The following is an extended version of the interview that appears in our August 2019 issue, heading to newsstands soon.
Richmond Police Chief William C. Smith (Photo by Jay Paul)
In announcing Richmond’s new police chief on June 26, Mayor Levar Stoney said that after an extensive process that drew applications from around the country, “Our search for the best candidate led us back to our own backyard.”
Richmond Police Department veteran William C. Smith “knows this department inside and out, and he knows and respects the Richmond community,” Stoney said. “He is thoughtful, detail-oriented, accountable, compassionate and fair. He is what every community needs in a police chief.”
A native of Richmond who grew up in Powhatan County, Smith says he initially wanted to attend Virginia Military Institute and become a Navy pilot, but lacking a scholarship to attend VMI, he enrolled instead in Virginia Commonwealth University, where he studied physics and anthropology before settling on computer science and earning a degree in management information systems.
During an interview with Richmond magazine in early July, Smith, 51, talked about his path to law enforcement, following in the footsteps of his father, Sherrell Michael Smith Jr., who retired from the RPD as a lieutenant the day the younger Smith graduated from the police academy.
Richmond magazine: What made you decide to go into police work?
William C. Smith: I had gotten into the computer field and actually had a pretty successful career with the state, but I really wasn’t satisfied in that career. I could not see myself basically being stuck in a cube looking at a computer screen for the next 30 years. I like being out, I like talking to people, I like being engaged in activities. So I started looking at policing. I had a few ride-alongs, and I thought, “This is really interesting.”
RM: What appealed to you about it?
Smith: The fact that it’s such a dynamic activity, in both the volume and the significance of the need to help people and how much you can have an influence, was very appealing. I’d never been in a job where 10 or 12 hours went by like the blink of an eye. When I first started out, the sergeant would say, “Give me your keys. It’s time to go home.”
“But — there’s more we can do.”
“There’s always more. Your shift’s over. Go home.”
That’s the way it’s been for 25 years.
RM: You started in the mid-1990s. Was that a challenging time to be an officer?
Smith: It was very challenging. Crack cocaine was probably at its zenith in terms of abuse and the impact that it had on people [and] the resulting violence and the disorder that we saw in the city. I can remember vividly the downtown area, at 5:30 after everybody left from government work or from businesses, it was like they rolled the carpets up and turned out the lights. You think about from that time frame to now; the city has done phenomenally well in that time period. The amount of activities that we have going on, the amount of people living downtown, people coming in on the weekends. The city is busy and just bustling with activity.
RM: How has the department changed during that time?
Smith: There's really no comparison. From a training standpoint, from an equipment standpoint, from a philosophical standpoint, it really is a night-and-day difference. When I first started, you’d have to hand off your radio to the person that’s filling in behind you. We didn’t have a whole lot of people, so I worked Whitcomb Court and Mosby Court by myself, and there were times we were working all of the East End with five or six people. I would call it triage policing, which is essentially run around with your hair on fire and do the very best you can in a very short amount of time to try and put a Band-Aid on [a problem] so that you can go run to something that’s more violent and more dangerous and again try to put a Band-Aid on that.
RM: What are some of the differences between then and now?
Smith: When you look at that period, one of the biggest changes was when Chief [Rodney] Monroe arrived and implemented sector policing, which put a lieutenant in charge of a geographical area, and their job was to be the primary point of contact for the community. That was where we really started to begin to be a community policing organization.
Police Chief William Smith (right) talks with Capt. Marty Harrison during a July community walk in Richmond’s Fawnbrook neighborhood. (Photo by Jay Paul)
RM: Why is community policing so important?
Smith: Our authority comes from the community, meaning that the community places their trust in us individually and us as an organization. In order for us to be effective, that authority, that trust must be legitimate. At its core, [that means] making sure that we provide transparent and accountable services and that we are, every day, working to build that legitimacy through engagement. That foundation is constantly being chipped away at by outside forces, sometimes by things we do inside the city. The officer that said some completely inappropriate things to the kids at Albert Hill [Middle School] — that is a significantly damaging incident.
RM: Can you explain how you handled that situation [when an officer cursed at a group of students in March]?
Smith: It was important to respond to that quickly. It was also important for me to respond to that internally, quickly as well as thoroughly. So on the day that it occurred, I had my internal affairs engaged in investigating that immediately. I said I want that officer in here today. I want you all to interview him today, and I want a completed investigation no later than, I think I gave them the weekend to get it complete. Which they did. I signed off on [the investigation] and recommended the appropriate disciplinary action and stood up before the media before a week was out and apologized to the community.
RM: Was there any other follow-up?
