Richmond City Council on Monday endorsed a slate of police reforms that have been demanded by Black Lives Matter protesters, but stopped short of adopting a resolution seeking an analysis of the Richmond Police Department budget. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Richmond City Council on Monday unanimously signed off on two measures that create a pathway to instituting key public safety reforms, but balked at a resolution that aimed to analyze police expenditures with the goal of reallocating funds toward social service programs.
The measures approved by council call for work groups that will advise city leaders on how best to implement an independent civilian review board with subpoena power to investigate police misconduct complaints, as well as a new system called the Marcus Alert, which requires that police coordinate emergency response efforts with mental health professionals to de-escalate situations involving mental health crises. The alert system is named after Marcus-David Peters, an educator who was shot and killed by a Richmond police officer in 2018 while experiencing a mental health crisis.
According to the papers, the Marcus Alert work group will be required to be up and running by October, while the civilian review board task force will need to submit its final recommendations to council by March 1, 2021.
The two measures, introduced by 5th District Councilwoman Stephanie Lynch and 9th District Councilman Michael Jones, echo the demands of local Black Lives Matter protesters, who have rallied throughout the city for nearly two sustained months. Lynch, a former social worker, said the measures present an exciting opportunity for Richmond to lead the way in reshaping police practices and ensuring that city residents struggling with mental health issues are met with the care they need.
“It is an extremely important moment for us to regain trust and to truly build a process that ensures that we have transparency and that we can hold [police] behaviors accountable,” she said of the civilian review board.
Although the measures received broad support from the panel, council members roundly rejected a third resolution proposed by Lynch and Jones that requested a report from the Richmond Police Department detailing expenditures in its 2020-21 budget that go toward “social service functions that do not directly relate to law enforcement work” such as mental health and substance abuse.
Based on that report, planned police spending in those areas could then be transferred to other city departments or community organizations that are more directly equipped to offer social services, Lynch and Jones explained. The Richmond Police Department received $96.4 million in the city budget for the current fiscal year.
“We can put money toward funding particular programs that will assist Black lives, and when you say Black Lives Matter — even though it means so many different things across the country — it just means one thing: that we matter, and it should matter in every area of how we legislate,” Jones said before the vote.
Lynch and Jones were the only council members to vote in favor of the resolution. While some opposing members said the proposed budget analysis process could be improved, others rejected it outright, comparing it to broader calls to "defund the police."
Council members Kim Gray and Kristen Larson voiced their opposition to the paper in a news release distributed before Monday’s meeting, citing a lack of clear policy direction and the pandemic’s ongoing impact on city revenues. Instead, the two council members advocated for a third-party review of the city’s general fund, including the police budget.
“I am ready and willing to [make budget cuts], but this resolution does not move money into new initiatives or policies,” Larson said. “I think it is not well thought out, I think it’s reckless, and I think we need to take some more steps before we start looking at moving money.”
However, the resolution’s patrons were adamant that it would not seek to defund or abolish the city’s police department, and would instead ensure that programs endorsed by council, including the civilian review board and the Marcus Alert, receive the funding they need to be effective. By voting down the proposal, Lynch cautioned, the council would simply be granting “lip service” to protester demands without finding ways to fund those efforts.
“The very real and tangible problem that we have before us is that the things that we just voted on will require funding if we really want to start demonstrative change in our communities,” she said. “It’s wonderful for us to pass these measures, but it’s another thing to fund them, and this moves us in that direction.”
Richmond Police Chief Gerald Smith, who also attended the virtual meeting, said the measure’s passage could worsen morale among city police officers and signaled that decreasing RPD’s funding could lead to increases in local police misconduct and use of excessive force in minority communities.
“I will examine the RPD budget head to toe in the spirit of improvement, but first, right now, I have to change the misconception that the RPD budget is up for grabs as if it were a yard sale,” Smith said. “People are trying to take advantage of this opportunity from every angle.”
Although she opposed the resolution, Council President Cynthia Newbille said she’d support revisiting the issue at council’s August meeting with a comprehensive review of all departmental budgets in the city to find the funding needed for the social service programs.
