”
But the White House’s plan to end the bloodshed would not have saved Cummings’s life. Despite the president’s claim that the “bad actors” who use guns would face consequences, Biden’s strategy doesn’t even mention holding trigger-pullers accountable — a sad oversight borne purely of the politics of the moment.
Homicides rose 25% last year and are up another 24% so far in 2021. At the same time, police have been relegated to responding to violence passively, with arrests and stops declining precipitously since the anti-police unrest of last summer. Violent criminals have been emboldened as public officials defund and defame law enforcement and progressive prosecutors treat offenders more like victims than perpetrators.
Instead, the Biden approach is to crack down on “rogue gun dealers and traffickers,” fund violence interrupters (i.e., ex-cons who mediate disputes), and create youth jobs programs. But the only way to stop the killings right now is to keep dangerous repeat criminals such as Harrod off the streets.
And with Harrod, our justice system had every chance. Over the past decade, Harrod has been arrested more than a dozen times — as an adult. (His juvenile record is not available.) And his crimes were not minor, petty, or nonviolent. Harrod was arrested on charges of dealing drugs, robbery, aggravated assault, and illegally carrying firearms (repeatedly). Each time he showed up to court, he received extreme leniency with felony charges knocked down to misdemeanors and more serious charges pleaded down further.
On a handful of occasions, Harrod did receive jail time, though well below what would be permissible under Maryland law and sentencing guidelines, but rarely served his full sentence. And in between court appearances, judges released him, and he was arrested again and again while awaiting court hearings, which he repeatedly failed to appear for, violating the conditions of his release.
In February 2021, Harrod allegedly assaulted someone with a firearm but wasn’t arrested for two months. When police arrested him again in April, Harrod was again illegally in possession of a gun and was not compliant with the conditions of release.
The judge put Harrod on “supervised release” — confined to his home or work and required to wear an ankle monitor. Four years earlier, in January 2017, Harrod, facing gun charges, removed his ankle monitor and fled, only to be apprehended hours later.
Knowing all this, the court inexplicably put a man with a long history of skipping bail, carrying guns, and violence back on the street. Cummings would pay for the criminal justice system’s egregious error with her life.
In early May, six weeks before he allegedly killed Cummings, Harrod once again cut off his ankle bracelet monitor. The system either lacked the technology or the resources to recognize this and immediately bring Harrod into custody. It wasn’t until after he was identified as a “person of interest” in the murder of Cummings that Harrod would be arrested for his outstanding warrant. About two weeks later, he would be charged with Cummings’s murder.
Harrod’s rap sheet could, and should, have earned him decades in prison while his history of ducking justice by jumping bail should have kept him detained ahead of trial — locked up safely behind bars the night he allegedly killed the Naval Academy midshipman’s mother, on what may have been the proudest day of her life.
Biden’s emphasis on the supposed contributing factors to violence — illegal gun trafficking, social services, and economic opportunity — fundamentally fails to prevent the more and more common tragedies like Cummings’s killing. Enforcing the law and meting out real consequences to lawbreakers such as Harrod would prove far more effective.
The same sad story is playing out across the country from New York City to Los Angeles and San Francisco to Philadelphia, where violent criminals get the benefit of the doubt, but their victims get no solace. Even Cummings’s hometown of Houston has struggled to hold violent repeat offenders accountable.
In Harrod’s case and so many others, our criminal justice system utterly failed time after time to hold the real perpetrator of mayhem to account.
Biden needs to remember that second chances are one thing, but zero consequences kill.
Jason Johnson was deputy police commissioner for Baltimore from 2016-2018 and is the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.