Smith: We’ve been working on a program that we’re getting ready to implement in the very near future called ART, which is Active Support Response Training. ART is a program by which we want to create group ownership of individual behavior. So, if Amy [Vu, a public affairs staffer present during the interview] and I are working together and I’m having a pretty lousy day, it provides us with the dialogue and structure with which Amy can say, “You all right, Will? Let me be the lead on this call, because I can see you’re about to lose your temper.” That is, in essence, what we’re trying to accomplish, to provide a structure by which co-workers can intervene either during a call for service or during their normal daily interactions to provide better support for each of us individually.
RM: The shooting death of 9-year-old Markiya Dickson in a park on Memorial Day weekend must have been another challenging time during your tenure as interim chief.
Smith: Certainly that was a pretty low point of the first six months of the year by a wide margin, just because of her age and innocence. I’ll say this: Every single homicide — regardless of what activities the person may or may not have been engaged in, that person is still somebody’s son or daughter, brother or sister, father, uncle, aunt — every single one is a tragedy, and it’s a tragedy for that family that you never recover from.
RM: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing the department now?
Smith: I look at [policing] in three components: on the front end trying to intervene, trying to prevent people from getting to the middle leg, which is the law enforcement side, then you have the third leg, which is restorative justice. Those are people who’ve already been through the law enforcement process, that are now coming back home. We need to develop our internal system so it’s providing us with better insight into where our intervention activities may be more successful or more needed or providing us with better information on where we can be more supportive of people on the restorative side.
RM: Can you give an example?
Smith: We respond to all the calls for runaways. [In those cases,] we know that there are one of two things going on, more than likely. One is the child is trying to get away from a really bad situation at home, whether that’s domestic violence, abuse or drug activity. Another possibility is the family dynamic is strong, and they’re trying to create a structure which the child is rebelling against. But regardless of the reasons why, we know that a runaway is a red flag for persons in need. Either the family is in need, or the child’s in need, or all of the above are in need. What do we do with that information? We need to be doing more than simply looking for and trying to find the runaway, which is the traditional approach. We also need to look at how do we partner with agencies to help support the family, help support that child, providing the resources that are needed in the order that they’re needed to have a successful outcome.
RM: Do you refer information to another agency that can step in?
Smith: We should be partnering with those agencies all the time. Here’s another piece: If you look at all of Richmond, and particularly the region, we have hundreds and thousands of programs that have all variety of support services for all kinds of issues. We don’t have a strong enough organization yet that says we really have a good understanding of all the players involved, what their capacities are, what their specialization is and how we as a police department can partner and be a better partner in that group. It is a lack of a structured interface between providers that we lack.
RM: Is that something you hope the police department can address?
Smith: We’re going to do that. While it may not be perfect, we’re going to do it as best we can, because that’s where I think our larger gains are. We are looking now to implement bringing in groups — bringing in all of our partners that we know of with the direction of “attend and bring a friend.” We’re going to start with that and build on it throughout all of our functional areas [to] try and get a better understanding of not only the capacity we have to support particular areas, but also where information sharing could be done.
RM: You’re the first person who’s been promoted to police chief in the department since 1967. What do you attribute that to?
Smith: Part of it is pretty easy to explain, because there was one chief from 1967 to 1989. Chief [Frank] Duling takes up a big chunk of that time. What I will say is this: I take it as the highest honor I could have to be that person. I’m going to do the absolute best I can for the people who work in the department, but I’m also going to do the very best I can for all of Richmond. There are some distinct advantages, I think, coming from within and being a Richmonder. There is no “get up to speed” or learn your personnel or learn the importance of the community or learn the importance of specific leaders in the community. In my opinion that is a huge advantage. The disadvantage is, while I’ve worked with a number of agencies across the United States and into Canada on some other projects, I don’t know their perspective. So my challenge is to take the advantages and make sure that I’m doing my very best to assess our processes, assess personnel, with as fresh a set of eyes as I can muster.
RM: How does it feel to lose the interim title and officially become chief?
Smith: I did not enter being the interim chief acting like the interim chief. I told the mayor and the [chief administrative officer] exactly that. I said, “If you put me in this role, I’m going to do the things that I think need to be done to move the organization forward.” I will say this: The first day that Chief [Alfred] Durham left and I was sitting in “the seat,” I felt the enormous burden of responsibility. There’s a lot of comfort in being able to provide the advice and being supportive, but not having to be the decision maker. When you are now the person that other people are advising, knowing that you have 230,000 citizens and untold visitors and you have a department of 883 people and there’s a lot of people depending on the department to do the right things, you certainly feel, almost physically, how heavy that responsibility is.
