by James A. Bacon
A woman is being treated for life-threatening injuries from a gunshot wound after being found in a room at the Diamond Inn & Suites hotel in Richmond’s Diamond District yesterday. City records show that the Richmond Police Department has been called to the motel for multiple incidents, including overdoses and a death investigation, since the beginning of the year, reports WRIC-TV.
Another routine crime. Not even a homicide. Ho, hum. But this shooting and previous incidents at the hotel didn’t take place in “the projects,” which middle-class city residents can compartmentalize as tragic but not affecting them. The shooting took place across the street from PopUp RVA, a popular weekly gathering featuring 50 to 70 local artisans, crafters, new businesses, local distilleries, food, desserts, drinks, and local live music. The hotel is just outside Scotts Addition, a light-industrial area transitioning into the hippest neighborhood in the city.
Cities die from a thousand small cuts like this.
Law-abiding, tax-paying citizens pay attention. WRIC quotes Peter Feddo, a 16-year city resident, as worrying that the shooting is part of a pattern of more crime in the past year and a half.
“We’ve got to do better. We got to be better stewards of our city, and, unfortunately, right now, it doesn’t feel like that and, you know, I’m more inclined to take a car to drive every place because it just feels safer,” Feddo said. “People live here now, and people are suffering now, and people are getting shot now, and people are getting stabbed now, and people are afraid to go over there.”
Much of Feddo’s comment was predictable. What struck me as novel was the statement that he’s more inclined to take a car to get around. The single greatest selling point of the City of Richmond is its walkability. Yeah, the taxes are high, the schools are a disaster, and services suck. But the city has walkable grid streets, while neighboring Henrico and Chesterfield counties don’t.
If streets are perceived as too risky to walk, the city loses one of its great competitive advantages for development, renewal, and growing the tax base. When the disorder of the inner city spills into stable neighborhoods where people pay taxes, keep up their property, and demand little in the way of public services, people are less likely to invest and more likely to decamp to the ‘burbs.
Meanwhile, in the City of Norfolk… a few hours after 600 family members and other mourners gathered to remember Sierra Jenkins, the Virginian-Pilot reporter killed in a shootout outside a popular nightspot, a man was killed and two women injured in a shooting inside the MacArthur Center.
Once upon a time the MacArthur Center was the bright, shining centerpiece of the city’s downtown revitalization effort. The 140-store mall opened in 1999 next to the General Douglas MacArthur Memorial. In recent years, the mall lost its anchor stores, smaller stores closed, and then the entire complex shut down during the COVID pandemic before reopening in May 2020.
Richmond, Norfolk and other older urban centers enjoyed a renaissance during the 2010s thanks largely to the decline in crime and the perception that cities were safe again. The perception is changing again.
A central question of our time is this: why the surge in crime? Some blame it on the COVID pandemic. If they’re right, violent crime should subside as the virus and attendant economic shutdowns recede. COVID disruptions may have been a contributing factor, but I think the driving force was the spread of rhetoric that de-legitimized the police and criminal justice system. When people regard the system as systemically and fundamentally unjust, they’re more likely to break the law. Social disorder spreads, and violence increases.
Yes, my worldview is antithetical to the idea that the “root cause” of crime is poverty. Many will disagree. There is no point in arguing. We’ll see who is proven right in the end.
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