Charlottesville City Council briefed on Project Safe Neighborhoods

The Charlottesville Police Department has not yet released its annual report for 2024, but Police Chief Michael Kochis told City Council on February 3, 2025 that violent crime was down last year after increases in 2021 and 2022.

“Last year, we had a 10 percent decrease in part one crime, which are the most serious crimes,” Kochis said. “Homicides are down 76 percent last year. And so the numbers are good, right, but they’re not zero. We just had a young man killed the other night.”

Kochis was on hand to tell Council about Project Safe Neighborhoods, a federal initiative that comes out of the University of Virginia President’s Council on Community Partnerships. He told Council the initiative brings both a framework and resources.

“It gives us resources at the federal level that we don’t have at the state level,” Kochis said. “I’m hoping we don’t have to use any of those resources.”

One of the specific mechanisms in Project Safe Neighborhoods is to offer “call-in” meetings where people who may otherwise end up committing violent crime are brought-in to discuss what community support they may need. None have happened yet.

“It’s taken a while to make sure that we had the capacity,” Kochis said. “Thing we didn’t want to do is call someone in and they say, hey, what do you need? And they say hey, I need job training, I need this, I need that. Oh, and we don’t have it, you know, so we wanted to make sure that we had the capacity to actually do what we say we were going to do.”

Councilor Lloyd Snook said Council has been dealing with this issue for a number of years and had had many presentations. He said that included discussions on youth violence.

“It was particularly distressing back then that there seemed to be a lot of young people who every time they had some sort of a beef, they wound up going and finding a gun and shooting wildly all over the place, and occasionally they actually hit somebody,” Snook said.

Snook said that lead to funding of groups like the BUCK Squad, who now go by the name Central Virginia Violence Interrupters, to try to stop violence.

Chief Kochis said many of those disputes are settled with gunfire because firearms are plentiful. He said the issue is complicated because it derives from poverty.

“From where I stand as the police chief, my concern is these young individuals, their access to firearms and using them to just settle what would just be a petty beef that now linger online for a very long time,” Kochis said. “And that’s what we continue to see. We have not seen many shootings or violent crime associated with the drug distribution.”

You may recall that Charlottesville High School was briefly closed in November 2023 because of violence. If not, go back and read this story. When Snook asked Kochis if he had any information on whether that was still an issue, the chief said he did not have that data on hand.

“I could probably get some of that, but I think we’re in a better place today than we were this time last year when it comes to schools,” Koc I feel safe saying that.

Misty Graves, Charlottesville’s Human Services Director, said there have been new initiatives.

“We have a couple new initiatives going into the schools to work on pro social skills, confidence building, self esteem, conflict resolution, identity,” Graves said. “These are gender based groups so there’s a girls’ circle and a boys’ council. And so youth that are in Walker and Buford be able to engage in that.”

A slide from the presentation shown to Council. View the rest here.

Councilor Natalie Oschrin wanted to know more about about how the call-in meetings work. Chief Kochis said that individuals who might be asked to call-in are scored on a matrix that factors in criminal history and other activities.

“If you were involved in a gun violence incident or were caught with a firearm, you know, stuff like that,” Chief Kochis said. “And then once that score comes up, we developed a list and say we’re going to take the top.”

Graves said the number of individuals is around 20 at the moment. The idea will be to work with community partners and parole officers to facilitate meetings to ask what they need for support. Two facilitators have been selected but so far there have been no meetings.

Mayor Juandiego Wade asked if there was any possibility federal involvement would be curtailed given the Trump administration’s campaign to take control of all federal funding.

“The folks who we work with at the U.S. attorney’s office we’ve been working with for years through multiple administrations,” said Chief Kochis. “It’s the same line level career prosecutors that know this community who live in this community who you all know and so I don’t suspect any of that’s going to change and I’ll do everything in my power to make sure it doesn’t.”

When the city is ready to post its annual report, you’ll be able to get that in this newsletter or on Information Charlottesville. Here are similar reports:

• UVA Public Safety report published, October 6, 2022
• Charlottesville Police Department releases annual report for 2023, May 22, 2024
• Albemarle Police report: Homicides increases in 2023, but property crime slightly down, March 29, 2024

Before you go: This article was originally sent out as part of the Charlottesville Community Engagement newsletter in the February 4, 2025 edition. Both are functions of Town Crier Productions. You can support the work by purchasing a paid subscription or contributing monthly through Patreon. You can also send in a check or send an email, but drop me a line first!