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Can a strong new
police chief stem Richmond’s crime problem?
Despite perceptions,
most violence is not downtown
by
Robert L. Burke
Virginia
Business
March 2003
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It’s
a cold Saturday night in a Richmond east side neighborhood
and Vance Purnell is killing time in the parking lot
of the 88 Cleaners & Coin Laundry on Government
Road. He leans into the passenger window of a small
pickup truck to talk to a young woman and an older man,
when there is a sudden roar of engines and headlights.
Two cars zoom up. Four cops jump out. Purnell, 37, steps
back with a blank look. “Take
your hands out of your pockets,” yells one officer.
He obeys. A small plastic bag falls to the ground.
About an hour later one of the officers tells a city
magistrate that he believes the bag holds crack cocaine.
But for now an angry Purnell is standing handcuffed
in dirty blue coveralls and muddy work boots. His words
are slurred; he admits to drinking a couple of beers.
Onlookers watch, both curious and entertained. A woman
with three children walks through the parking lot. She
won’t look but the kids do, their eyes locked on
Purnell and the police.
What
raised suspicion was seeing Purnell with his hands inside
the truck — something officer Richard Lloyd Jr.
and his partner Robert Sprinkle spotted through the
dark from their cruiser about 40 yard away. Drug deals
are often done that way. Lloyd stands with Purnell while
other officers talk to the truck occupants, who are
later released.“You take drugs?” Lloyd asks
Purnell. “Hell no, man,” he says. “I
drink.”
Purnell
goes to jail, charged with distributing narcotics. And
for a few more hours the officers cruise crime-ridden
neighborhoods on the city’s east side, past rows
of ramshackle or abandoned houses, dirty street corners
and the bleak brick buildings of housing projects. They’re
on the frontline of the city’s effort to stem a
chronic crime problem, which is threatening both its
social fabric and economic health. They pass scores
of young black men dressed in oversized coats and baggy
jeans, knit caps pulled low. The youths studiously pretend
not to see them, but Lloyd always shouts a greeting
or shines a spotlight. Some they recognize as ones they’ve
arrested before. Sprinkle calls them “frequent
flyers.”
Before
their shift ends they make another arrest, this time
two teenage boys found sitting in a stolen blue Buick.
One had been picked up just days before on a carjacking
charge. Sprinkle, a six-year veteran who patrols some
of the city’s worst neighborhoods, can’t fathom
how things got so bad. “You wonder why people are
out at three o’clock in the morning drinking beer,
with a six-month-old baby on their lap,” he says.
“Before I took this job, I didn’t even know
this place existed.”
The
city’s long-running war on crime is at best a standoff.
Richmond remains Virginia’s most violent city.
Despite gains made in recent years it is still the state’s
murder capital, a black eye it earned nationwide in
the mid-1990s when homicides soared to 160 in 1994,
later dropping under aggressive police tactics and prosecutions.
But now killings in the city are up again — rising
20 percent in 2002 to 84, followed by 13 more killings
in the first five weeks of this year.
A
few miles away from the city’s worst areas, the
violence is threatening to take a different toll. Richmond
is entering a key phase in the overhaul of its moribund
downtown business district. Boarded-up stores on Broad
Street will be torn down, replaced by a performing arts
complex and a new 216-room hotel. A relic from a failed
1980s project, the Sixth Street Marketplace, will be
turned into a street again, lined with new shops and
restaurants. A few blocks east a new federal courthouse
is planned. The new $160 million Greater Richmond Convention
Center on Broad Street is open, and city leaders hope
it will spawn new clubs and restaurants in the historic
Jackson Ward neighborhood nearby.
None
of this will work, though, if people are afraid to come
downtown. Business leaders shudder at the thought of
Richmond reclaiming its bad reputation. “It does
have an impact on our economy because people have the
perception that the city is not safe,” says Lynda
Sharp Anderson, president and CEO of the city’s
Metropolitan Business League. Beverley “Booty”
Armstrong, a part-owner of the upscale Jefferson Hotel,
calls crime “a huge factor” in the city’s
plans. “If the city doesn’t solve that problem
or the perception of the problem as the case may be,
then the economic growth of the inner city is going
to be impossible.”
But
exactly how much of the crime fears are perception or
reality? Citywide, crime rose 3 percent from 2001 to
2002 with the biggest hikes, about 20 percent, occurring
in the number of homicides and rapes. The sad fact is,
the areas hardest hit by crime are not the trendy Fan
District near Virginia Commonwealth University or Shockoe
Bottom or even the boarded-up blocks at Sixth and Broad
just a few blocks from the state capitol. It is the
low-income neighborhoods south of the James River and
east of Interstate 95 that suffer most. Most of the
city’s homicides aren’t random killings. Police
say in most instances the killer and victim know each
other and illegal drugs are involved. Indeed, of the
84 homicides last year not one was downtown.
Richmond’s
experience might reflect a larger shift in crime for
which experts haven’t agreed on a cause. Washington,
D.C., for example, saw a 12 percent hike in homicides
last year. Nationwide, the overall crime rose slightly
in 2001 after dropping the previous 10 years, according
to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of
Justice. The homicide rate for older teens and young
adults nationwide also rose slightly in 2001.
