Roy Cooper Appointed a Violent Ex-Con Gang Member to His ‘Racial Equity’ Task Force. He Called It a ‘Tremendous Success.’
- June 9, 2020 Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) signs Executive Order 145, creating the Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice — NC Dept. of Public Safety
- 24 members Cooper hand-picked for the task force, including RREPS founder Kerwin Pittman — NCDOJ official roster
- 11.5 years Pittman served in prison for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder before Cooper appointed him — Spectrum News 1, RREPS.net
- 125 policy recommendations in the task force's final report, including eliminating cash bail and sending social workers instead of police to some 911 calls — NCDOJ final report, Dec. 2020
In June 2020, as protests over George Floyd’s murder spread through American cities, Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) signed Executive Order 145 and created the Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice — a panel he described as a chance to eliminate “racial inequities in our systems of law enforcement.” A month later, his office released the 24 names. Alongside a sitting state Supreme Court justice, the attorney general, sheriffs, and police chiefs sat Kerwin Pittman, founder of a Raleigh reentry nonprofit — and, per the Washington Free Beacon and Pittman’s own public account, a former gang member who spent more than a decade in prison for conspiracy to commit murder.
Six years later, Cooper is the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated in North Carolina, running against Republican Michael Whatley (R-NC). The task force he built — and the man he put on it — are now central exhibits in that race.
Cooper’s office named its 24 appointees in a formal NCDOJ release the following month: co-chairs Attorney General Josh Stein (D-NC) and Associate Justice Anita Earls, plus sheriffs, police chiefs, prosecutors, legislators, and advocates. Pittman’s listed credential was founder and executive director of Recidivism Reduction Educational Program Services (RREPS), the reentry nonprofit he built after his own release from prison. Cooper later appointed him to a second body, the State Reentry Council Collaborative, as well.
Pittman doesn’t hide his past — he built a public career on it. “At one point in time, I did sell drugs. I did join a gang. All the above,” he told ABC11 in a 2021 interview. To Spectrum News 1 the same year, he described running “the streets in southeast Raleigh” as a teenager, “selling drugs, robberies, whatever the likes may be to make finances for yourself and for the gang.” The Free Beacon identifies that gang as a Bloods set. What Cooper’s office did not mention in the July 2020 announcement was the specific crime behind Pittman’s sentence.
In June 2006, a Raleigh teenager named Jamel Jeffreys was shot and killed on Beauty Avenue when gunmen opened fire from a convoy of moving vehicles, wounding three others. WRAL News reported at the time that police arrested three suspects, including 19-year-old Kerwin Ellis Pittman, charged in Jeffreys’ killing. Fifteen people were ultimately charged in the case; thirteen, including Pittman, pleaded guilty to lesser charges rather than stand trial. The one defendant who did go to trial, Michael Jones, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.
Pittman pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and was sentenced to more than 14 years. He served 11 years and 6 months, including over a year in solitary confinement, before his release around age 30. “Me and some of my friends went to actually fight some people in another neighborhood,” he later told Spectrum News 1, “and one thing led to another…and the individual ended up losing their life.” None of that history is in dispute — Pittman has repeated it in interview after interview as the origin story of his reform work. It simply wasn’t disclosed the day Cooper’s office announced him as a criminal-justice policymaker.
The task force wasn’t symbolic. Its December 2020 final report ran 166 pages and made 125 recommendations for “reimagining public safety” in North Carolina. The very first listed action called for more social workers and fewer police officers on routine 911 calls, stating that “law enforcement is not the best fit for every type of call for services.” Other recommendations, per the Free Beacon and the official report, included sharply curbing cash bail statewide, favoring citations over arrests for low-level offenses, mandatory implicit-bias training for officers, decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana, and downgrading the role of school resource officers.
