I’ve been a big Rich Gibson, Jr. supporter since I met him about 18 months ago. I was so excited when he won the race for Howard County State’s Attorney. It was just a matter of time before I interviewed him, I think we can all agree on that! I asked him to talk to me after the NAACP Jazz Brunch on our way out to our cars on May 5th. He immediately agreed and put it in his phone calendar.
If I Were a Rich Man
So sang Tevye in Sholom Alecheim, Arnold Perl, and Joseph Stein’s classic piece of Americana, “Fiddler on the Roof.” And Rich Gibson, Howard County’s State’s Attorney is…well, rich! I asked him to talk to me about what it takes to run the State’s Attorney’s office in HoCo and, like all these amazing people here I ask, he said, “Sure, Robert!” He even checked in with me the day of, which was good because I had double-booked interviews. The other one postponed, lucky for me.
It’s not an “if” situation for Rich, meanwhile, this being rich thing. He already is: in legal knowledge, prosecutorial experience, and innovative ideas for the office of State’s Attorney in Howard County.
“As State’s Attorney, it’s my job to make sure crimes are prosecuted in a fair and just way. It’s also to make sure police conduct themselves properly when interacting with our populace. That’s the core of the job,” Rich told me over a shiny, mahogany table in his office as the legal textbooks to our right watched over us.
His mission, he went on, is also is to integrate the office he’s now in charge of into the community in a way that it hasn’t been in the past. He wants to make sure it’s as present as can be and involved in the community.
“When I ran–and I’m knocking on doors–a lot of people didn’t know what State’s Attorney was, they didn’t know what Attorney General does versus State’s Attorney, they don’t have an understanding of any of this–”
“I didn’t either..,” I said, interrupting him.
“–and that’s…sad. We should be doing a better job of interacting with and interfacing with the community, and so I’m trying to do that.” He said he wants to be proactive as State’s Attorney, not just reactive.
Related: See what I learned at the Little Patuxent Water Reclamation Plant.
Complex Indeed!
They don’t call the Howard County Courthouse Drive complex a “complex” for nothing. It has the police headquarters, the county council and county executive’s offices, and the courthouse offices on its campus…er, complex. HoCo’s building a new courthouse soon, but for now, it’s at that complex. Anyway, I had wandered around looking for Rich’s office for a while, until some very helpful employees directed me to it and Rich’s receptionist, Harriet Silver, helped me find him.
He has a beautiful, well-kept office, pictured above. And it goes with his dapper dress and good looks well!
Back at the table, I asked him how the Office of the State’s Attorney fits into Howard County’s mission as a diverse, inclusive, equitable, safe, and nurturing place for its residents. A tall order, to be sure.
“We enforce all the criminal laws within the county,” he said without hesitation. “And certainly many criminal violations stem from man’s inhumanity to man. So it’s people’s inability to see the human worthy of love, and fair treatment, and respect in someone who may not necessarily look like them.” If the State’s Attorney’s doing it’s job effectively, he went on, it’s protecting those whose rights are being violated, within the jurisdiction.
“The bottom line is we need to make sure that each person here is being treated with respect and dignity and has a safe space in Howard County,” he said with a resolute nod and a smile, exposing a charmingly crooked front tooth.
How Bajans Find Love
Rich was born and raised in the Bronx. When his parents sensed it was getting a little rougher, as he put it, they moved to New Jersey. Rich graduated from Roxbury High School there. After that, he got a Bachelor’s degree in law and justice from the College of New Jersey. Then he got his Juris Doctor from Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C.
“My dad’s from Barbados,” he said. His father spends half the year there and half of it in Florida. Rich’s three grade-school-age children with his wife, Carissa, visit every summer. Rich grew up knowing Cari, but they lost touch. They were re-introduced them during his undergrad years.
Rich’s mom still lives in New Jersey, and she’s of Bajan descent too.
So Far, So Rewarding
I asked Rich, then, to tell me what’s it’s been like since he took office on January 7th.
“It’s been really rewarding just being in a position to actually make a difference, to have an impact,” he said. The community’s given him such a blessing, he said, smiling again.
“That’s the greatest honor. I’m a prosecutor to my core, so to be able to impact the community at this level and to establish my policies that I try to bring here–to have a platform to do that–that is…it’s tremendous, and I’ll always be grateful for it,” he said.
The job’s not without its challenges, of course, as no job is.
“It’s a battleship, not a Bugatti. Change takes time, and it’s evolutionarily driven. It doesn’t just happen,” he said, his light brown eyes taking on a thoughtful look.
“You know, you can be an idealist, but you also have to be pragmatic and a realist and understand that change is iterative, and it’s slow. There are some things you can do right away,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Other things take time, but the goal is to move us in that direction,” he said, and I nodded as I scribbled down notes and made sure my two recording devices were working.
And then there are the surprises he’s encountered.
“We don’t have an internal policy manual. We’re creating one now,” he said. He gave me an example. He said the State’s Attorney’s Office has been using the county’s policy manual, but that doesn’t speak to the office’s unique issues.
“Let’s say a prosecutor picks up a domestic violence charge or a DUI–do they have to tell me? Should they be in court handling DUIs? Should they be in court handling domestic violence cases? Right now there’s no guidance about that,” he said as he folded his arms and rested them on the table in front of him.
Rich and his team are creating a document to address such issues. As another example of things that need to be addressed officially and that need a protocol, in a Memorandum of Understanding between HoCo and Montogomery County on police-involved fatalities, it was all “a handshake.” Under his leadership, the State’s Attorney’s office is creating official procedures to deal with such serious issues.
And: Local historian Shawn Gladden gave me a 101 on HoCo history.
