Colette McEachin on gun violence, restorative justice, and the value of experience

Virginia has a Democratic primary coming up on June 17th. The party has already locked in its gubernatorial candidate, former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, so much of the media coverage has focused on the six-way fight for the lieutenant governor nomination. But also on the ballot is the Democratic slot for Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney. The city’s top prosecutor job has been held since mid-2019 by Colette McEachin, who has spent almost three decades rising through the office. The one-time Church Hill precinct prosecutor is running for reelection this year, and faces another primary challenge from Church Hill resident Tom Barbour, who previously lost the Democratic nomination to her in 2021.

“Richmond needs someone with perspective, with experience, with a depth of relationships that can be used to protect all of Richmond and to provide safety, second chances, and accountability,” McEachin told me in a phone interview earlier this month. “That’s the difference between me and Tom Barbour.”

That’s not the only difference, as you’ll see if you compare the conversation below to the one I had with Barbour last month. McEachin and I spoke for more than 40 minutes about her perspective on the surge of violent crime Richmond saw in the first quarter of 2025, the use of Flock Safety cameras in our community, and what the Commonwealth’s Attorney can (and can’t) do if federal agents try to detain people in Richmond’s courthouse like they did last month in Charlottesville. Plus much more.

Below is a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. This is The Lookout Interview with Colette McEachin, the current Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney and Democratic candidate for reelection to that office.

Dave Infante, The Church Hill Lookout: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today. Richmond has seen a big jump in population even since you first became Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney. So to start, could you give voters who are new here, or unfamiliar with your career, the short version of how you wound up in the role?

Colette McEachin, Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney: Thanks first for being willing to speak with me. I love Church Hill because I was a Church Hill precinct prosecutor for a number of years. It is a beautiful, historic part of Richmond. I grew up in Connecticut, so I am not a Richmonder, I'm a proud New Englander. I moved to Charlottesville to go to law school after graduating from Brown University. I met my husband, Donald, in law school. He was from Richmond, and he was very much a Richmond boy, so he was always going to come back to Richmond. We ended up continuing to see each other, and I eventually moved to Richmond.

I worked for a private firm in Atlanta and in Richmond, and then ran into David Hicks, who is currently a judge in the general district court. David, at that time, was working for Joe Morrissey and suggested that I look into becoming a prosecutor, because I was looking for more trial experience.¹ I was hired by Joe Morrissey, and I've been at the office ever since, except a few years when I was on maternity leave and on maternal sabbatical. I made my way up the ranks from assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney, to supervisor, to deputy. Then, Mike Herring, my immediate prior boss, asked me to be the interim Commonwealth’s Attorney when he resigned in the middle of his last term. I became the interim Commonwealth's Attorney after winning a firehouse primary in August of 2019, finished out Mike's term, then was reelected to my own term in 2021, when Tom and I ran against each other. My term now concludes at the end of this year, so I'm running for reelection.

You've had a lot of experience in Richmond’s Commonwealth’s Attorney office. In recent memory here in Richmond, is there a particular case that you think offers a hallmark or a showcase for voters on how you approach this work?

Wow. Well… in a 30-year career…

Well maybe just limit it to more recently. For example, I read a comment you gave to the press about personally involving yourself in prosecuting the Huguenot High School graduation shooting case in 2024. Can you speak to why you considered it important to try that case yourself?

Oh, that's a good case, because it touches on so many aspects of the justice system and how it impacts different people. The case has been well-covered, so I won’t go into the details, but the reason that I want to try that case, along with two of our most experienced homicide prosecutors, is because I wanted the community to know that the office took seriously a homicide that occurred right downtown in the middle of the day after an RPS high school graduation with thousands of people around. That we—well, not we, but the VCU police—were able to come in contact with the defendant Amari Pollard, retrieve his weapon immediately after he fired it multiple times, keep him calm. Police acted responsibly. Nobody pointed a gun at him. He was not somehow killed in the police interaction. The process worked smoothly, and at the end of the day, the case went to a jury at his request. There was a four-day jury trial, and then based on some rulings that went the Commonwealth's way, he and his attorney decided that he would plead guilty to first-degree murder and use of a firearm in the commission of that murder. He is now serving time.

The case so encapsulated a lot of the crime that occurs in Richmond. The Black victimization rate across the country is four to seven times higher than that of whites, and higher than that of the overall population. So once again, sadly, we had a young Black man with a gun—a teenager, only 19, bringing that gun onto VCU property because he left it in his car, then going to get the gun after the graduation because he was afraid that something might happen. When people ask me what I can do as a Commonwealth's Attorney to prevent gun violence and to reduce gun violence, what I can do is make sure that people understand that if you use a gun in a harmful or threatening way in the city of Richmond, you will be prosecuted. In Virginia, we know people love their guns. In America, we know people love their guns. There is no legal way for me to prevent someone from getting a gun. But if you have that gun and you use it [illegally], you're going to be prosecuted. I want that message to be loud and clear so that people understand that it's not normalized. There's no reason for you to have a gun at a high-school graduation, there's no reason for you to have a gun at a funeral in Oakwood Cemetery. People say “Oh, Richmond's dangerous, so I have a gun.” Well, you are making Richmond dangerous because you have a gun.

I'm glad you brought up the Oakwood Cemetery homicide. After that incident, Richmond Police Department Chief Rick Edwards, held a press conference, and he revealed that violent crimes are trending up year-over-year. We’re at 14 homicides through March 2025, compared to 11 by the end of March 2024, that’s a 27% increase. Aggravated assaults are up 30% in that period. Overall violent crime up 9%. Richmond has seen worse, of course, but those are meaningful increases. You told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that you want voters to know that “crime has gone down and community justice reforms have gone up.” How do you square that first claim with these upticks?

