Two left-wing foundations, the MacArthur Foundation and Arnold Ventures, spent millions pushing criminal justice reform policies in Charlotte, North Carolina, that are now being blamed for career criminal Decarlos Brown walking the streets in Charlotte, where he brutally murdered Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on the city’s transit system.
Brown, who fatally stabbed Zarutska on Aug. 22, had 14 prior arrests including an armed robbery that landed him five years in prison, and was released without bond or monitoring in a criminal case earlier this year. Lawmakers, the Trump administration, and even Brown’s relatives have blamed the soft-on-crime policies embraced by Mecklenburg County court system, which oversees Charlotte.
Those policies—including a push for cashless bail, the reduction of jail populations, and an attempt to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in jails–have come to Mecklenburg County by way of the MacArthur Foundation, the country’s 12th largest private charity, and Arnold Ventures, the private philanthropy of former Enron executive John Arnold, a Washington Free Beacon review has found.
MacArthur Foundation has given $3.8 million to Mecklenburg County Criminal Justice Services, which encompasses Charlotte, as part of its Safety + Justice Challenge to address “overincarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse and racial and ethnic disparities in jail usage.” To achieve those goals, Mecklenburg County in 2019 adopted what it touted as “bold reforms,” including the Public Safety Assessment, a scoring system developed by Arnold Ventures that judges use to decide whether to keep defendants in jail, hold them on bail, or release them without bail conditions. Arnold Ventures advertises the system as a tool that “has helped jurisdictions achieve higher rates of release and lower use of financial conditions.”
Arnold Ventures has given $18 million since 2020 to the Center for Effective Public Policy, a think tank that provides training for the Arnold assessment at the 59 jurisdictions where it is currently used.
Mecklenburg County says it uses Arnold’s Public Safety Assessment “as the actuarial pretrial assessment” for all defendants in their first court appearances after arrest. Mecklenburg County chief district judge Roy Wiggins, who is now presiding over Brown’s murder case, said in 2020 that Arnold’s assessment is a “very helpful tool to me as a judge.”
While a copy of the Public Safety Assessment compiled after Brown’s arrest in January was not immediately available, the tool has a poor track record when it comes to releasing violent criminals, the Free Beacon reported. In 2017, Arnold’s Public Safety Assessment recommended the release of Jules Black, a New Jersey man charged with felony gun possession. Black was arrested a week later for the murder of a man he shot 22 times. The Arnold system recommended in 2022 that a New Mexico judge release Muhammad Syed, an Afghan refugee who was convicted of ambushing and killing two men with an AK-47-style rifle.
Brown was most recently arrested on January 19, 2025, on charges of “misuse of the 911 system” following a domestic incident involving a relative. Brown, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, told police during his arrest that he had eaten a “man-made” object that controlled his thoughts and speech.
Nevertheless, magistrate judge Teresa Stokes released Brown without bond or any electronic monitoring, requiring only a “written promise to appear” for future court dates, according to court records.
Stokes filled out a “findings of fact” form that set Brown’s release conditions based on the results of the Public Safety Assessment’s “Release Conditions Matrix,” according to court filings. Stokes checked a box that Brown should be released on a “written promise to appear.”
Wiggins heard Brown’s 911 case in late July. He ordered a psychiatric evaluation for Brown after Brown’s lawyer said he “has a long history” of mental health issues. Brown failed to show up for the appointment, according to reports.
Weeks later, Brown stabbed the 23-year-old Zarutska, whose family fled Ukraine in 2022 after Russia’s invasion, four times in an unprovoked attack captured on surveillance video.
The brazen assault has touched off a cascade of outcry from lawmakers and even Brown’s own relatives, who say Brown should have never been on the streets given his extensive rap sheet and mental health issues. Brown’s mother told news outlets that the criminal justice system is “broken” and that she tried to have her son involuntarily committed for schizophrenia after he became violent towards her.
Republican lawmakers have called on Wiggins to fire Stokes as a magistrate judge, saying her decision to release Brown in January was “reckless.” Vi Lyles, the Democratic mayor of Charlotte, called the case “a tragic failure by the courts and magistrates.” Attorney General Pam Bondi, who announced federal charges against Brown on Tuesday, called the slaying “a direct result of failed soft-on-crime policies that put criminals before innocent people.”
It is likely that Brown would have scored high on the Public Safety Assessment, bolstering the case that he should have either been kept in jail in January, been held on cash bail, placed on house arrest, or been subject to electronic monitoring.
In his 2020 podcast interview, Chief Judge Wiggins said the Public Safety Assessment awards a higher score to defendants who have previous failures to appear and those who have “pending charges and prior convictions” in other criminal cases. Brown had multiple charges for failure to appear, and charges for felony larceny, possession of a firearm by a felon, breaking and entering, in addition to the armed robbery for which he served prison time.
Mecklenburg County touts the MacArthur and Arnold Ventures initiatives on its website. In a 2020 press release, the county said it reformed its bail policies in March 2019 based on guidance from the MacArthur Foundation, and that grants from the charity were aimed at helping it “continue safely reducing the jail population.”
The county said it used the MacArthur funding “to implement bold reforms,” including “automating the Public Safety Assessment (PSA), improving the bail policy, working to eliminate ethnic and racial disparities.” The county also revised its bail policy in March 2019 to align with the MacArthur Foundation’s program, and embraced an “implicit bias training module for criminal justice professionals” in the county.
That training, which is provided to Mecklenburg County judicial and law enforcement employees, asserts that “institutionalized racism” permeates the criminal justice system and “that our legal system is organized and structured around racist practices.”
Wiggins, a Democrat, suggested in his 2020 interview that he takes race into consideration when looking at the city’s jail population. He said he receives a daily “snapshot” of jail inmates, including the number of days in jail, what charges they are held on, and the “ethnic breakdown” of the jail population.
A spokeswoman for Arnold Ventures said the organization is not familiar with the circumstances of Brown’s pretrial release, saying “these decisions are solely made by local judges.”
“Like all Americans, we mourn the heinous murder of Iryna Zarutska,” said Angela Landers. “Philanthropies have no role in judicial decision making. We have always advocated for a criminal justice system that properly assesses risk and detains dangerous individuals,” she said.
Mecklenburg County’s Criminal Justice Services division, which oversees the criminal justice reform initiatives, did not respond to a request for comment. The MacArthur Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
