We’re celebrating our 40th anniversary with monthly dives into our archives. This month’s look back is from our December 1989 and March 1993 issues.
March 1993
A startling picture in the December 1989 issue of Richmond Surroundings, this magazine’s predecessor, shows a man’s body lying in bloody snow on Old Brook Road. The unidentified man’s violent death was one of 100 homicides in 1988, the first year of triple-digit killings in Richmond. The number would peak at 160 in 1994 and earn the city the unwanted distinction of being the U.S. “murder capital” in 1997 (on a per capita basis), when 140 people were killed.
As Harry Kollatz Jr. noted in his March 1993 feature article “Murder in the City,” Richmond’s homicides climbed as the population dropped — from a high of 249,521 in 1971 down to 203,056 in 1990. Police attributed the violence to the prevalence of crack cocaine. Richmond’s population hit a low of 197,790 in 2000 before starting to rise in 2010. The U.S. Census population estimate for 2018 was 228,783.
From the March 1993 issue of Richmond Surroundings
Colette McEachin, Richmond’s newly elected commonwealth’s attorney, started working in the prosecutor’s office in 1991. During the past two decades, she’s watched homicides gradually decline to a low of 32 in 2008 and then hold steady at about 40 per year until 2016, when the number climbed to 61. McEachin says one program that helped to reduce the rate was Project Exile, launched in 1997, which moved the prosecution of felons caught with guns to federal court, where there was a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison. Medical and technological advances are also keeping more people alive, she adds.
Source: Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office
Is Richmond a safer place now than it was in the 1990s? Yes and no, McEachin says. In neighborhoods such as Oregon Hill, Scott’s Addition and Church Hill, “people are out and about, comfortable,” she says. “So there are areas that are certainly safer, but there are still areas where you wouldn’t want your children to be outside after dark.”
