Richmond Police Say Violent Crime Up 7% in 2024

The Richmond Police Department reports that the city saw a 7% increase in violent crime while property crime decreased by 3% resulting in an overall decrease in crime by 0.25%.

Police department staff generated 28,193 reports.

• 2,084 arrests made – 1,103 felony arrests and 955 misdemeanor arrests.
• 198 DUI arrests
• 258 firearms recovered
• Parking Enforcement Unit towed 1938 vehicles and red tagged 2523 vehicles
• 11 fatal collisions which resulted in 12 deaths
• Nine (9) Human Trafficking Special Operations
• 46 Assaults with a firearm investigations

In 2024 there were 11 homicides. Police said this is three more homicides than they had in 2023 but still one of the lowest numbers on record (there was one other year with 11 homicides). Of the 11 homicides, all but 3 have been solved. Source

Year Over Year Crime Statistics

Richmond Police Chief Says Council Defunded Police

In December, 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

Previous Richmond Police Stories:

• Jan 2025 – Richmond Police Directed to Track “Deploy, Display, and Discharge” of Military Weapons
• Dec 30, 2024 – Richmond Mayor Says Crime is Up in State of City Address
• Jan 2023 – Richmond Police Chief Provides 5-Year Crime Data Report