Richmond, California
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Publius
26 October 2026.
Tuesday’s Council agenda has two items about the Office of Neighborhood Safety, and I read both with the fondness one has for an old family photograph. The question in a photograph is who is standing in it.
Item S.1 is a presentation by Professor Jason Corburn of UC Berkeley on the Office’s effect on gun violence, sponsored, the agenda says, by Councilmember Claudia Jiménez and Councilmember Sue Wilson. Item Q.2.a, on the consent calendar, accepts a $3,674,258 state Proposition 64 grant that includes $982,795 for “program and operational support through the Office of Neighborhood Safety.” The staff report on S.1 lists one previous Council action: “July 17, 2007.”
The figures are good news. The city’s own submission to a state innovation program counts 42 homicides in 2006. The Police Department’s table lists 8 in 2023 and 6 in 2025, unaudited. A JAMA Network Open study published on August 31, with Professor Corburn among its authors, associates the Office’s Peacemaker Fellowship with a 61 percent reduction in fatal and nonfatal firearm assaults. The authors say the full-period results should be read with caution, and the Fellowship began in June 2010.
So where did the approach come from? The Council’s minutes have the earlier pages of the album.
In October 2005, Mayor Irma Anderson convened a conference called “Richmond Rises Above Violence.” On January 31, 2006, in her State of the City address, she asked the Council to commit up to $250,000 to “the public health model” and said: “I want to make it clear that this is my first priority.” On June 6, 2006, the Council voted eight to none, with one member absent, to hire The Mentoring Center, led by David Muhammad, for up to $250,000 “to establish the Office of Violence Prevention.” The minutes name DeVone Boggan as one of its consultants. Councilmember Bates moved the item and Vice Mayor Viramontes seconded. Mayor Anderson supported it, and it was moved and approved while she was mayor. The Council then had nine members, the mayor and eight councilmembers, and one of the nine seats was held by Councilmember Gayle McLaughlin, elected in 2004 as the Richmond Progressive Alliance’s endorsed candidate.
The record has a second thread. By the Council’s first meeting of 2005, the City had a new City Manager, Bill Lindsay. On December 6, 2005, the minutes record a community group congratulating him “for making the decision to choose Christopher Magnus as the new Police Chief.” The Council did not vote on the chief. Magnus was sworn in on January 31, 2006, and served until January 2016. In her address that month, Anderson said the new chief “understands the importance of the public health approach to violence prevention” and “wants to strengthen community policing.” Mr. Lindsay was also the staff sponsor of the June 2006 contract.
On February 24, 2015, Richmond Police Officer Erik Oliver was one of six officers who met President Obama and Vice President Biden in the Oval Office, according to a Justice Department blog. The Police Department said it was selected for “our progressive approach to community policing” and “the decline of our crime rate.” Chief Magnus’s official biography says he testified that year before the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Mayor McLaughlin took office in January 2007. On July 17, 2007, after the Mentoring Center’s final report, the Council unanimously adopted the staff recommendations to establish an Office of Neighborhood Safety. The City’s page “Remembering Mayor Irma Anderson” tells the earlier part in a sentence: she “encouraged the City Council to adopt a public health approach to violence prevention,” and “the City created an Office of Violence Prevention, which later became the Office of Neighborhood Safety.”
Now the Richmond Progressive Alliance’s history page. Its entry for 2005 to 2007 says that after Mayor McLaughlin’s election Richmond “invested in the Office of Neighborhood Safety, helping drive a dramatic drop in homicides.” It names no one else. It does not mention Mayor Anderson, her conference, or the Office of Violence Prevention. An organization’s history may reasonably begin where the organization does.
The record continues. The Police Department’s own chart of funded sworn positions reads 196 for 2014-15 and 183 for 2015-16, then 157 for 2020-21 and 145 for 2021-22. On June 30, 2020, the Council froze 21 vacant sworn positions and voted five to two to direct a plan “to transition from Richmond’s current ‘community policing’ model to a plan conducive to the reduced police force.” On June 15, 2021, it voted four to two, with one abstention, to cut $3 million from the department and eliminate 12 vacant sworn positions. The minutes list who cast each vote. The county grand jury reports that homicides fell from 18 to 11 between 2021 and 2024 while total violent crime rose about 23 percent.
Here is the argument. Nothing in the record says what caused the decline in homicides. But take the Berkeley study’s premise. If the drop owes something to a public-health program the Office runs, it owes something to the Office. If the Office owes something to the approach adopted in 2006, it owes something to the mayor who called that approach her first priority. That is three links, each in the record. The conclusion I draw is only that a program’s history includes the people who began it.
Who convened the 2005 conference? Who chose the chief whom Mayor Anderson described as someone who “wants to strengthen community policing”?
And when the Office’s history is told on Tuesday, will the 2005 conference and the 2006 vote be part of it?
— Publius
Sources: Council agenda, Oct. 27, 2026 · Staff report on item S.1 · Council minutes, Oct. 18, 2005 · Council minutes, Jan. 4, 2005 · Council minutes, Feb. 15, 2005 · Council minutes, Dec. 6, 2005 · Council minutes, Jan. 31, 2006 · Council agenda, June 6, 2006 · Council minutes, June 6, 2006 · Council minutes, July 17, 2007 · City of Richmond, Remembering Mayor Irma Anderson · City of Richmond, A Century of Service (list of police chiefs) · City of Richmond, Innovative Government submission (2014 homicide table) · Richmond Police crime statistics · JAMA Network Open, The Peacemaker Fellowship and Urban Gun Violence in Richmond · Richmond Progressive Alliance, What is RPA · Richmond Progressive Alliance, 2004 election results (archived) · Justice Department blog, What 21st Century Policing Means · Richmond Police Department post, Feb. 25, 2015 · Chris Magnus, official biography (House hearing, May 11, 2022) · Richmond Police Department budget presentation, June 7, 2022 · Adopted FY2020-21 operating budget · Council minutes, June 30, 2020 · Council minutes, June 15, 2021 · Richmond Confidential, June 18, 2021 · Contra Costa Civil Grand Jury report on Richmond police staffing, April 2025 · Publius, No. 27