Homicides in Hampton Roads rose sharply over the past two years, following a national trend
More than 200 people lost their lives to homicides in Hampton Roads last year, as the region experienced a spike in killings similar to those in other major U.S. cities.
Hampton Roads’ seven largest cities recorded a total of 207 slayings in 2021, the highest in recent memory and a 20% increase over the year before, according to data provided by local police departments and tallied by the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot.
That’s on top of an 18% spike in 2020 — meaning killings rose 42% in two years since the seven cities lost 146 people to homicides in 2019.
Several people were killed in domestic disputes between couples in 2021. Others were slain during arguments between acquaintances — such as two Hampton men, one armed with a sword, who stabbed each other to death during a May street fight.
Three women were shot to death Nov. 3 at Norfolk’s Young Terrace after they tried to help a young woman who was allegedly shot by her baby’s father. A 10-month-old in Newport News was stabbed to death in May, and his mother charged with murder.
The overwhelming number of killings in Hampton Roads were by handgun.
Norfolk led the region in terms of the sheer number of people slain. The city recorded 61 homicides in 2021 — a 60% jump from 38 two years before.
But Portsmouth had the region’s highest homicide rate when adjusted for population, with roughly 36 killings per 100,000 people.
Local police chiefs and law enforcement experts cited a range of factors for the increase — from increased societal stresses brought on by the pandemic, to increased prevalence of guns on the street in the hands of young people, to a pullback in aggressive policing in response to criticism.
In Hampton, which had 33 killings — its highest tally in at least 45 years — Police Chief Mark Talbot said stresses and pressures stemming from the pandemic and its lockdowns helped to drive the increases.
“Urban America is suffering, as is much of the country, through this pandemic,” said Talbot, who took the division’s helm in September, adding it’s “a hallucination that people are more violent now than in the past.”
“It brought adversity that we’ve literally never seen in many of our lifetimes,” he said of the pandemic. “The economy has collapsed in many places. The so-called social safety net is full of holes ... Even at its best, it’s full of holes, but now the holes are bigger.”
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A national increase
The increase in Hampton Roads comes as major cities across the United States have experienced noticeable homicide spikes since 2019.
The number of homicides rose by 30% nationally in 2020, to 21,570 slayings — the largest one-year jump since the FBI began keeping records. That marked a greater increase than in the seven Hampton Roads cities, where homicides were up 18% the same year.
The increase — driven in part by upticks in larger cities such as Chicago, New York and Philadelphia — drove the nation’s homicide rate up from a low point of 4.4 slayings per 100,000 in 2014 to 6.5 unjustified killings per 100,000 people in 2020.
Despite the recent increases, the number of U.S. homicides remains below the all-time high of 24,703 homicides recorded in 1991. Before the spikes, the national murder rate had been on a mostly downward trajectory since the mid-1990s.
“We wouldn’t be noticing these surges were it not for the fact that we’ve had these declines over the past couple decades,” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “So part of it is that we’re a victim of our own success.”
Fox said he also expects anither increase in homicides nationally in 2021 when the FBI statistics are released this fall. But he and other experts say it will be well below the 2020 spike, with preliminary projections ranging from 3% to 10%.
As for what is driving the increases, Fox said gun sales have risen across the country in recent years, and many Americans had more free time amid the pandemic because they were out of work and school.
“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” he said. “When people are not involved in a structured activity, that can lead to conflict with others. And then there also was during the pandemic a lot of instances of domestic homicides as couples and families are in close quarters.”
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‘An alarming number’
In terms of sheer numbers, Hampton recorded 33 homicides in 2021 — more than double the 15 in 2019 and surpassing the 31 killings recorded in 1975. But police say seven of those were justified acts of self-defense, which would reduce to 26 the number reported to the FBI.
Chesapeake had the largest homicide increase in the region — with its 26 killings in 2021 more than triple the eight recorded in 2019. (The 26 homicides include a police shooting on the interested handled by the Virginia State Police).
“For us, it’s an alarming number,” Chesapeake Police Chief Col. Kelvin L. Wright said of the spike. “We haven’t seen numbers like this since the crack epidemic of the late ‘80s.”
About a third of the city’s 2021 slayings were domestic in nature, which Wright attributes in large part to the pandemic and the isolation and mental health challenges it brought.
“Man is a social creature,” Wright said. “And when you restrict people’s ability to carry out life as we know it, people don’t necessarily think correctly, and hostilities increase. Violence sometimes is a result.”
Moreover, a seemingly endless prevalence of guns on the street — many ending up in the hands of young people — also are to blame for the spiking numbers, some local police chiefs said.
“Access to guns and weapons — and young, untrained minds and hands,” said Portsmouth Police Chief Renado Prince when asked what was driving his city’s spiking homicide numbers. “We have young people with weapons in their hands.”
Portsmouth had 35 killings for the year, up 94% from 18 recorded in 2019.
And 11 of the city’s homicide victims last year — nearly a third — were juveniles. Four minors — boys between 14 and 17 — were killed in one particularly deadly three-day stretch from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2.
When young people get access to guns, Prince said, they instantly have only one way to settle a disagreement.
“You give them a weapon, especially a young mind, and you have just taken away a bunch of their options,” he said. “They go from ‘fight or flight’ to fight equals pulling out a gun and shooting somebody.”
