On February 20, Charlottesville Police Chief Michael Kochis spoke with CBS19 about gun violence in the City. Since September last year, there's been a steady stream of reported shootings, some, like the shooting of three UVA football players in November, got national attention, and others, like the shooting of Eldridge “Skeeta” Smith, a beloved father, friend, and someone actually dedicated to stopping gun violence, hit closer to home. As the Daily Progress has reported, 21 people have been injured and 11 killed by gun violence in Charlottesville and Albemarle County since September.

Kochis said he planned to zero in on "hot spots" where shootings occur and "build, from the ground up, a crisis response team." Kochis was careful to say he would not be reactivating the SWAT team, which has been on “operational stand down” since former Police Chief Rashall Brackney disciplined and fired some members of the unit for disturbing behavior, including videotaping simulated sex acts, circulating nude videos of females and themselves, videotaping children of SWAT members detonating explosives, and making comments about City command staff such as “I say we kill them all and let God sort it out."

“I’m not ignorant of what happened with the SWAT team here,” Kochis said. “I mean, I read the file. We’ll get it right.”

Kochis has also been doing "walk-and-talks" in different neighborhoods and CPD social media has included friendly officer profiles, puppies, and kids wearing police hats. And, of course, Kochis mentioned the perennial need for more officers and said the "biggest focus right now" was on the budget, which at $20 million a year is second only to public school funding, so the department can get pay raises to attract officers. Many in Charlottesville believe more money for the police won't solve the problem, while others think a greater police presence in our neighborhoods is needed.

Just a few days after Kochis spoke to CBS19, 20-year-old Nicklous Pendleton was shot in broad daylight — as kids were getting out of school — while he was driving down Page Street in his pickup truck. He later died. Kochis later announced he would be holding a Community Forum at Old Trinity Church on 10th Street on Monday, February 27 to discuss recent gun violence, which is also going to be live-streamed.

Recently, Kochis spoke again about his plans with Hawes Spencer at The Daily Progress and revealed what he had learned from visiting neighborhoods.

“I’ve been walking through the communities and speaking with folks – to really listen to those folks who live in those communities who are most affected by gun crime,” Kochis said. “And the message that I have heard is very clear. They want police in their communities. They want us to be the police again.”

While it's unclear exactly what "being police again" is going to mean, Kochis said he plans to increase patrols in the 10th and Page neighborhood, others near it, and at the UVA Corner. Plainclothes officers will also be deployed in those neighborhoods, and he says he's assigned a detective to work with the FBI’s Safe Streets Task Force. He's also putting an emphasis on public relations.

“Over the last four or five years, this police department has stopped engaging with the community,” he told the DP. “We stopped having National Night Out, we stopped doing the Community Police Academy, we stopped doing these programs that were designed to involve the community with the police department and build meaningful relationships.”

Of course, that can be a challenge for police in certain communities, as the police themselves in the U.S. have shot and killed 1,079 people in the last 12 months, according to the Washington Post's police shooting database.

Meanwhile, the Albemarle County Police department is dealing with gun violence problems as well. Joshua Lamont Jones, 34, was shot and killed on February 22 on Timberland Lane, which followed a shooting at nearby Cavalier Crossing apartments on February 15 that injured a child. In December, the ACPD held a press conference to discuss their efforts to address gun violence, connecting it specifically to gang activity.

However, while Kochis and the ACPD focus on street shootings and policing, with a focus on potential gang or drug-related activity, the gun violence we've been experiencing as a community, and as a nation, happens under a variety of circumstances. UVA football players Lavel Davis Jr., D'Sean Perry, and Devan Chandler were shot and killed on a bus full of UVA students coming back from a field trip to see a play in D.C. While UVA and the community mourn their loss, and a $1.5 million external investigation of the circumstances surrounding the shooting will be launched, there’s still little information about why something so senseless like this happened.

It's also still jarring to think that Matthew Farrell, a kind and unique figure of the vibrant 1990s art scene in Charlottesville, was shot by a lover who appears to have needed physiatric help. Or that a single mother of four, Sabrina Jenkins, 37, was shot in her car parked along Stony Point Road. A man who had lived with her was arrested and charged with her murder.

