Richmond Police Chief Alfred Durham (Photo by Jay Paul)
Dozens of men are shooting hoops at the Celebration Church off Midlothian Turnpike on an early evening in mid-December. The stands are packed and buzzing with an infectious energy — girlfriends, grandparents, children — all present, all cheering.
In the middle of the action — laughing and dapping up the players as they sprint up, down, on and off the court — is a middle-aged man with a beaming smile. Everybody knows him, and many of the participants seek him out to lock hands or introduce their kids.
A loyal father figure? A proud mentor? An engaged citizen?
You could say that Alfred Durham is all three.
And this isn’t just another pick-up game, it’s an experiment. Durham has brought together players from some of the city’s most at-risk neighborhoods and housing projects. The RVA League for Safer Streets kicked off in July with a summer league made up of teams from the Mosby, Whitcomb, Creighton and Fairfield Court public housing communities. In the span of a month — at the peak of the city’s most murderous season — the number of homicides in those fraught neighborhoods was zero.
Durham is the city’s police chief — the man you see at crime-scene news conferences, the man called to account when a troubling murder remains unsolved. In this setting, however, and in many of the poorest communities in Richmond, it is his other, unspoken roles — as activist, mentor and father — that matter most. Durham is keenly conscious of this fact. It drives him daily, hourly.
“We’re not the ones who create these problems, but we have an obligation to address them,” he says. “I think when you have [police] who have not grasped the real community engagement piece of it — that we’re servants, public servants — I think that’s where a lot of the challenges come from.”
Players jog off the court for a break, and Durham pulls aside Jawad Abdu. Their bond is obvious. A felon who was only recently released from prison after serving 19 years on a gang-related murder conviction, Abdu describes the league as a “spiritual” haven. He speaks about Durham in terms that suggest a father figure and a healer all rolled into one.
“I saw chiefs come and go, but I’d never seen someone quite like him,” Abdu says later. “He just seemed different … like he was really out here to help.”
Another former inmate, Paul Taylor, agrees. “Now, we talk about court work and not courtrooms,” he says of the effect the league has had on its players. About Durham, a man who represents a uniform that is often viewed with distrust by black Americans, he speaks with a kind of wonder. “I mean, he opened his arms to two convicted felons,” he says, “and found the grant money to make this thing happen.”
Durham’s relationship with another young man, David Baldwin, is even tighter. The chief met Baldwin at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in 2015, listening to his story of life on the streets as a teenager and his time in jail. Durham was taken by his maturity, and told him not to hesitate to reach out.
Baldwin, now 28, called the next day — he needed help finding a job. Within hours, he was sitting in the chief’s downtown office; Durham and another Richmond police officer, Carol Adams, had helped arrange for him to start cutting grass for the city.
“He’s all excited. He says, ‘I start Monday! But I need some boots!’ ” Durham recalls. “So I say, ‘OK, let’s go get some boots.’” At the store, Baldwin asked the chief whether they could pose for a quick photo together. “A photo?” Durham asked, confused. “ ‘Chief, I want to send it to my friends — they’re not going to believe this — I’m with the police chief, and you just bought me some boots!’ ” And then Baldwin grew quiet. “I haven’t had a gift,” he told Durham, “since I was 14 years old.”
“Can you imagine? Christmas, birthdays — it almost brought tears to my eyes,” the chief says, recalling the moment from behind his desk during an interview at police headquarters, and before he can finish the sentence, the chief — a law enforcement veteran of 30 years who sometimes refer to his officers as “troops” and who served for a decade and a half in the Marine Corps — does have tears in his eyes.
Chief Alfred Durham at the scene of a December Confederate heritage demonstration (Photo by Jay Paul)
A few days earlier, in South Richmond’s Bellemeade neighborhood for a monthly community walk with his officers, Durham is smiling and at ease despite the chilly drizzle. He seems genuinely sad when he has to leave early for another meeting.
