Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards on Thursday said the department had reached out to pro-Palestine protest organizers to ask them to decrease the frequency of their demonstrations amid a surge in violent crime in the city and persistent police staffing issues.
In a text message sent by Richmond police officer Mohammed Maher Hameed to organizer Zaid Mahdawi, Hameed requested that the protesters give Richmond police “a little break.”
“We are extremely short,” Hameed said in the April 14 text, obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “We have to make sure that you guys are safe, and we have a lot of officers that will be tied up.”
A Richmond police officer speaks into his radio outside Quirk Hotel on April 7 as pro-Palestine marchers leave the area.
NICOLAS GALINDO, TIMES-DISPATCH
Richmond police spokesperson James Mercante told the Times-Dispatch that Hameed was asked to make contact with Mahdawi because the two had a prior relationship. But Mahdawi said that he and Hameed are not friends, and have only briefly crossed paths while playing pickup soccer.
In the text, Hameed suggested that the protesters’ April 14 event had detracted from the department’s ability to effectively respond to that day’s fatal shooting of four people, including a 16-year-old, in Richmond’s East End.
“Less than six officers were at the scene because everyone was at the rally,” Hameed said in the text. “To call it chaos would be an understatement.”
In exchange for Mahdawi’s cooperation with the request, Hameed told Madhawi that Richmond police could “speak to the (commonwealth’s) attorney about options” related to unlawful protest charges filed against Mahdawi in connection with an April 7 demonstration outside the Quirk Hotel, where Sen. Tim Kaine was holding a book-signing event.
“I’m aware of your arrest,” Hameed said in the text. “We could work something out in a way.”
Edwards confirmed that he had directed a supervisor to ask Hameed to reach out to Mahdawi, but said he “didn’t tell (Hameed) how to say it.” He said that the proposal was admittedly atypical for situations like Mahdawi’s.
“Obviously, (Mahdawi) has pending charges,” Edwards said. “The commonwealth attorney could take … his cooperation into account with any options as far as any deals they may offer him.”
The impetus for the text message was the recent spike in fatal shootings across Richmond, Edwards said. As officers have worked to respond to the scenes of those shootings, the already short-staffed department has been hamstrung by the necessity of keeping tabs on the protesters.
Of particular concern are the marches, Edwards said. While events staged in one location — such as Monroe Park — require only a limited police presence, marches through city streets demand a significant bump in deployed resources.
“(The staffing issue) is definitely not a secret,” Edwards said, adding that the department is over 150 officers short of its authorized force level. “Every weekend for this, we’ve had to call in teams of officers on their days off. I just felt like those officers would be so much better served (elsewhere) while our city was struggling with so many shootings.”
So if the protesters agreed to gather less often and remain in one place, they would help Richmond police focus on “violence in our city, as opposed to violence across the globe,” Edwards said.
But Mahdawi pushed back on the idea that the protests were interfering with the efforts of Richmond police to contain gun violence.
“The protests are our First Amendment right,” Mahdawi said, “and we are in no way, shape or form stopping (them) from doing (their) jobs.”
Mahdawi said officers showed up at Monroe Park last Sunday simply to watch the group make bracelets, which he called an obvious sign that “they’re misusing their resources and their personnel.”
“That’s their problem,” he said.
He described Hameed’s text as a “coercive … and corrupt” attempt to blame the protesters for recent gun violence.
“We don’t need them to protect us, and they know that damn well,” Mahdawi said. “This is a sign that (the protests) are working. It’s causing entities and agencies in the local government to take sides.”
“And we haven’t been as disruptive as we need to be, to be honest,” Mahdawi added.
Edwards explained that officers had been dispatched to Monroe Park last Sunday after protesters did not respond when asked by police about their plans for the day. He denied the claim that Hameed’s message was an attempt at coercion, and clarified that he was not attempting to blame the group for the shootings.
“This was obviously not some kind of demand,” Edwards said. “It was a conversation. I thought maybe they would be moved by the sheer amount of people shot.”
War in Gaza marks grim 6-month milestone
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