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Richmond Mayor Says Crime is Up in State of City Address

by CC News
Richmond Crime Data

Mayor Eduardo Martinez says 2024 crime data from the Richmond Police Department shows crime is up 1% in the City of Richmond.

The information came during the December 17 City Council meeting where Martinez provided his 2024 State of the City Address — including 96 slide presentation available to the public.

“This presentation is meant to be a high-level presentation and there are more details on the website,” said Martinez. “If you want an overview, you can stay and watch this.”

He highlighted several areas of the city, including public safety and community well being—including crime data through November.

“The overall data shows a 1% crime increase in the total index crimes from 2023 to 2024,” said Martinez who then read off the crime data.

  • Homicides – 11
  • Sexual Assaults – 96
  • Robberies – 266
  • Aggravated assaults – 914
  • Burglaries – 277
  • Larceny-Theft – 1,700
  • Vehicle Thefts – 1,032
  • Arson — 31

“That doesn’t sound good, but Richmond is dedicated to reducing crime and violence through various public safety initiatives,” stated Martinez. “We focus not only on holding people accountable, but addressing the root causes of crime. Our goal is to prevent violence through comment centered programs to create a greater community for everyone.”

He said they had programs through the Office of Neighborhood Safety—to connect with people who are at high risk for gun violence and encourage them to access resources.

Martinez continued stating the Richmond Police Department hired 17 officers, 12 staff with officer retention at 146 sworn staff with 121 filled. 25 sworn staff vacancies with 73 professional staff with 54 currently filled—19 non-sworn staff.

Meanwhile, 12 officers separated with the city, 7 resigned, 4 retired and 1 terminated saying that in 2024, there was a net gain of 5 officers.

He said goals were to bring back a fully staff traffic unit and fully staff its community crisis response team – there is also opportunity to partner with neighboring cities to address sideshows. He called for continued investment for programs.

To view the 96-slide presentationclick here

Richmond Police Chief Says Council Defunded Police

Councilmember Soheila Bana released a letter from Richmond Police Chief French after a resident offered concerns over the “perceived non-responsiveness by Richmond Police.

According to the posting, Bana says Richmond Police used to have nearly 200 officers. Now it has a budget for 146 officers; currently, there are 20 vacancies. (The Matrix study shows we need 244 officers.) Chief French is requesting a budget for a lateral recruitment program to fill the vacancies.

Here is a copy of the letter as posted by Bana:

Councilmember Bana,

I read Carl’s email and I’m not quite sure how to address the issue he raises. I agree that I don’t want the reputation of our Department or City to be one of lawlessness but I don’t know how to stop people from expressing their grievances on social media. Carl’s references posts on Nextdoor however, the police department isn’t privy to those posts so there is not a way for us to respond.

Additionally, we need to balance how much time we spend interacting on social media as this can consume a lot of time and effort and it is not always productive to have back and forth online interactions. My preference would be to meet with individuals or community groups when an issue arises so that we can have a productive conversation around solutions.

As you know, despite our best efforts we continue to be extremely short staffed. This is a direct result of the defunding by the City Council in 2021. Since that time we have had difficulty recruiting and retaining officers in our department. In late 2020 is when the defund conversation initially began with the council and 2021 when positions were taken from the police department. I made it clear that if the defunding happened, there would be negative impacts to our response times and our ability to respond to calls for service. My concerns fell on deaf ears and the officers were left feeling devalued and unsupported.

In 2021 alone, 26 officers left the department and in 2022, 27 officers left. This reduced staffing further impacted our department. Despite these challenges, my staff has continued to respond to calls and provide the best service they can. We’ve focused on violent crime and last year had the lowest homicide rate on record. However, just as suspected and expressed during the defunding conversation, we aren’t able to address the quality-of-life issues that the community is regularly impacted by. Many times we have to try to address these concerns with officers working on overtime. The appeal for overtime used to draw officers in but they’ve been forced to work mandatory overtime for so long that they are burnt out and exhausted. They are going from call to call during their shifts and there isn’t much time for proactive enforcement.

All of the ancillary units that supported our service response have been cut because we cannot staff them. We no longer have a stand alone traffic unit to address traffic safety issues. We no longer have a foot and bike patrol unit to proactively patrol and engage the business districts. We no longer have a narcotics unit to deal with illegal drug sales. We no longer have a regulatory unit, yet we are again tasked with the enforcement of smoke shops because they’ve been unregulated. We no longer have a violence suppression unit so when shootings and homicides occurred we force officers to work overtime to impact the areas to prevent additional shootings. We no longer have a parole or probation unit to make sure the people entering our community after incarceration are abiding by the terms of their release. We no longer have a school resource unit so beat officers are forced to respond to school issues. We no longer have a mental health response team to preventatively work with our community members with mental health challenges and prevent mental health crisis’. Our investigations unit is less than half of what it used to be (from 50ish detectives to less than 15) so many cases do not receive the proper time and attention to solve. The lack of these resources leaves us in a position in which we are forced to be re-active to problems instead of proactively preventing problems.

I am just as frustrated with our situation as the community is. I want to be able to provide the same level of service as we were able to pre 2021 but I cannot do it with the amount of staff I have. We continue to work aggressively on hiring but we’ve been unable to fill our vacancies despite having hired 42 officers in the past two years.

We will be bringing a proposal to council on December 17th to incentivize our recruiting and retention efforts. We hope that this plan will garner more interest from potential candidates and keep the officers that we’ve invested in from leaving.

Again, I am open to hearing additional suggestions.

Bisa French
Chief of Police
Richmond Police Department


City of Richmond 2024 Crime Statistics

Citywide Index Crimes 2024 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec YTD Total
Homicide 1 1 1 0 1 4 1 1 0 1 0 11
Sexual Assault 3 14 7 11 6 5 7 8 14 15 12 102
Robbery 28 33 28 22 33 17 19 29 30 21 26 286
Aggravated Assault 94 60 77 81 79 74 104 85 86 85 89 914
Burglary 28 21 22 22 19 35 37 28 13 28 24 277
Larceny-Theft 142 141 139 119 93 153 142 154 188 153 181 1,605
Vehicle-Theft 108 90 97 100 124 100 121 105 64 78 68 1,055
Arson 4 2 5 4 4 3 2 0 1 6 1 32
Index Crime Totals 408 362 376 359 359 391 433 410 396 387 401 4,282

Year Over Year Crime Statistics

Year Over Year 2021 2022 2023 2024
(through November
Homicide 18 18 8 11
Sexual Assault 86 114 100 102
Robbery 243 258 298 286
Aggravated Assault 832 857 941 914
Burglary 311 262 343 277
Larceny-Theft 1,849 1,993 1.696 1605
Vehicle-Theft 1,044 1,068 1,258 1,055
Arson 44 34 30 32
Index Crime Totals 4,471 4,604 4,674

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