Rich Masters was standing with a microphone in front of dozens of people on the third floor of an office building in the Navy Yard neighborhood on the edge of Ward 6. Behind him were yard signs tacked on the wall urging voters to “Recall Charles Allen,” among the dozens ready to be distributed to the mini army of volunteers.
Yet Masters insisted: “This is not about Charles Allen.”
To the crowd, Masters’s paradox of a comment seemed to make sense: It was about crime — and Allen, over the course of the past year, as Congress swatted down two of the D.C. Council member’s criminal justice and policing bills, had become its scapegoat.
“He’s a decent man who has the wrong idea about crime,” said Masters, a onetime Hill staffer who is doing public relations for the campaign, urging the room of potential volunteers to “be nice” if they saw Allen, who has been the target of online rage for months.
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The Thursday event launched the recall campaign’s ground game, recruiting volunteers and door-knockers for what is shaping up to be one of the most explosive local political dramas this year. The push to recall Allen got an initial green light before the D.C. Board of Elections last week, but it has drawn counter campaigns, including No Recall in Ward 6 and Neighbors United for Ward 6 — groups of Allen supporters who see it all as a misplaced attack backed by big-money outsiders. Now, in what was supposed to be an off-election year for Allen, that fervent debate over his future has crystallized the split among Democrats over liberal criminal justice policies Allen had championed, as the city seeks to reverse a spike in violent crime.
The recall campaign is headed up by organizers who are well-connected Hill vets with political chops but who until recently have been nationally focused. They have sought to blame the third-term council member for creating what Masters called a “policy of leniency.” Allen’s supporters, meanwhile, swatted back: “Public safety is Charles Allen’s top priority, despite what propaganda you may hear,” one email from the No Recall campaign said Friday evening.
As for Allen himself, he said he heard and shared the campaign’s concerns about violent crime — which was up 39 percent last year — but described its message as a distortion of his record and one that serves right-wing interests. “I think people want an outlet to the frustration that we all feel about crime,” said Allen, the former chairman of the public safety and justice committee who now heads up the council’s transportation work. “I think it’s important that people aren’t misinformed and they can’t be fooled.”
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Organizers have 180 days to collect petition signatures, needing support from 10 percent of the ward’s registered voters, or roughly 6,000 people, before the Board of Elections can certify the recall for a special election. Should it succeed, the seat would be vacant until another special election is held to replace him.
Kicking off the organizing meeting Thursday night, Masters rejected the label “carpetbaggers.” He started by introducing D.C. native April Brown, the recall campaign’s treasurer, who said her mother was carjacked on Capitol Hill in 2020. “Why am I doing this? I’m doing this because — well, because of crime,” Brown said.
Then there was Moses Mercado, the campaign’s field organizer, who had come to D.C. in 1993 to work for a Texas congressman and had been a superdelegate for Barack Obama. “I did national politics, not local politics,” he told the crowd. “But I realized — I had a conversation with my wife about what if something happens, God forbid, somebody carjacks her?”
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There was Tonya Fulkerson, the campaign’s self-described “money lady,” a Democratic fundraising power player in her day job who said she has now made raising money to unseat Allen “my mission for the next 180 days.”
There were Jennifer Squires and Ned Ertel, the campaign’s founders, who have lived on Capitol Hill near Barracks Row since 2000, back when it was still “a little dicey,” Squires said — but after years of progress, it now seemed to be going backward. Ertel, who worked on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in the ’90s, said his main foray into local politics until now was throwing a fundraiser for former Ward 6 council member Tommy Wells when he ran for mayor. (Wells is now heading a counter effort, Neighbors United for Ward 6, to defend Allen.)
“It was so disturbing, just the rank lawlessness that’s been coming over the city, that we decided that we really have to start getting involved,” Ertel said.
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Since launching, the recall campaign raised $56,000 through January, and Fulkerson said Thursday that they are up to $85,000. A significant chunk of the money in the Jan. 31 campaign finance report came from donors with ties to national Republicans or people who live outside the ward, the Washington City Paper first reported — drawing criticism from opponents of the recall campaign that it’s a politically expedient effort driven by the same national agitators who have used crime as a cudgel to bash liberal D.C.
Squires, a 55-year-old retired federal employee, brushed aside the criticism Thursday night, saying Republicans were welcome because the campaign was “not about politics.”
“This is basically a campaign about ideas and trying to convince this man he’s got the wrong ideas. I don’t care if you’re Republican, I don’t care who you are — especially if you live in Ward 6. That’s his constituency. You need to listen to what we’re saying, or he’s going to get recalled,” Squires said, adding that she used to think of herself as a progressive Democrat but that “people are telling me I’m not now, so I guess I’m not anymore.”