Then there’s the apparent kidnapping plot gone wrong that ended in a shootout in front of the Fitzgerald Tire Company Co. building in Downtown Belmont between men from Maryland and Texas, leaving one man dead under a sheet in the parking lot. Meanwhile, there have still been no arrests in the shooting death of Daquain Maurice Anderson, 29, just off the downtown mall last September, or in the afternoon drive-by shooting that same month on Anderson Street that left two men wounded and neighbors traumatized. As this short video shows, the frantic neighbors rushed to treat a wounded man before an ambulance arrived.

As The DTM reported, gun violence even happens accidentally. In December, Charlottesville and UVA PD intercepted a 911 call about a shooting, learning that the shooter had been cleaning his gun at home when it discharged and struck another person in the room. The driver was rushing the person to the UVA ER when he made the 911 call, so the police escorted him to the hospital. The person survived, while the person cleaning the gun "had some mental anguish," according to police.

And gun violence can, of course, be self-inflicted. Back in September, a Charlottesville Police officer pulled over a wanted man on Elliot Avenue, a man he was familiar with and talking to, he told dispatchers. The man suddenly fled the scene and crashed his vehicle not far away, and when officers approached the vehicle the man showed a firearm and shot himself, according to police reports.

Indeed, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 45,222 people died of gun-related injuries in 2020 - more than half of those were suicides.

And more recently, things got real on the set of CBS19 when meteorologist AJ Willy recounted his friendship with former colleague Dylan Lyons of Spectrum News 13 in Orlando, who was shot and killed while covering a homicide this week. Sadly, a display of sadness and grief in the aftermath of shootings has become commonplace.

Of course, one of the biggest problems we have is that it’s almost impossible to have a serious discussion about gun violence and its causes, as we are so politically divided on the issue. While the majority of Americans favor sticker gun laws, our two major political parties are so firmly divided on the issue that there’s no way of passing them.

Indeed, any debate or discussion is likely to get heated quickly. Meanwhile, suggestions for solving the problem always trigger a dizzying array of sub-debates about programs for at-risk youth, mentoring initiatives, the need for more or less more policing, creating economic opportunity, harsher sentences, having more guns, having less guns, mental health issues, poverty, systematic racism, crime, drug use, income inequality, inflation, and just about every other social ill. We’ve arrived at a very strange place where debates about gun violence tend to be about trying to fix people.

In the wake of the shooting at UVA, Virginia Democratic state Senator Creigh Deeds, with assistance from UVA and its police department, authored a bill that would have increased the penalty for carrying a firearm on schools grounds and given police more power to conduct searches in university buildings, but it was predictably killed by the Republican-controlled Public Safety Committee. “I wasn’t shocked at the outcome,” Deeds told the Daily Progress. “I was more so shocked that they didn’t give the courtesy of listening to it.”

And that wasn't even a bill about passing sticker gun laws, the kind Happy Perry, the mother of slain UVA football player D’Sean Perry, immediately called for after her son was killed.

“The red flags were there. And this young man was still able to purchase a firearm," Perry told the AP, referring to Christopher Darnell Jones Jr, the UVA student and former football player who shot her son. "And that in itself is a red flag for our nation.”

A nation that, according to the latest figures from a leading Swiss-based research project, now has a ratio of 120.5 firearms per 100 residents, a ratio far greater than any other country in the world. By comparison, Canada has a ratio of 34.7 per 100 residents.

Sadly, while the red flags continue to fly, our leaders appear unwilling to agree on what the facts are about gun violence, or what the solutions might be to stop it, and so the familiar cycle of shock and grief continues.

Meanwhile, under this stalemate, concerned communities tired of the cycle of violence, tired of the debate surrounding guns, have been forced to play defense, turning us into a country literally at war with itself. As the New York Times recently reported, schools are spending billions on tech to prevent shootings and a whole military-style industry has emerged to protect us from would-be shooters.

It’s insanity, of course, with no immediate end in sight.

Update 3.6.23:

Just a day after this story was posted a new circumstance surrounding gun-related violence in Charlottesville was added: a police-involved shooting on Tuesday, February 28 that left 44-year-old Billy Sites dead, with eyewitness and police offering conflicting accounts of what happened. And several days after that, on Saturday, March 4, yet another one was added when a shootout took place inside a convenience store on Cherry Avenue in the middle of the afternoon that left a 20-year-old dead and a 17-year-old wounded in what police are calling part of an “ongoing dispute” between the young men.