Attorney, David Martin has had a long road to get where he is today. At 16, when he attended Humboldt High School in St. Paul, Martin was, in his words, “getting into trouble.” He was selling drugs and was part of a gang. His grades were slipping, and it was only a matter of time before the consequences of his actions would catch up to him.
That’s when Martin was introduced to Melvin Carter Jr. and Save our Sons (SOS), an organization that works with at-risk African American young men. Well, “introduced” doesn’t accurately describe Martin and Carter’s first meeting. Back in those days, before Carter retired from the St. Paul police force, SOS would perform an operation that they called “Night Raids.” Basically this meant that when a parent was worried that their child was in trouble, they would call SOS, and Carter, an armed police officer, would pressure the young man into making the right decisions. “I was not a willing participant,” said Martin, laughing about the incident now. (Carter said SOS doesn’t do night raids anymore because the demand got too high, and because, since he’s now retired, he can’t be as invasive as he could when he was a police officer.)...