By John Dorschner
That search continues to fascinate and trouble me.
In my 28 years writing for The Miami Herald's Tropic
Magazine, he was the only person I did two cover stories on: One was his
experiment in public housing in which he tried to get welfare mothers back to
work. The other was when he was a juvenile court judge and decided to find out
what happened to one of his cases outside the courtroom. It was an astonishing
revelation – both for him and for Herald readers.
After we both retired, we had lunch occasionally –
often to discuss the chaos of American politics … and baseball. He was a diehard Mets fan and was excited
about the new owner putting big bucks into the team.
STARTING IN A "SOUTHERN JUSTICE" MIAMI
With a Columbia Law degree, he could have easily had a big-bucks career in New York, but in the mid-1960s he arrived in Miami as a VISTA volunteer. “It was a Southern town,” he told me in 2013 when I did a formal video interview. “A Black woman could go to Burdines and buy a dress but she couldn’t try it on… because white people wouldn’t want to try on the same dress….
“The justice building had double water fountains.
People were walking around the halls with cigars and straw hats as if you were
in south Georgia. It was really a Southern justice system.”
He went to work for the public defender’s office, defending
juveniles in court. He recalls cops frequently using the n-word and a judge
calling Black probation officers “boy.”
Soon, he switched to the prosecutors’ side, working
for State Attorney Richard Gerstein so that he could set up a pre-trial
intervention program for first offenders.
A DO-GOODER AMONG LAW-AND-ORDER TYPES
He stayed for most of two decades in the prosecutors’
office, rising to be Janet Reno’s chief administrative assistant. His
colleagues, many of whom were law-and-order types bent on putting bad guys in
jail, often viewed him as a do-gooder, frequently seeking to keep people out of
jail.
He tended to get along with everybody. Over the
decades, he remained friends with Ed Carhart, who was Gerstein’s top assistant,
and George Yoss, who became Reno’s chief assistant. In 1980, those two battled in
a Tampa courtroom in perhaps the biggest trial in Miami’s history, with five
Dade cops accused of beating and killing Black motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie and
then covering up his death. The medical examiner made it clear that McDuffie
was murdered, but prosecutor Yoss had problems with conflicting, unreliable
witnesses, all of whom were fellow cops. Carhart, defending one of the officers, hammered on that unreliability. The
lawyers on both sides in the courtroom knew the state had huge problems, but
most people in Miami were shocked by the acquittals.
Eighteen died during the ensuing riots. Property
damage was $100 million.
“Ironically, I was in New York City when the riots
broke out,” Tom told me in 2013. He recalled walking through Harlem as
residents sat on their stoops reading about the riots in the Daily News. “Janet Reno was being accused of being insensitive to race, [but] I
was sent up there to explore vocational programs for minority youth that she
wanted to institute. Janet was always very much attuned to and supported
programs for indigent Black youth.”
In 1984, in his early 40s, he arranged to take a leave of absence so he could try to reduce crime by combatting poverty. He started in Larchmont Gardens, a public housing project near El Portal – 86 percent Black, two-thirds under the age of 21 – mostly welfare mothers and their children. He met one grandmother who was 28.
On paper, the government was taking care of
Larchmont’s residents. But Tom learned that social workers rarely showed up. No school staffers came looking for truants. A nearby county park was
closed. Housing staffers didn’t demand residents maintain their apartments. There
was no open child-care program if mothers found a job.
Tom started a small convenience store in Larchmont: a place to train mothers for the workforce and provide food for the
many residents who didn’t have cars to get to the grocery store a half-mile
away. He received a $75,000 grant for the project and hired 14. “A disaster” he
said of that start. He tried to do too much too soon. Some had drug problems.
Others didn’t really want a job. A teenage hire made for a glowing news story –
but she was pregnant and soon quit.
He discovered that, though the welfare checks were
small, the basic wage Larch-Mart offered often wasn’t enough of a difference to
get many people to work. He opened two other stores in public housing. One in
South-Dade became self-supporting, but the other two didn’t, and he passed them
along to another entity, which eventually closed them.
He had some victories in Larchmont: getting a doctor
to come to the site, setting up a baseball program, persuading the county
housing authority to spruce up the place. But some parents couldn’t be
persuaded to take their kids to school, and an employment counselor who came
regularly found that few were interested in her services.
A year after my story appeared, Tom became a judge, focusing on juvenile court, where he kept battling to make the world a better place. In 1992, we started talking about one idea he was exploring, which led to a Tropic cover entitled Can This Boy Be Saved?
The underline – what we called the sell – “Dwayne
Hardy, 13, Is One of Thousands Of Troubled Kids We’re Spending $98 Million A Year
To Divert From A Life of Crime. What is All this Money Really Buying? Juvenile
Judge Tom Petersen Decided To Find Out. You Won’t Like The Answer.”