Into
this fight comes police Chief André Parker, a
24-year law enforcement veteran who arrived in Richmond
last August from his job as assistant deputy director
for the Illinois State Police. Parker follows well-regarded
Jerry Oliver, who left after a seven-year tenure to
head Detroit’s police department. Parker has vowed
to “take back the streets.” In October he
announced what he called the “Blue Wave” —
an initiative to target open-air drug markets. In late
January Parker hosted a public meeting to launch a Community
Crime Control Plan to develop a citywide anti-crime
strategy. About 400 people attended. Parker also wants
to hire another 58 police officers. Police can’t
solve chronic problems in Richmond with poverty, illiteracy
and the easy access to illegal guns. “The drug
problem is not going to be solved by me locking people
up,” he says.
Despite
its crime problems, Richmond has launched several major
projects and attracted commercial investment as well.
City Manager Calvin Jamison cites the new convention
center and the coming Broad Street improvements, along
with a $49 million renovation of the city’s train
station. Also taking off is the revitalization of the
city’s riverfront. Several developers are planning
multi-million projects that will bring shops, restaurants,
apartments and new office buildings to areas such as
Brown’s Island and along the newly refurbished
Canal Walk. “If that doesn’t sound like a
city that’s booming with prosperity, I don’t
know what is,” Jamison says.
The
city may have an edge in its plans to repopulate downtown.
Richard Florida, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University
in Pittsburgh and author of “The Rise of the Creative
Class” says urban places like Richmond attract
creative people, such as artists and musicians, who
in turn develop an urban community that attracts highly
sought-after workers in a variety of fields. Once the
workers are in place the companies will follow, Florida
says. “These old districts provide authenticity”
that this creative class covets, Florida told a recent
gathering of the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce.
“You guys have that in spades.”
That’s
why places like the Fan District and Shockoe Bottom
can attract people despite the city’s disturbing
crime rate. “One of the ways cities have dealt
with crime issues is by encouraging people who aren’t
as fearful of crime,” Florida says. “The gay
population, younger artists, the cultural people. ...
I think a lot of cities think they’re going to
get the suburban family as the first mover into downtown,
and that’s just not going to happen.”
Simply
increasing the number of people downtown will breed
a sense of security, says John F. Berry, executive director
of Richmond Renaissance, the organization overseeing
many of the downtown projects. “That is going to
give people in this region a lot more confidence about
downtown.”
There’s
another confidence gap, this one political. A dozen
area businesses have put $60,000 toward a campaign to
yank power away from the current City Council. “There
doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of faith” in
the city leadership among business people, says Armstrong,
a principal in CCA Industries, one of the donor companies.
“The perception is you don’t feel the sense
of urgency coming out of City Hall. ... They’re
all focused on their own little districts.”
The businesses are backing a proposal by the City Charter
Commission, formed by former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder
and former U.S. Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr., to let voters
choose the mayor instead of leaving it to the nine-member
council. The city’s nine-ward system was set up
in the 1970s to guarantee black representation by creating
black-majority wards.
What
has evolved, critics say, is a leaderless council whose
members frequently embarrass the city with over-the-top
combativeness or clownish antics. Former mayor Leonidas
B. Young, for example, who held office between 1994
and 1996, spent nearly two years in jail for mail fraud,
filing a false tax return and obstruction of justice.
Council woman Reva Trammell, who represented the 8th
District for four years until her defeat last November,
was known for her public tirades and occasional scrapes
with the law, including an allegation that a city police
officer had slapped her. Current 6th District Councilman
Sa’ad El-Amin last year surrendered his law license
in Virginia rather than face 47 misconduct charges before
the Virginia State Bar. On February 21, a federal grand
jury indicted El-Amin and his wife, Beverly D. Crawford,
on 16 counts of tax evasion and other charges.
Richmond
Mayor Rudolph C. McCollum Jr. dismisses the proposal
as a power grab. He called the charter commission “a
certain group of people that recognize you can harness
a lot of folks through money.” What the city needs
instead is support from its neighboring counties, he
says. Urban cities traditionally have higher levels
of social ills such as crime, poverty and illiteracy.
Virginia’s independent city system, though, makes
cities pay the bill themselves. And the current moratorium
on annexations prevents cities from expanding their
tax base by taking in more land.
Richmond’s
neighboring counties would all benefit from a vibrant
urban core, he says, and they ought to help make it
happen. Chesterfield County, for example, is considering
building a new coliseum to compete against the aging
Richmond Coliseum. “Does it make sense ... when
10 miles away you’ve got the facility here? Why
not help share in that?” McCollum says. “Those
are the kinds of things we need to be thinking about.”
There
are plenty of questions about the city’s future.
One answer will come this year when demolition crews
start taking down empty buildings on Broad Street and
erase at least some of its deteriorated landscape. Which
way the fight against crime goes is still wide open,
as Parker looks for new officers amid an alarming rise
in homicides that carried over to early 2003. Richmond’s
leaders are looking to 2007 and Jamestown’s 400th
anniversary as a kind of coming-out for the city. Jamison
calls it “Virginia’s Olympics.” It won’t
help if Richmond presents itself to the world wrapped
in police tape.
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