My Ghost Vapes

The numbers say Richmond is safer. Redd Street didn’t get the memo.

Homicides are at a ten-year low. On a Sunday evening off Mechanicsville Turnpike, a man walked past my car carrying an AR-15 in his hands.

, 5 minute read

Sunday evening I drove to Redd Street to volunteer. I go talk to the guys in a substance abuse program there. I pulled up around 6:30.

Half a block north, at the corner of Mechanicsville Turnpike and Redd, there is a convenience store. Twenty to forty people were standing outside it, flying flags and trapping. Wearing their colors, selling their product, out in the open.

While I was getting my stuff together, about six guys started walking south down Redd toward Mosby Court, which sits at the other end of the block. Three of them walked past my car and around it, sizing me up and yelling back to the guys trailing behind them. I looked in my rearview mirror. One of the guys trailing was open carrying an AR-15 in his hands. No sling.

I put the car in gear and took off. I circled the block, pulled into the alley and parked in the back.

I have never seen trap boys, gangs and open carrying like that in Richmond. Not even in the projects.

I know those blocks. In the mid-00s, when I was in active addiction, I spent a lot of time in Mosby Court and Whitcomb Court. I did drugs there. And I felt safe enough that I could get out and walk around, even at night. Eventually, in December of ’08, Richmond police served me with a formal trespass from every public housing project in the city. Around here they call it a barment.

Trust me, it’s different out here now.

What the numbers say

Here is the thing. By every count the city keeps, Richmond is safer right now than it has been in years.

COVID broke something everywhere. Murders in the United States went up nearly 30 percent from 2019 to 2020, the biggest one-year jump since anybody started keeping national records in the 1960s. Richmond went from 59 homicides in 2019 to 66 in 2020, then to 90 in 2021, the most since 2004. Police said young people were behind much of it. They recovered 947 guns that year, and more than half of them were stolen.

Then it came down. 59 in 2022. 63 in 2023. 54 in 2024, and 54 again in 2025, the lowest in eight years. Nonfatal shootings in 2025 were the lowest in ten.

This year is better still. At the midpoint of 2026, Richmond had 22 homicides, down a third from the year before. The police chief said it was the lowest number since 2015.

For scale: in 1994 this city buried 160 people. In forty-five days in 1992, one crew killed ten.

Both things are true

A homicide count tells you how many people died. It doesn’t tell you how bold the corner is.

Forty people out front of a store, colors on, product moving, and a rifle carried down the sidewalk before dark: none of that is a number on a police chart until somebody pulls a trigger. A city can be getting safer on paper while one block gets more comfortable doing what it does where everybody can see it.

And Richmond’s violence has always been packed into a handful of places. It was in 1994 and it still is. The citywide number can drop while the same few blocks stay hot, or get hotter.

About that rifle

Virginia lets you open carry. But Richmond is one of a short list of cities where state law makes it a misdemeanor to carry a loaded semi-automatic rifle with a magazine that holds more than 20 rounds on a public street or sidewalk. A standard AR magazine holds 30.

So what I saw was probably illegal, not just scary. The strange part is the exception: if you have a concealed handgun permit, that law doesn’t apply to you. A new version takes effect statewide in July 2027 and drops that exception.

The bigger law, the assault weapons sales ban the governor signed this year, was supposed to start July 1. It is on hold in court until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on related gun cases. It would not have touched a rifle somebody already owned anyway.

What I take from it

I’ll give the city its credit. Fifty-four is not ninety, and twenty-two at the halfway mark is not anything Richmond has seen in a long time. Somebody is doing something right, and fewer families are burying somebody this year. That matters more than anything I saw from my car.

But a number is not a block. Nobody on Redd Street was checking the midyear report. What I saw Sunday wasn’t a body count. It was a crowd that had nothing to hide and knew it. Back in ’08 people at least looked over their shoulder. Now they carry it in their hands and walk it down the middle of the street.

And here’s what sits with me. I was there to talk to guys trying to get clean. When their meeting lets out, that corner is the first thing they see. Half a block from the door, the same thing that put them in that program is being sold out in the open. I know how that goes. I’ve been on the other side of that corner.

So, yes, the numbers are down. Go stand on Redd Street at 6:30 on a Sunday and tell me how it feels.

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