🧑‍🏫 Good morning, RVA: 664↘️ • 4↗️; a bunch of police-related news; and a blast from the past

Good morning, RVA! It’s 74 °F, and the hot, hot weather is back. Expect highs in the 90s with Feels Likes™ around 100 °F. Time to get sweaty.

Water cooler

This is awful, and I’m just going to quote straight from the Richmond Police Department release: “At approximately 8:35 p.m. [yesterday], officers responded to the 2300 block of Bethel Street for several reports of random gunfire. Once on scene, they found three adult males suffering from apparent gunshot wounds. One male was pronounced at the scene, one was transported to a local hospital with life-threatening injuries and one was transported with non-life threatening injuries. Two other individuals with apparent gunshot wounds were self-transported to a local hospital—an adult female with non-life threatening injuries and a juvenile in his teens with life-threatening injuries.”

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 664↘️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 4↗️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 124↘️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 14, Henrico: 83, and Richmond: 27). Since this pandemic began, 308 people have died in the Richmond region. Through their dashboard, VCU reports two new cases and nine new people in either isolation or quarantine. They’ve also started doing and reporting prevalence testing—which is when you test a bunch of asymptomatic folks to see how much virus is out there hiding among the apparently healthy. The University reported 38 of theses tests with just one positive.

Last night protestors again took to the streets of the Fan and Downtown, stoked in part by the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin and in part by more internet flyers (this time, however, asking for a peaceful protest). The CT’s Andrew Ringle has a short thread on Twitter with a few pictures and videos. As far as I can tell, this protest ended after a couple of hours without any police involvement.

Not to needlessly rag on the RPD comms, but I have to roll my eyes at this tweet that says “Join RPD in the fight against COVID-19. Social distance and wear a mask.” and is accompanied by a picture of four masked and distanced officers. That’s nice, but what about allllll of the unmaked and incredibly in-your-face officers in this video? Or this video? Or this picture? Or how about these pictures? And those are all just from August! I think, instead of a rah-rah join us! messaging, I’d like to hear something along the lines of “We’ve done a bad job at protecting the health of Richmonders over the past several months and are recommitting to wearing masks and keeping our distance to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

Henrico County has hired Eric English as their next chief of police, effective Monday, September 14th. English currently serves as the Harrisonburg chief, and served in the RPD from 1989 through 2018. You can read Henrico’s press release here and this quick, sports-slanted interview by the RTD’s John O’Connor from back in June.

Finally, as far as police-related news goes, the City has released the video from the second meeting of the Mayor’s Task Force to Reimagine Public Safety. I haven’t listened yet, but, if you’ve got two hours, give it a spin.

The New York Times has a long piece on the intersection between redlining and dangerous neighborhood heat levels that heavily features Richmond. This should all sound very familiar to you because it’s based on the work of Richmond’s very own climate scientist, Dr. Jeremy Hoffman (well, he’s chief scientist at the Science Museum, but I say we get to claim him as a city). If you start overlaying Richmond’s redlining map with other data, you start to see upsetting connections almost everywhere—tree cover, paving, other built-enviornment things, but also life expectancy, income, and a bucketful of important social determinates of health.

The RTD’s Kenya Hunter says Hanover County Public Schools have backed out of their opt-in, in-person instruction plan for all grades…for one day. Pre-K, kindergarten, first, sixth, and ninth grades will meet on September 8th, and everyone else will return to school on September 9th. I get that those are transitional grades, but I’m not really sure how a single, solitary day gets you much virus risk mitigation. I guess we’ll see how it works in a couple of weeks.

Survey time! SIR has put together two surveys to understand how young people perceive Richmond and how the region can better attract and retain college students and young professionals. Here’s the survey for young professionals and here’s the one for college students. This data will go toward updating their YRVA study from back in 2013. Here’s a story about that from RVANews, which is the long-ago news ancestor to this very email!

This morning’s longread

Eliminate Local Government

I don’t agree with all of this, but I always enjoy reading something that gets me thinking about the Dillon Rule. What would Richmond be like if we had no local government at all and the state set all of our policies? Would we see more progressive allowances for cities or the exact opposite?

Progress does not come from localism. Housing, for example, is generally more plentiful when decisions are made at a higher level. Zoning is a national law in Japan, and the national government does not care about the opinions of local NIMBYs and therefore has made it easy to build more housing on your own property. (Takings, in contrast, are extremely hard in Japanese law, which has driven up urban transportation construction costs.)

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This morning’s Instagram