A local bail fund linked to Black Lives Matter Louisville plans to post bond for Quintez Brown, the anti-police activist charged with the attempted murder of mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg.
On Monday, police charged Brown with attempted murder and four counts of wanton endangerment after he allegedly entered Greenberg's campaign office, pulled a gun, and began shooting. A district judge set Brown's bond at $100,000, which the Louisville Community Bail Fund plans to post. The group was cofounded by Black Lives Matter Louisville organizer Chanelle Helm and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars freeing heinous criminals arrested for murder, rape, domestic violence, and other violent crimes.
According to police, Greenberg, who is Jewish, appears to have been targeted in the shooting. The mayoral hopeful's positions on public safety and policing are at odds with Brown. Greenberg, a Democrat, has centered his campaign around a plan to root out violent crime—which he called the "city's biggest challenge"—by hiring more police officers. Brown, meanwhile, wrote columns for the Louisville Courier Journal that accused law enforcement and other "institutions in society" of "work[ing] together to maintain the status quo of the spectacular Black death."
A Louisville Community Bail Fund member submitted the $100,000 cashier's check to release Brown late Wednesday afternoon, WHAS political reporter Rachel Droze revealed. The group's representative sported a "Free Angela" T-shirt in a reference to Angela Davis, the former Communist Party USA leader and avowed Marxist whose guns were used in a California terrorist attack carried out by the Black Panthers that killed four people.
In addition to posting Brown's bond, the Louisville Community Bail Fund group said it will provide "mental health resources" for the activist upon his release from prison. Brown's allies have called it "disgusting" and "irresponsible" to associate the activist's "connection to Black Lives Matter" with the shooting.
Mainstream journalists and Democratic Party leaders have long embraced Brown. He appeared on a 2018 MSNBC panel with Joy Reid to call for "common-sense gun reform" and participated in the Obama Foundation's "My Brother's Keeper" program, which recognized him as a "rising face."
Nonprofit groups like the Louisville Community Bail Fund have raised millions of dollars in donations since George Floyd's death in 2020. The significant financial windfall comes thanks in part to top Democratic officials. Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, urged her followers in June 2020 to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund—in September, the group freed an alleged domestic abuser who was arrested for murder just weeks later.
The Louisville Community Bail Fund has also faced criticism over whom it agrees to bail out. In November 2020, the group posted $30,000 to release Andre Clayton, charged in a double shooting, who went on to break his bail terms by posting images on social media with drugs, cash, and guns. The Louisville Community Bail Fund admitted that it did not talk to Clayton or his attorney prior to posting his bond nor did it check his criminal history.
Kentucky Republicans last month introduced a bill that would make charitable bail illegal in the state.