The Cranky Taxpayer |
The 2018 data in the Police Department's Incident Based Reporting System as of July 17, 2019 report 2,091 unique vice offenses for the calendar year. 95.2% of those reports involved drugs or drug equipment:
The total is up a bit from 2017, particularly in the drug count. Here are the Top Ten blocks for vice in 2018:
Fifty percent of those blocks sport apartments; if we count the motel blocks as "rental," we can say that 70% contain rental property. 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, often 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. It is long past time for a housecleaning at RRHA. [1] A 1998 National Institute of Justice report to Congress, Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising, 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.” 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.
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Last updated
07/18/19 |