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The campaign is in largely murky political territory: A recall campaign has never succeeded in the 50 years of D.C. home rule. Even with the fundraising and political savvy among the organizers, success is not likely to come easy: Allen has been overwhelmingly reelected twice since winning the seat in 2014. In his last two elections — the 2022 primary and general — he ran unopposed; in 2018, he won with 88 percent of the vote against a Republican challenger.
That’s got some critics of the recall effort thinking: If opponents of Allen’s approach to criminal justice saw it as such a problem, why didn’t they recruit someone to run against him when he was up for reelection in 2022? At that point, many of the policies that recall supporters are against were already law or under debate.
Edward Ryder, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Ward 6, criticized what he saw as an unfair attempt to single out Allen, one of 13 members on the council, for a problem with complex underlying causes — but without presenting an alternative candidate.
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“They’re not presenting any solutions other than he is the source of all of these problems — let’s get rid of him because that will fix it all,” Ryder said, adding that he expected Ward 6 residents to see through that attempt.
Wells, now chairman of Neighbors United for Ward 6, called it “simplistic” to believe Allen’s legislation caused a crime spike in D.C., arguing that the recall campaign fed a “national agenda” painting blue cities as dangerous and poorly run. But he said the counter campaign will ask people to look at the parks, retail and libraries in their Ward 6 neighborhoods and see the “bigger picture” about Allen’s track record.
“I understand people are taking their frustrations,” Wells said. “They’ve moved to a fabulous place, and they’re upset and angry, and that’s understandable. And their focus is on Charles. But they also have to remember: Why did they move there to begin with? This is a great place that Charles helped create.”
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The recall campaign’s petition focuses on several major pieces of legislation that Allen led while chairing the public safety committee, plus pointing to his move in 2020 to cut the mayor’s proposed half-billion-dollar police budget by $15 million. Allen had redirected $9 million to gun violence prevention programs.
While committee chairman, Allen led a bill to overhaul the Youth Rehabilitation Act in 2018 after a Washington Post investigation found convicted murderers and rapists who were given leniency under the law were being rearrested. Allen’s bill removed people convicted of murder or sexual assault from eligibility under the 1985 law, which gives more lenient sentences to eligible young-adult offenders, plus the possibility of their conviction being set aside if they successfully complete a sentence. Allen’s bill also expanded eligibility from those under age 22 to those under 24 — a main complaint of his opponents. A 2022 study of the amended law found that those who were between 22 and 24 were significantly more likely to not be rearrested than younger participants.
But it was really in the spring of 2023, when the new Republican Congress turned up the heat on D.C. oversight, that Allen landed in the hot seat: In bipartisan votes, Congress blocked two pieces of legislation Allen had led, calling them “soft on crime.” The first was a major rewrite of the city’s century-old criminal code. The second was a major police accountability bill that restricted certain policing tactics and created new transparency rules, which Republicans framed as “anti-police” while worries about crime had been building. (President Biden vetoed that effort.)
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Those Hill politicos were watching.
“I’m focused, like a lot of people are on Capitol Hill, on national politics and national policy,” Masters said. “And so when people started texting me and I started reading through some of these pieces of legislation that were passed, I just got angrier and angrier.”
Allen defended the legislation and said any suggestion that those laws have a direct nexus to the crime increase are misguided. He noted that he also pushed for increasing penalties for gun offenses, such as banning ghost guns and possessing dangerous automatic weapons.
He said he has sought to be responsive to the crime crisis, pointing to efforts to expand the D.C. police cadet pipeline and incentivize more police to join the force with $25,000 signing bonuses. Allen also voted for the council’s latest omnibus public safety package, Secure D.C.
But efforts to significantly reverse crime trends depended on more than the D.C. Council, he said, such as the need for accountability in the courts and in prosecutions that D.C. officials don’t control.
“There are many pieces to the entire complex system that I think has let residents down, and I think the answer is focusing on the solutions, bringing people together to solve these problems, rather than pointing fingers,” he said.
Some of the people who came to the organizing meeting Thursday night said they came because it felt like one way to take action against the feeling of fear on the streets that had crept into their lives.
One attendee in the second row, Brad Wilson, said he wasn’t sure if a recall was the right course of action — but at this point, he just hoped it would send a message. He said he’s lived near Union Market for two decades, but it wasn’t until just the other day as he was walking on the sidewalk that it hit him: Suddenly, he felt unsafe. “I used to never think about it,” he said. He knew someone who had been carjacked, he said. Now he was looking around, vigilant, avoiding people.
Now he was here.
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