The 2011 data in the Police Department's Incident Based Reporting System as of Jan. 30, 2011 report 2091 separate vice offenses for the calendar year.  Just over 95% of those offenses involved drugs or drug equipment:

The total is down slightly from the previous year and pretty much in line with the previous six years.

The % cleared by arrest failed to improve.

Here are the top sixteen blocks (those with 10 or more offenses reported) for total vice in 2010:

The 200 block of W. Grace St. is Police HQ; the 500 block of N. 9th St. is the police detention facility (the former District Courts bldg.).  Removing those, we have:

Essentially all that activity is drugs, except that fourteen of the reports at police HQ were porn(!).

As usual, we see that rental properties, notably RRHA and apartments, are at the center of the problem. 

The really Bad News is the ongoing problem at RRHA, which is by far the largest public nuisance in the City.

Overall, these data show the vice activity in Richmond to be concentrated at identifiable places, almost always associated with rental property.  State law declares this activity to be a nuisance and provides abundant criminal and civil authority to abate it. 

Indeed, nuisance abatement (generally directed at the property owner) is the sole strategy that can be shown scientifically to control drug dealing and related crime at private rental places.^[1]

As these pages also discuss elsewhere, RRHA is maintaining the largest drug nuisance in the City. 

The RRHA Commissioners have demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to properly run the organization.  It is long past time for a housecleaning at RRHA.

[1] A 1998 National Institute of Justice report to Congress discusses the place-bound nature of crime as follows: “Most places have no crimes and most crime is highly concentrated in and around a relatively small number of places. If we can prevent crime at these high crime places, then we might be able to reduce total crime.  [The] findings suggest that something about a few places facilitates crimes and something about most places prevents crimes.”      Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising, http://www.ncjrs.org/works/chapter7.htm.  Of course, the something about most property that prevents crimes is an owner (and neighbors) who will not tolerate disorder.  In my view, the focus of community policing should be to encourage and assist the law-abiding landowners and to target the others.