After one of the recent juvenile shootings, Prince recalled what a 16-year-old girl told an officer on the scene. She said young people today are “just lost.”
“We don’t know which way to go, we don’t know what to do, we just lost so we don’t care,” said Prince, recalling the girl’s words. “That was a striking conversation coming from a young lady who was self-aware. How do we find direction? That’s the question.”
Newport News counted 31 slayings for the year. That’s up 15% from the 27 in 2019, a relatively modest increase compared to several other local cities. Still, it’s only three shy of the Newport News’ high of 34 homicides in 1974.
Virginia Beach, for its part, was the only large city in Hampton Roads to report a decrease, with 15 killings for the year. That was down not only from the 34in 2019 — the year of the mass shooting in which 13 people were killed — but also from the 20 in 2020.
The Virginia Beach Police Department did not respond to an inquiry as to whether its 2021 tally included a police officer’s shooting of Donovan Lynch at the Oceanfront in March, a controversial killing that a grand jury determined to be a justified act of self-defense.
Overall, the tallies set Hampton Roads’ 2021 homicide rates — the number of killings per 100,000 people — at 35.8 in Portsmouth; 25.6 in Norfolk; 24.1 in Hampton; 16.6 in Newport News; 10.4 in Chesapeake; 6.4 in Suffolk and 3.3 in Virginia Beach.
The numbers were lower in surrounding counties.
James City County had three homicides for the year, while York County, Williamsburg and Isle of Wight had one apiece. There were no reported killings in Gloucester or the rest of the Middle Peninsula, and Poquoson maintained its streak of zero homicides since the early 1980s.
Police departments in the seven cities have made arrests or otherwise closed 122 of their 207 homicide cases, or 59%, in 2021, according to agency figures. Cases can be closed through a variety of means, including the arrest of a suspect, the death of the offender, or a determination that a killing was justifiable self-defense.
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The role of law enforcement
Some in law enforcement maintain that mounting political pressures and scrutiny of police officers over police killings — most notably the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 — have caused officers to pull back on arrests and proactive enforcement.
Wright said his hunch is that some officers are likely backing off of proactive steps because they don’t want to be “all over the media for doing their jobs.”
He tells his officers that their body-worn cameras will protect them.
“Someone can take just a snippet of video and make you look bad,” Wright said. “But we have the full video ... and rest assured that we will use all the tools that we have available to make sure that the truth gets out.”
Joseph Giacalone, a retired 20-year New York Police Department sergeant and adjunct professor of criminal justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, doesn’t buy the pandemic explanation.
The whole world has faced the pandemic, he said, but the increase in killings appears confined to the United States.
Giacalone asserts that a police pullback in the face of criticism has combined with softer prosecutions to leave more would-be killers on the street.
Police officers, he said, often don’t want their arrests to end up on social media. They also don’t want to get sued, get hit with civilian complaints or otherwise castigated if “things go sideways” when they take proactive steps.
Officers still respond to 911 calls and accidents, Giacalone said, but fewer take it upon themselves to do the aggressive policing they once did routinely.
“Quite frankly, nobody wants to be bothered with that anymore,” he said. “It’s those investigations that get done by patrol officers — the intelligence gathering that they get from stopping cars and arresting people with drugs and guns in the car — that’s what you lose.”
But Fox disputes that characterization, calling the notion that police have backed off a speculative theory that’s difficult to measure. He said there’s “no real evidence” that it’s a “widespread, pervasive and persistent problem in America.”
“Certainly there are some cops who have responded that way — that it’s better to be safe than sorry,” he said. “But it’s certainly not all cops. And for those who have had that reaction, it’s not necessarily something that has persisted over time.”
But some Hampton Roads police chiefs point to other factors that they believe have limited local officers’ ability to proactively police.
Wright said a new Virginia law designed to curb racially targeted policing — by precluding them from pulling cars over on a host of vehicle equipment violations — gives officers fewer opportunities to take criminals off the streets.
“There’s people who are involved in criminal activity who know that we no longer possess some of the tools that we used to have in order to help prevent crime,” the Chesapeake chief added.
“I dare say that in looking at my officers’ self-initiated activity, we’ve noticed there’s been a decrease,” Wright said. “But we’re trying to decipher how much of that is actually COVID and how much was a result of a change in the law.”
Prince agreed that the new state law, passed in late 2020, does make it more difficult for officers to “establish contact” with people they suspect of unlawful activity.
“But it has not made it impossible,” the Portsmouth chief said. “It just means that we have to examine the laws that we have left and find a way to apply those so that we are able to operate and still within the confines of the law.”
Talbot said departments have to continue to challenge officers to be proactive.
“I don’t believe that police officers, in any meaningful number, are refusing to do what needs to be done to save lives,” the Hampton chief said. “It is hard in this business, and it’s harder now. The officers on the street are carrying the weight of the adversity in our cities, and we should thank them for that.”
But police officers “are absolutely up for the challenge,” he said, adding that local residents shouldn’t feel nervous for their own personal safety.
“Some residents living in some parts of the city engaging in some types of behaviors stand far more risk of violence,” Talbot said. “But the vast majority of residents, the vast majority of people who live in the city of Hampton are profoundly safe.”
Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com