“There should be some order and structure to how are you going to proceed. What are your responsibilities? What are my responsibilities?” he asked, rhetorically, looking at me sideways. And then I thought Colleen should have done this interview. She has an M.A. in rhetoric and LOVES it, as regular readers of this site will know, which evolved from ancient Grecco-Roman law. And Rich is a great speaker, I reconfirmed that day. I’d originally seen examples of it during the campaign. The most memorable one was at a fundraiser for then-candidate for County Executive Calvin Ball at the home of local physicians Drs. Tariq and Atiya Khan and their daughter, local writer Akbi Khan. Rich spoke extemporaneously about how much was at stake in Campaign 2018.
“We need to vote our values,” he’d said that day.
He and Colleen always have a lot to talk about. But so did we, and I was enjoying myself.
I thought back to another day during Campaign 2018 when Rich and I stood outside Miller Library handing out literature and holding signs as people went in to vote. Rich gave me an impromptu mini-lesson in prosecution.
“He had motive, means, and opportunity, didn’t he?” I asked about someone in a story he was recounting.
“He did–very good, Robert!” he said with a grin too big for the sweltering heat.
Rich said he’s realized since he took office that some things have to be built–not just rebuilt–but built from the ground up. That surprised him because he figured, as I did, that it would be there, like the protocols he’d mentioned earlier, for example.
A Marathon, Not a Sprint
“I will absolutely run again,” Rich said when I asked him about his future plans.
Rich told me he wants to do this job really well. His goal, he said, is to create a world-class State’s Attorney’s office, to run that effectively, and to fully integrate the office into the community in a way that’s fluid.
“I want the community to be able to say, ‘I understand what the State’s Attorney’s office is, what their role is, how they relate to me.’ And I get we’re a lot of people in Howard County–not everyone’s gonna know. But right now, only the minority of the minority of the minority know. There are very few who actually understand what it is that we do right now. I want to have a bigger footprint,” he said.
After his 2014 loss for the same position, Rich stayed involved. He got to know how things work, who the key players are, how to run a campaign. He was elected to the Columbia Democratic Club (CDC) Executive Board, appointed to the Howard County Democratic Central Committee (HCDCC), and even joined the executive board of the non-profit Voices for Children (VFC). And because it’s the kind of friend he is, and he can see talent and ability where it exists, he gave RoCo’s good friend, Senior Medical Director of Accountable Care at Johns Hopkins University, cardiologist, and member of the HCDCC now himself–not to mention ex-Secretary of the CDC–Dr. Scott Berkowitz’s name to the VFC board. Scott’s now on it.
His Story and History
Rich has been a prosecutor for 15 years. He started out in Prince George’s County where he was head of the juvenile drug court. A prosecutor friend, Erek Baron, who’s now a delegate representing Prince George’s County in the Maryland General Assembly gave him some stirring advice.
“He said, ‘Look, Rich, if you wanna be good you gotta go to where all the challenges are. And if you can succeed in that space, you’ll be well-suited to this field. I took his advice. took the challenge, and I went to Baltimore,” Rich told me. It was difficult, he said, because of the distrust the community has of law enforcement, some of it justified, some of it not.
“Either way, the perception is real,” Rich said, “and you have to deal with it.”
Rich spent a year in the Firearms Investigation Violence Unit–it’s called Five Unit for short–which prosecuted non-fatal shootings.
“Then I spent five years in homicide,” he recalled. Later, Former Baltimore City State’s Attorney Gregg Bernstein created a new unit called the Major Investigations Unit, which Rich then joined.
It takes a proactive approach to prosecution, and it laid the foundation, I thought then, for Rich’s proactive approach now as Howard County State’s Attorney.
“It works with federal, state, and local law enforcement to find out who are the agents of violence. Who are the people who are actually driving the problem and then going after them,” he said looking at the window to our left as he recalled it. It also investigated organizational crimes, prosecuting gangs, human trafficking rings, and large-scale drug crews.
“We focused on those kinds of large organizational entities and prosecuting those entities,” Rich said. Then came 2014, when he ran for Howard County State’s Attorney for the first time.
“As an African-American man, I understand what justice means and the power it has, and I wanted to make sure there’s equality in this space and that there’s fairness in this space,” Rich told me when I asked what motivated him to run in 2014 and again in 2018.
It was his dream, and when he lost his first race for the position, he wasn’t deterred.
“I knew he would bring best practices to our office here and also I had a long conversation with him about justice in general and found myself agreeing with him. Plus he’s just an all-around nice guy,” said local marketing professional, RoCo bestie, and political activist extraordinaire Deeba Jafri.
Please Rise
Rich is very polite, almost deferential. When I was done grilling him–I felt like such a good prosecutor!–he rose with me. He walked me out. Before he could leave the building to help me find my way back to my car, I told him he needed to get back to work, as kind as he was being. He smiled and held the door open for me. I bid him farewell.
I took a circuitous path back to my car to enjoy the balmy weather and the warm breeze.
I called community activist and RoCo bestie Tina Horn on my cell and asked her why she’d supported Rich. Rich spoke with her, just as he had with Deeba.
“I supported him because I believed in the vision and plans he recounted to me,” she said. She also liked how straightforward and honest she thought he was. And I do too!
I thought about how the plethora of Campaign 2018 stickers emblazoned all over the back and sides of the used 2010 Honda Accord Colleen and I bought a few months back helped me find my car then and always. In the same way, I thought, Rich’s education, job history, and legal skill served as signposts that would help him–and the county’s law enforcement community–on our newfound journey to a just, fair, and inclusive future for us citizens.
Thanks for reading! Check back with us here at rocoinhoco.com every week as Robert, Colleen (and pup, Moses) get to know the many facets—one each week–of this prismatic place called Howard County. We want to take you along with us, so follow us on Twitter at @rocoinhoco, join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @rocoinhoco.