“It’s like you have to send someone with him — he’s always the last one to go, all wrapped up in conversation,” an officer jokes as Durham walks toward his car, still talking to folks over his shoulder. The officer continues, recalling an earlier community walk in Creighton Court, when the chief was “stopping to talk to every other person,” adding, “He’s got some kind of rock-star status there, it’s all, ‘Ooh, ahhh! Look, it’s the chief!’ ”
Durham smiles, later, when he hears this story relayed to him. This kind of visibility and hands-on engagement has marked the chief’s tenure. At times it has made him a target — like the night a woman berated him as he visited an East End crime scene.
“You ain’t shit! You know that? You ain’t shit, Chief!” she yelled. “People are getting killed out here, and you ain’t doing shit about it!” Still, he believes that his unorthodox approach to running a police force in a divided city and at a divided time is not just the right one; it’s the only one.
Not that it doesn’t take a toll on him. Others occasionally notice, too.
“Chief, you take on too much,” an elderly woman told him after the East End confrontation.
The problem is that Alfred Durham doesn’t know how not to.
He doesn’t know how not to be immersed at an intimate, granular level. He doesn’t know how not to take his work personally.
That’s because, like many in the communities he serves, Durham is a survivor. An act of violence that struck his core continues to shape him, blurring the lines between who he is as a man and who he needs to be as a chief.
Durham confers with Deputy Chief Eric English at a department briefing. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
In February, Durham will mark three years as Richmond’s police chief. He came out of retirement, at age 51, to take the job. Three years might seem a brief tenure, but he’s the fifth chief to serve Richmond in the last 16 years.
The revolving door suggests just how demanding and unrelenting the job is, a constant, often thankless grind.
None of the daily challenges, however — carping from residents, endless meetings, cases left unsolved — can compare to the larger existential struggle that has gripped him since 2005.
Two months into his first stint in Richmond, as chief of staff under then-Chief Rodney Monroe, Durham was in bed one night in early June when the phone rang. When he answered, he almost hung up; he thought what he’d heard was a dream.
A few minutes later, though, the phone rang again, and the same message came through the line: Your brother was shot. He didn’t make it.
“He never saw it coming,” Durham muses, more than a decade later, almost as if reflecting on himself. And perhaps he is.
What made the death all the more bewildering and painful was that he had just left Washington, D.C., after two decades with the Metropolitan Police force. Now, eight weeks later, his younger brother and best friend, Kenzell, was murdered — shot three times from behind while working under a vehicle at a tire shop in Northeast D.C. An angry customer had entered the store earlier to argue with the manager over a bent rim. Kenzell intervened, and the man left. Durham’s brother never saw him return.
“As an officer, and even as a manager — a supervisor going to homicide scenes,” Durham says, “you would never expect that to happen to you, that your loved one would be murdered.”
He’d spent his life on one side of the law, and now he was seeing it from the other side.
“It devastated me for years,” he says.
Twelve years later, the moment still feels raw. On a Monday night in December, the chief has just returned from a weekend in Washington — his “escape from the city” — rushing south in time to attend a meeting of the Richmond City Council, where legislative proposals to curb gun violence are on the agenda.
With the meeting over, he begins making dinner — a quick one, alone in his house on the city’s North Side.
Between beeps of the microwave, he speaks with an uncharacteristically soft and reflective voice, not at all the tone of a chief known for his often blunt off-the-cuff pronouncements.
“All you do, is just,” he starts off, tripping over his words slightly, as he often does when searching for the right way to frame, or perhaps complete, a thought. “All you have left are those memories of growing up with” — his voice falters — “your brother, and things that we used to do with the family, and that was taken away from me — like many others in our communities who have lost loved ones. Joys, memories, just taken away.”
The trauma thrust him into a new role, unbenownst to him at the time: survivor and advocate. “As I was burying my brother, I looked at him and I told him, ‘As long as I have the power to be in law enforcement, if I can stop somebody else from being a victim like I’m a victim in this moment — I’m going to do everything I can,’ ” Durham says. And with each syllable, his voice becomes more assertive — not angry, not frustrated, but as if renewing vows, a rekindling of his oath to serve and protect.