As with Larchmont, Tom found Dwayne’s files showed a lot of government activity trying to make the situation better. He had been on the caseloads of six counselors, three judges, two psychologists and six lawyers.
He’d been a handful even as a
9-year-old, when a school record noted “defiance of school authority.” At 10,
he was “leaving class without permission” and selling addicts bags of soap
shavings he passed off as crack cocaine.
When Tom started investigating, he found that Dwayne wasn’t
even at the address listed in the records. His mother had a drug problem, and
he was staying with a grandmother who was trying her best. Tom tracked him
down when case workers had no idea where he was.
Tom fought to get Dwayne’s welfare benefits
transferred from the mother to the grandmother. He called top officials several
times. They did nothing. Only when he threatened that the situation would end
up in a Tropic story did they act. “This was a judge, who has some clout,
calling the head of the district,” he told me. “You can imagine an ordinary
person would find it just about impossible to do anything.”
Among other things, Tom arranged for a specialist in
troubled kids to take on Dwayne’s case. “I can
create a program for Dwayne,” Tom told me. “That’s easy. The question is how to
deal with the bureaucracy of many Dwaynes. That’s not easy.”
In fact, it wasn’t
that easy in Dwayne’s case either. A decade later, he was dead at age 23. The
record I saw didn’t say how he died, but his early demise certainly didn’t
indicate a success story.
Tom eventually semi-retired,
serving as a senior judge hearing some cases. He retired completely in 2016.
His career was strewn
with achievements. For some years, he served as Reno’s presenter to grand
juries, launching major investigations, including ones into nursing homes and
foster care.
With Georgia
Jones-Ayers, he started The Alternative Program, focusing on pre-trial
releases. As a judge, he developed a first-offender diversion program
along with many other initiatives. The Florida Bar honored him with the Selig
Goldin Memorial Award for his lifetime achievements.
He and I stayed in touch. In 2020, after writing a
book about the McDuffie cops trial, I consulted with him for some follow-up
stories on police brutality I did for the Miami Times and my blog.
“We can’t expect the police culture to differ from
our national culture of which they are only a part,” he told me for a blog post
headlined What’s Wrong with America. “The cops will never be any better or worse
than we are. And they reflect our values. Including the covert ones.”
He thought back to his early days in Miami, when a
Miami police chief announced, “When the looting starts the shooting starts.”
Tom recalled that over time cops stopped using the n-word publicly, “but they
were the same cops. … As long as our society condones racism, police culture
will reflect the larger culture of which police are only one component.”
One of his last public crusades was serving as an unpaid legal advisor in an effort to eradicate the name Dixie from Miami-Dade street signs and rename them for Black activist Harriet Tubman.
Only the Republican-dominated Legislature could do that for state roads, and the pols passed a tepid compromise: Designating some sections of roadway in North and South Dade as “Harriet Tubman Memorial Highway,” while retaining Dixie as the formal name. Tom certainly appreciated the irony of having Tubman and Dixie honored side by side.
His death – apparently of a heart attack while
exercising – shocked me. I re-read the stories I had written about him. Both of
those grand experiments were noble attempts that made for fascinating reading.
But … had they led to nothing?
I started writing this essay some days ago, then set
it aside. Was there a point I should be trying to make about his efforts? Clearly, the underclass – poverty, teen births,
drugs, crime – run deep. Dwayne might have been doomed from an early age, long
before Tom entered his life.
Frankly, at this point, I’d be interested in any
efforts to break the cycle of our poorest citizens – without regards to
ideology.
I can see Tom raising an eyebrow about that last
phrase. Or maybe grunting and wondering what I meant. I wish we could have one final chat. Lessons learned? Alternatives that
might have been tried? New theories? Interesting recent experiments?
Since that conversation is no longer possible, I'm left still with the last paragraph in the Larchmont story of 1988: “America keeps waiting for the home run on
welfare – for the idea that is so brilliant, so certain, so undeniable in its
ability to succeed – that everyone will have to go for it. But the experience
of the past 20 years has been that there are no magic solutions to the problem
of the underclass. The only real answer must be grinding, unspectacular
attempts to find out what works and what doesn’t, separated from the heavy
baggage of ideology. As [scholar-politician Daniel
Patrick] Moynihan says, the lesson learned when dealing with the poor is
that ‘if you really work hard, you can make a difference – maybe not a big
difference, but a difference worth making.’”
If you want to read more about Tom’s thoughts on
police and race in America: click HERE.
More on the much-misunderstood McDuffie cops trial is in my book Verdict on Trial: The Inside Story of the Cop Case that Ignited Miami's Deadliest Riot. That’s available HERE.
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