🔫 Good morning, RVA: A gun violence report, police violence, and a transit talk

Good morning, RVA! It’s 30 °F, and today’s highs may just hit 60 °F—if you stand very still in a sunbeam. Legit warmer weather returns this weekend, with temperatures in the mid 60s, so get excited for that as we work through the will-they-or-won’t-they of fully transitioning into winter.
 

Water cooler

Yesterday, the City dropped their 2023 annual progress report for Gun Violence Prevention Intervention Efforts. You know how City Council passes all of those resolutions creating this or that committee and demanding annual reports on which or whatever topics? This is the result of one of those things!—specifically from when the City declared gun violence a public health crisis back in 2021. I don’t know about you, but I get excited when these reports actually exist, and I hurriedly save them to my PDF library. This one’s particularly interesting because localities in Virginia don’t have a ton of authority to do much of anything to directly reduce the number of guns in our neighborhoods or the easy access to them. So we’ve got to get clever, and we’ve got address root causes—it’s hard, slow work. Tap through to read about how the City focused efforts on early childhood education, mental health, and other supportive services, or check out this list of top-level takeaways that I pulled out of the press release.
 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Samuel B. Parker and Luca Powell report on a traffic stop in Gilpin Court that turned violent after Richmond Police officers punched a man in the face. It’s worth watching the entire video (originally posted on TikTok)—especially if you don’t often interact with the police. Content warnings apply, for sure. The City declined to comment as the “Richmond Police Department and an internal agency” are reviewing the incident.
 

Also in the RTD, Em Holter reports that the City may consider issuing fines for folks who violate Richmond’s noise ordinance. I have big feelings about this! Reading between the lines, and it feels like people want to crack down on loud cars and late-night parties—which is fine, I guess. But the single, most annoying, most consistent source of loud noise in my neighborhood is gas-powered leaf blowers. I can’t remember if the actual noise ordinance text spells out exemptions for lawn tools, but, even if it does, I’m really interested in how the city plans on equitably enforcing the ordinance and issuing these fines.
 

Jahd Khalil at VPM has some early, early reporting on this year’s attempts by the General Assembly to clean up Virginia’s messy retail marijuana market. Despite Democrats controlling both the House and Senate and despite just the piles and piles of cash the Commonwealth is leaving on the table, I think the governor still vetos anything weed-related that makes it to his desk.
 

Today, at 12:00 PM, RVA Rapid Transit will host a free, virtual Transit Talk with Chet Parsons, executive director of the Central Virginia Transportation Authority. The CVTA is our region’s newish, collective way of funding transportation infrastructure via a sales tax and a gas tax, and it funds, as you’d probably guess, a whole heckuva a lot of big, dumb highway projects. But! It also pays for fun things like the Fall Line Trail and generates a significant chunk of money that the region must spend on public transit. You can check out the CVTA Finance Committee’s agenda from their meeting this past month to get a sense for the size of that public transit chunk (about $2.6 million paid to GRTC in the month of June). With GRTC’s Transit Strategic Plan launching this week, showcasing what the next ten years could look like for our public transportation system, now would be a great time to ask the folks at the CVTA about how the region intends to pay for all of those potential service expansions (while also maintaining the existing levels of service). As a friend said to me recently, if we decreased our highway spending by just a couple tenths of a percent we could give everyone in the region a frequent, 10-minute bus.
 

This morning’s longread

Energy makes time

I’ve been reading a lot about non-linear time lately, and, while haven’t really found a way to apply any of it to the way I live my life yet, it’s definitely something I’m continuing to think through. The piece below explains how you can increase your available time (or at least the productive use of it) by focusing first on the things that you love—the things that give you more energy. More energy, means more of those days you look back, shocked at how much you crossed off your todo list (or at least that’s the theory).
 

They suddenly find time for attending to that one project they’d been procrastinating on for weeks. They sleep better. Their skin looks great. (Okay I might be exaggerating on that last one, but only mildly.) It turns out, not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do costs time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn’t need more time; their time needed their art.
 

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Picture of the Day

Thursday vibes.