“Regardless of what kind of lifestyle they lived or what they’re into,” he says, and here his tone steels, “nobody has the right to take somebody’s life.”
During a community walk in Jackson Ward, Durham talks with Kenihya Paine (left, standing) and Ke’asyah Paine. (Photo by Jay Paul)
The city’s homicide rate spiked in 2016, the highest in a decade, with 58 deaths, according to Virginia State Police figures. It was equally bad in 2017, with 57 homicides listed by the Richmond Police Department, plus one investigated by state police, as of press time. Durham’s critics — in the communities, on the City Council and among local news outlets — say he hasn’t done enough to address the violence.
During a City Council public safety committee meeting over the summer, the 8th District representative and committee chairwoman Reva Trammell criticized Durham for his officers’ lack of visibility — a function, in large part, of ongoing budget issues that have affected the chief’s ability to fill out his staff.
“I don’t live in a $100,000 neighborhood, but I don’t want [crime] in my $35,000 neighborhood, either,” Trammell said during the meeting. “I’ve got prostitution. I’ve got drug dealing. I’ve got break-ins ... Where are they? Where are the officers?”
In September on WTVR-CBS 6, a report by Mark Holmberg aired with the headline, “String of Killings in the City: Richmond has a Long, Bloody History of Murder.”
Around the same time, Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Michael Paul Williams observed, “The strain of the growing homicide toll is wearing on Durham, who has not masked his exasperation with public housing residents. It’s hard to comfort and chide at once.”
Paul Taylor, the inmate-turned-basketball player, says the chief’s critics don’t understand the importance of Durham’s involvement — that his presence in these communities shows a degree of care he has never seen from anyone in city government or on the force before.
“When heads start to roll and City Council feels like they have to point the finger at somebody, it’s always at the chief,” he says. “But I don’t see any of them out here.”
Durham is well aware of the public's frustrations. He says no one holds him or his city department to a higher standard than he does.
“Going into the communities, I’m always pleading — folks say, ‘Chief you’re always mad … you sound like a broken record … And I’m not mad, I’m frustrated. I lost a brother to gun violence. And unless you have walked in what we call survivors’ shoes … you don’t know what it’s like.”
Montrio Allen, holding 7-month-old Maree, tells Durham the neighborhood is “cool,” but property theft is an issue. (Photo by Jay Paul)
The public figure in him, the leader of a 700-plus officer force, worries constantly about the rise in violence and the growth in crime, and meets regularly with the mayor and other officials to talk policy and proposals. This is cold work, statistical work, sitting-down work.
But as a survivor of violence, and as a black man in a world where he and his brethren are constant targets, often of the institution he represents, he is loath to allow numbers alone to determine his course of action.
He continues to emphasize that there is no substitute for being present in the communities most affected, for demonstrating that police are aware and concerned, and, above all, care.
This belief has been repeatedly — and sorely — tested.
Perhaps no event captures this tension better than a shooting that occurred six months after he returned to the city in 2015 to assume the role of chief.
Officers had responded to a call about an armed party off Meadow Street, but when they approached the young man, he took off running. While in flight, he started firing at the officers, striking one and prompting them to fire back, killing him.
After visiting the hospital with then-Mayor Dwight Jones to check on the wounded officer and his family, Durham says he confronted one of the most difficult situations of his career. He went to the scene of the young man’s death to hold a news conference, and was greeted not only by media, but by a furious crowd of residents, neighbors and friends of the victim.
It was the first time Durham says he was faced with the fallout of a shooting by an officer in real life. Freddie Gray’s death at the hands of police in Baltimore a few months earlier was still fresh in the public’s mind.
“Folks wanted answers and I had to explain to them, ‘I just got here. I don’t know what happened. I was not here,’” he recalls, still visibly pained by the episode. “But then out of the blue, this young man’s mother came up and stood beside me out of nowhere. And she tells this crowd, ‘Let the police do their job. That’s my son. And I want to know what happened also.’ ”
Durham says she was “heaven-sent.” As if on cue, the crowd calmed and eventually dissipated.
