In Richmond, deadly shootings tend to occupy the public conscience like passing April showers. They come and go like downpours.
The collective outrage over the latest homicide spree — 10 since Easter Sunday, four of whom were teenagers, as of Friday afternoon — is sparking a new round of law enforcement crackdowns and renewed calls for family and community interventions.
And, of course, the lock-’em-up news conference at City Hall: On Monday, the morning after another 16-year-old boy was shot to death in Gilpin Court, Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards, Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras and Mayor Levar Stoney stepped before the cameras to plead for the community’s help.
People are also reading…
Stoney, himself a new father, vowed “we will find you” before nearly breaking down. He called for parents “to step their game up.”
“We as a community at large are here to help. If you’re running into a problem that makes it difficult for you to care for your child, to parent your family, please let us know,” he said. “The doors are open. Whether it’s in the faith community, the nonprofit community, organizations who are in these neighborhoods — we all want to do our part.”
The police chief is stepping up enforcement, along with kick-starting Operation Safe Summer more than a month early: free gun safes, youth programs and interagency partnerships to add patrols and better police high-crime neighborhoods. An 11 p.m. teen curfew went into effect on Friday.
The stopgap measures are important and necessary. The city has no choice but to find a way to stanch the bleeding. When violence erupts, public safety must become our top priority.
At some point, however, we must acknowledge the hard truth: Despite all the political convulsions, no one really expects this problem to go away. Gun violence has been part of Richmond’s story for at least the past 40 years. There are just too many guns and too much poverty concentrated in the city’s most economically distressed communities — typically in and around public housing in the East End, North Side and South Side. Generations of broken families cut off from the resources necessary to attain any semblance of financial security breed more of the same.
The foundations were laid during Reconstruction and exacerbated during the Great Depression through the 1950s, when legal segregation ended and the interstate highway system ripped through Richmond. Redlining trapped Black families, cutting them off from wealth-building by denying them access to homeownership. What started as government-subsidized workforce housing — like Gilpin Court — to replace slums in the 1940s became go-to public policy when the government veered construction through those same Black communities a decade later.
From 1952 to 1962, thousands of Black families were forced into substandard replacement housing — hence, the remaining courts: Creighton, Fairfield, Hillside, Mosby and Whitcomb — that remain largely as they were then: incubators of extreme poverty and violence.
Beginning in the late 1860s, state lawmakers in Richmond incorporated the principle of separating cities legally from surrounding counties, later codifying “independent cities” in the Virginia Constitution. Originally, the idea was to strengthen cities as economic centers in regions across the state; by the mid-1950s, it was being used to cut off growth in those same cities and strengthen surrounding counties.
It’s no accident that lawmakers were intentionally isolating Virginia’s cities, says the Rev. Ben Campbell, former pastoral director at Richmond Hill and author of “Richmond’s Unhealed History.” From 1970 to 1978, white flight to the suburban counties exploded as Richmond’s schools became fully integrated and Black political leaders assumed power at City Hall.
“Discriminating by race was official public policy in Virginia following the Civil War onward,” Campbell explained in an interview last week. “Rather than have your urban policy based on having strong cities, it became a way to continue segregation.”
After the city’s annexation of 23 square miles — and 47,000 mostly white residents — from Chesterfield County in 1970, the General Assembly’s decision to end annexations altogether was “the door-slamming action of the state’s segregationist leadership,” Campbell said.
Over the next 50 years, as the Black middle class followed white families to the suburbs, Richmond’s Black poverty condensed and grew worse. Those with the resources to get out did. Those who couldn’t were left behind, just as economic stagnation and manufacturing jobs began to disappear across the country. With limited public transit and access to employment in the bustling suburbs, the city’s poverty worsened.
Richmond has made measurable progress during the last decade, filling to the brim with socially conscious young people, cool restaurants and breweries, along with a budding arts and music scene that has helped rejuvenate the city’s tax base. Generous historic tax credits and a real estate abatement program launched in the early 1990s has led to widespread reinvestment in previously left-for-dead neighborhoods — places like Brookland Park, Carver, Church Hill and Jackson Ward.
The overall poverty rate has declined in the city, dropping to 19%, and extreme poverty among Black residents has lessened in Richmond over the past few years. All of the tax credits led to a pattern of government-subsidized gentrification that pushed some of that poverty into surrounding counties, which have become more racially and economically diverse.
But it isn’t enough. Despite the recent growth, Richmond continues to have the highest concentration of extremely poor families in the metro region. And the city continues to be isolated economically. Meanwhile, the current affordable housing crisis has stunted progress.
“You don’t change it overnight,” Campbell said. “You also don’t solve it by pretending it’s not a problem. And you certainly don’t solve it by racializing the conversation.”
In the meantime, all that poverty will keep producing violence that can’t be remedied with curfews, gun safes or bigger jails. During last week’s news conference, a visibly frustrated Kamras, the RPS superintendent, issued a clarion call.
“Since 2019, 169 juveniles in the city of Richmond have been shot. Nearly all of those were RPS students. ... Our community, our schools, they are hurting. And they should be focused on the SOLs which we are giving in two weeks, and instead many of them this morning, and last week, and tomorrow are holding grief sessions,” he said at City Hall. “Because that’s what we do. We will always stand in the gap for our kids. But we have to change this.”
Until our political leaders and the broader metropolitan community acknowledge, prioritize and commit to addressing the root cause — crippling, systemic economic isolation and poverty — gun violence will ebb and flow like it always has.