😠 Good morning, RVA: Three nights of protests, a bus burned, and get your tear gas outta my city's streets

Good morning, RVA! It’s 54 °F, and today’s weather looks absolutely brilliant. Expect highs in the 70s and lots of sunshine. Later this week expect temperatures to heat up into the classic Richmond summer zone.

Water cooler

A lot has happened since we last spoke. For the last three nights protesters have gathered in Downtown Richmond, angry about the murder of George Floyd by a White police officer, to demand police and criminal justice reform. The situation is obviously a lot more layered and complex than that previous sentence, but it’s a good place to start.

On Friday night, protesters—which, in the moment, following from afar on Twitter, seemed largely peaceful and chill—burnt and destroyed a GRTC Pulse bus. While both operators and riders were unharmed, GRTC did suspend evening bus service on Saturday, all bus service on Sunday, and will again suspend evening service tonight. March Cheatham at the Cheats Movement has photos of the burned-out bus wreckage, which, even three days later, still shock me (or is it 600 days later? it’s hard to tell at this point).

On Saturday night, protestors again gathered. They added context to the Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue and damaged a bunch of businesses along Broad Street—including some longtime, Black-owned businesses. A handful of buildings burned, some stores were looted (Balance, one of my favorite bike shops, being one of them), and the scene on Sunday morning, as Public Works employees put Broad Street back together, was quiet and surreal. The Richmond Police Department was, of course, deployed or activated or on the scene or whatever words you want to use throughout the night. While I don’t think anyone was arrested on Saturday night, I saw scary videos of the callus and casual use of pepper spray by police and a police vehicle used in an incredibly dangerous and violent way. This was all Saturday night.

On Sunday, the Mayor asked the Governor to declare a curfew in the City, which he granted. Throughout the day I saw wonderful rallies and demonstrations (if maybe not masked-up or socially distanced enough for my personal level of comfort). Yet, as curfew o' clock crept closer, folks began to gather at the Robert E. Lee monument, adding more context, and preparing to defy the Mayor’s ordered curfew. For me, this is when the tenor of things changed. Even immediately after the Mayor’s press conference, it felt like there was space for organizers, advocates, leaders, and electeds to get together and make meaningful policy change (more on that in a minute). I didn’t love the Mayor’s tone or the way his comments put condemning violence and destruction before empathy with angry citizens, but, still, he spoke of bringing folks to the table—although didn’t specify a concrete way of doing that. Then after the sun set, the opportunity for talk seemed to slip away as Richmond’s downtown streets turned into an arena for a sick game of police chasing protesters. This video from Ned Oliver will give you a first-hand feel for what took place over the course of several hours. I’m disgusted by what took place last night. Filling the air with tear gas in front of the Children’s Hospital? Thunking around Broad Street in intimidatingly armed and armored brute squads? Pepper spraying VPM’s Roberto Roldan, one of our best and nicest reporters, and shoving him to the ground? I never want to see any of that on Broad Street ever again. Yesterday afternoon there was a moment, an opportunity to work together as a community to move Richmond forward. This morning, though, that moment is gone and the Richmond Police Department and, by extension, Mayor Stoney have a lot of questions to answer.

It’s easy to read through what happened in Richmond last night and think that things just got out of hand, that save for the actions of a few protestors here or a few cops there that things would have been fine. Spend four seconds scrolling through Twitter or looking at newspapers across the Country, though, and it’s abundantly clear that this kind of police behavior is systemic and widespread. Last night in Richmond happened all across America.

So, how do we move forward? I am not a criminal justice or police reform expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I am willing and excited to learn. Nationally, Twitter user @samswey, has put together this list of research-based solutions to stop police violence. Some items from his list: More restrictive state and local policies governing use of police force, demilitarization, and establishing non-police alternatives to 911 calls involving people with mental illness. State Senator Jennifer McClellan released a statement calling for training in basis, crisis de-escalation, and more “transparency in investigations of misconduct at all levels.” And, locally, the folks at Richmond For All have been asking for a civilian oversight board and a Marcus Alert (which sounds a lot like a non-police alternative to 911) for years. It is worth noting that at Sunday’s press conference, Chief of Police Will Smith said the RPD has been “working diligently” on a Marcus Alert or a Crisis Alert and that they are “working on increasing the number of civilians” on their review boards. As with literally every policy issue important to Richmonders, so much of it depends on who has authority to do what. How much of police procedure is dictated—and can be changed—by the Mayor, City Council, or, because Dillon Rule, the General Assembly? I have absolutely no idea (which is maybe part of the point?), and that’s the critical question that I’m looking for experts to answer this morning.

To close, I want to quote from Duron Chavis, whose opinion I deeply respect: “These uprisings are the result of 400 year legacy of death dealing that black and brown people have experienced at the hands of America. I am not entertaining any convos that put looting and property destruction as the central narrative. In three weeks there have been numerous police killings of unarmed black people and the pandemic been killing our people more than white folks because of racist policies…For years black leaders been telling you that this shit needs to be fixed and you turned a deaf ear and sat on your hands. Some of you will let last night serve as an excuse as to why you will continue to do what you always have done. Nothing. You will blame black and brown people even though we have documented evidence of who really smashed shit. Go talk to the white folk about why they did it. Know that the real culprit is the system for not giving a shit about my people…The rest of us will continue working to build the reality we dream of even amid the broken glass, ashes and scorched buildings this system overlayed over the city streets last night. I promise you that.”

As long as we were deep in the midst of a deadly pandemic, I didn’t think anything would push the daily coronavirus update. You sure showed me, 2020. As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 996 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 5 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 220 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 87, Henrico: 66, and Richmond: 67). Since this pandemic began, 192 people have died in the Richmond region.

Because I can’t not, although I realize it is severely out of place and possibly tone deaf, a couple of nerdy civic updates:

1. An item of note from today’s Organizational Development committee meeting: The Mayor’s Press Secretary, will give a presentation on the new city website.
2. Looks like the City will use $6.6 million from the Budget and Revenue Stabilization Contingency Reserve to cover the coronavirus-related shortfall in the FY20 budget—that’s the budget passed last year.
3. The Richmond 300 Draft plan will be available today. Both Planning Commission and OrgDev will hear a presentation on the plan.

This morning’s longread

An Antiracist Reading List

Turn off the latest episode of Holey Moley and pick up one of these books.

To build a nation of equal opportunity for everyone, we need to dismantle this spurious legacy of our common upbringing. One of the best ways to do this is by reading books. Not books that reinforce old ideas about who we think we are, what we think America is, what we think racism is. Instead, we need to read books that are difficult or unorthodox, that don’t go down easily. Books that force us to confront our self-serving beliefs and make us aware that “I’m not racist” is a slogan of denial. The reading list below is composed of just such books — a combination of classics, relatively obscure works and a few of recent vintage. Think of it as a stepladder to antiracism, each step addressing a different stage of the journey toward destroying racism’s insidious hold on all of us.

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.

This morning’s Instagram