It probably didn’t hurt that the first thing Durham did, there on the scene, was to offer his condolences to the victim’s mother for her devastating loss.
His officers, however, were less impressed. Some chastised him: This bad guy tried to kill our officers, and you’re apologizing?
Durham was firm. “Hold up. His mother’s not the one who shot our officers. And she lost a child. We do the very best we can as parents also. We don’t want anything bad, or the worst, for our kids — but sometimes they make wrong decisions. So understand that. Have empathy.’’
That word might not be the first quality that comes to mind when people think about police. But Durham insists on it.
“We’re public servants, and I tell folks — I’m very adamant about this — if you don’t have a servant’s heart, maybe you’re in the wrong business. We have to care for people.”
A police chief who is comfortable enough to be vulnerable and reveal his heart may not be the norm for the profession. The job almost calls for rigidity and firmness. Durham can be blunt, and brash, but he seems almost constitutionally incapable of being the remote, stern disciplinarian some wish him to be.
“I’m very adamant about this — if you don’t have a servant’s heart, maybe you’re in the wrong business. We have to care for people.” —Alfred Durham
The line of demarcation separating Durham’s work from his life sometimes seems so faint as to be nonexistent. Perhaps even he forgets it’s supposed to be there.
He nearly always works on weekends and rarely, if ever, gets to celebrate a holiday. He has no family in the city. He sleeps poorly most nights and, even when he does get some rest, it often isn’t for very long.
“My sleep sucks,” he says, letting out a bitter laugh. “My phone will go off, and I can’t get back to sleep because I have 15 things that I need to address.”
The option of not addressing them, of leaving them for later, never seems to occur to him — a fact that many who have worked with him over the years have noted.
Mayor Levar Stoney, who opted to retain Durham when he assumed office, speaks admiringly about the dogged nature of his employee, but worries at times, he says, about the apparent absence of an off-button.
“When we’re having our one-on-ones over lunch or dinner or breakfast or something like that, sometimes I’m just there to get to know my employee a little bit, on a different level — a little give and take, you know? But he’s over here, already thinking of ideas on crime fighting and community policing, and talking about legislation we can get passed in the General Assembly or we can champion in the G.A., and I’m thinking, ‘This guy is really — this is a full-time job for him.’ He’s thinking about how we keep our city safe 24/7, and I’m just like, ‘Chief! This is supposed to be like a moment for us to relax and hang out.’ ”
Durham is aware that his strength could well also be his flaw, that the very thing that fuels him, that makes him different from most police chiefs and that endears him to some residents, is the very thing that gnaws at him in the small hours of the night.
He also knows that, try as he might, he can’t change his nature. Even retirement couldn’t stop him from getting back to work, something he’s been doing since he started delivering — or as he puts it, “serving” — newspapers at age 13.
“Well, I am worn out,” he admits, chuckling darkly, “and what I’ve realized is, and people tell me all the time, ‘Chief, you have to look out for yourself.’ And it’s a struggle for me. … I believe that God put me here for a purpose, and that’s to serve people and I’m going to do that.”
He says he realizes that, although he’ll never be able to stop involving himself in the lives of the dispossessed men and women in the forgotten neighborhoods of this city, he has to take care of himself.
“The time that you lose in this job and not enjoying life — you can’t get that time back. And I was telling somebody the other day, for me, I’ve been in law enforcement for 30 years; 27 of those years I have been in an on-call status — everything from an officer until now as chief of police.”
Knowing he has to disengage, of course, is not the same as actually disengaging. Recently he’s begun to take mental health days.
Still, he says he leaves the porch light on, just in case someone needs him.
This past Father’s Day, the chief received a card from Baldwin, the former inmate he bought boots for.
It reads: “Chief, you have been nothing but a blessing to me. And when I make it big, I want to be nothing but a blessing to you.”
Durham replied: “No, I want you to be a blessing to somebody else. That’s what it’s all about.”
Part 1 of 3: This is the first in a series of articles exploring different aspects of law enforcement.