Cooper embraced the results. He called the task force a “tremendous success” and told its members, “I look forward to implementing your strong recommendations.” His 2026 Senate campaign now lists the task force’s creation among his top accomplishments as governor. The legislature, then and now controlled by Republicans, never adopted the cash-bail recommendation as statewide law — but Cooper signed several narrower criminal-justice bills that tracked the task force’s direction, and magistrates across the state, operating under existing pretrial-release guidance, continued releasing low-level defendants on written promises to appear.
That is the thread Republicans now pull hardest. In January 2025, career criminal Decarlos Brown Jr. — arrested on a felony larceny charge with 14 prior arrests on his record — was released from a Charlotte-area jail on a written promise to appear rather than secured cash bond. Seven months later, police say Brown fatally stabbed 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s Lynx Blue Line train. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Republican Senate campaign committees have run ads tying that release directly to the cash-bail posture Cooper’s task force pushed. Cooper’s campaign disputes the direct causal claim, noting the task force’s bail recommendation was never enacted as binding statewide policy and that Cooper separately signed the Pretrial Integrity Act tightening bail for certain violent offenders. Fact-checkers at PolitiFact have separately debunked a distinct GOP claim — that a 2021 COVID-era prison settlement, not the bail policy, freed Brown early; it did not, since Brown had already served his full sentence before that settlement was reached.
The blood of this innocent woman can literally be seen dripping from the killer's knife, and now her blood is on the hands of the Democrats who refuse to put bad people in jail, including Former Disgraced Governor and 'Wannabe Senator' Roy Cooper.
Reproduced from Newsweek's contemporaneous coverage; no public post ID was located to link directly, so this renders as a static quote card.
Brown has since been found incompetent to stand trial in both his state and federal cases, which remain pending; nothing here asserts a verdict in his prosecution. The political dispute over what caused his release, however, is fully public — and it runs straight back to a policy framework Cooper’s own task force wrote and Cooper himself praised.
North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders have moved to make sure no governor can build a panel like it again. House Speaker Destin Hall (R-NC) and Senate leader Phil Berger (R-NC) announced legislation this year to bar the governor and executive-branch officials from creating similar commissions. “That task force advanced weak-on-crime policies that kept the murderer on the streets,” Berger said. Whatley, campaigning against Cooper, said state leaders “must rescind the Cooper policies that allowed attacks like that on Iryna.”
Roy Cooper now thinks it's 'cynical' to point out his policies kept Iryna's killer on the streets, free to commit murder. What a shameless fraud.
Whatley has made the task force and Cooper’s broader criminal-justice record a centerpiece of his own campaign, at times pointing to a separate, earlier controversy — the 2021 COVID-era settlement that let thousands more inmates out of North Carolina prisons on Cooper’s watch.
When he was NC Governor, Roy Cooper fast-tracked the release of 3,500 inmates. The list included Iryna Zarutska's killer, Decarlos Brown, along with fifty-one rapists and murderers serving life sentences. In a complete dereliction of his duty to keep people safe, Cooper...
Michael Whatley has my complete and total endorsement for the United States Senate from the Great State of North Carolina — he will never let you down.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Paraphrased from multiple contemporaneous news reports of Trump's endorsement post; no public post ID was located to link directly.
Pittman, for his part, has kept working. He now runs RREPS full-time and, in early 2026, became what advocates describe as the first formerly incarcerated person in U.S. history to purchase a former state prison, converting the Goldsboro facility into reentry housing. He has not withdrawn from public life, and Cooper’s office has not disavowed the appointment. The task force he sat on remains, six years on, the single most-cited policy document in the North Carolina Senate race.
Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) hand-picked Kerwin Pittman — a self-described former gang member convicted of conspiracy to commit murder who served 11.5 years in prison — for his 2020 Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice. The panel's 125 recommendations, which Cooper publicly praised, called for less cash bail, fewer police responses to 911 calls, and softer treatment of low-level offenses. Republicans, including Cooper's 2026 Senate opponent Michael Whatley, now tie that framework directly to Decarlos Brown's cashless release before he killed Iryna Zarutska. Cooper's campaign disputes the direct causal chain but has not disavowed the task force, Pittman's appointment, or the "accomplishment" framing on its own website.