When you look at crime—and this is not for just Richmond—you can't look at it as a snapshot, but as a video. You are absolutely right, the numbers in the first quarter of this year are higher than they were in the first quarter of last year. But I am going to have more faith in what we are doing when I see the numbers at the end of December 2025. Because, theoretically, if no one else gets killed in the city of Richmond for the rest of the year, and the total number of homicides is in the teens or 20s, sadly for Richmond, that would be a “good” year. An outstanding year. The lowest homicide number that I can recall off the top of my head is 36 in the 1980s I believe, prior to the crack epidemic. Were you here in the ‘90s?

No, I’m one of those very new voters I was talking about who’ve moved to Richmond since your last election. But from what I’ve read, I understand it hit the city hard.

It was quite bad. We were the homicide capital of the United States, with 162 homicides in a year.² That means somebody was killing somebody almost every other day. It was horrific. And I was here in the office. So in the back of my head, I'm like, We're going to do whatever is necessary to not go back there. Now, a lot of that was driven by drugs and crack. Sadly, the thing that makes it so difficult to prevent gun violence now is, one, the accessibility of firearms, and two, the fact that people get mad. It's that simple. They get mad, they have a gun, they use the gun, then somebody ends up dead. It's not that there are MS-13 immigrant gangs running around Richmond. That's not what’s driving it. It's not that it's only happening in the “Big Six” Richmond Redevelopment & Housing Authority [public-housing developments.] The quote-unquote “projects” are not driving gun violence. What is driving gun violence is people's inability or reluctance to not shoot someone when they're angry. It is that simple.

Let’s discuss your goals with the Community Justice Reform Unit. Can you talk a little bit about that initiative, and characterize its efficacy in the years it’s been running?

The Community Justice Reform Unit was something that I started shortly after I was elected, so around 2021. I wanted to do two things with this unit: to make sure that the office as a whole was more accessible and “out there” for the community, and to make restorative justice an integral part of the Richmond court system and not something that was only occasionally being used in the [Juvenile and Domestic Relations] courts, as it was at that time. On the one hand, I'm really pleased, because there has been positive response, both from city government and from community members. We've been able to create the Richmond restorative justice organization, which is slowly becoming independent from my office and is working towards its 501(c)(3) status. That's the good news.

I had thought that when I promoted restorative justice as an alternative to the traditional courtroom process, people would be running towards it. That the numbers would blossom into the thousands. My office prosecutes roughly 13,000 cases a year, and we only have 40 attorneys. So that's almost 400 cases per person that the office is dealing with, and a lot of those cases are high violence, very complex. I though for sure that for the less serious cases where it's neighbor against neighbor, acquaintance against acquaintance, or even strangers with no serious personal injury, people would want to be able to talk with the person that harmed them and come up with a resolution outside of court. Then my office would be able to dismiss the charge, and then, the offender would be able to get it expunged. now get it expunged. One of the other things the Community Justice Reform Unit did was work with the clerk's office to smooth out the expungement process, I'm also very proud of that. But to get back to restorative justice, it turns out that people, once they're harmed, their property is damaged, either they don't want to “go light” on the defendant, or talk to the defendant; or, on the other hand, the defendant is not prepared to have a conversation with them and recognize any accountability or responsibility.

Sure, sure.

So that has caused us to take a step back. Is it because we're just at the beginning of this new process? It only rolled out over the past couple of years. I try to moderate my disappointment, my surprise that it has not been as overwhelmingly received as I thought it would be, with with the fact that, it’s still a new thing. The criminal justice system has been rolling on for hundreds of years. That's what people know. That's what they see on TV. That's what they hear people talk about on TikTok and Instagram. You don't hear that about restorative justice. So it’s simultaneously a creation process and an education process for the public.

Switching gears here. Automated license plate readers are scattered across Church Hill and throughout much of the city. RPD has called them a “force multiplier.” Civil-liberties advocates warn they’re part of “a system of mass surveillance.” I read your interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch announcing your reelection campaign. They quoted you saying, “The fact that there are surveillance cameras everywhere is so, so helpful.” I'm not sure whether that was referencing speed cameras or Flock cameras, so I figured I’d just ask: What's the McEachin view on ALPRs?

I want your readers to know that there is a distinction between Flock Safety’s gunshot detection devices and license plate readers. Those are two different things. And then, of course, another thing that has popped up in Richmond recently is the speed-detection cameras that are around some of the Richmond public schools and operating during school drop-offs and school pickups. So we have got three things going on.

Right. Noted.

I am of the opinion that if people are comfortable buying Ring cameras for their home so that they can see who comes up to their patio or front porch, or passes by on the street while they're away, then I see that as analogous to the Flock license plate readers. I think those protect the greater community in the same way that your individual Ring camera protects your person and your property. I don't know where all the LPRs are, because as you said that’s an RPD thing. But I do know that when you consider that the city of Richmond is roughly 60 square miles of land to have under 100 Flock cameras, I don't think is a lot. My basic position is, I do not think that they are a violation of the First Amendment. I do not think they are oppressive. Richmond Police Department, with its own attorneys, is very aware of all the litigation that originated from Norfolk regarding Flock cameras. In Richmond, I do not think they’re overused.

I can tell you, personally and explicitly, how valuable they are in identifying and catching people who have committed serious violent offenses, and how persuasive they are to a juror, to a community member who has been selected to sit in judgment to see whether the Commonwealth Attorney's office has enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to convince you and 11 other strangers that [a defendant] did it. Flock cameras, gunshot detectors, Ring cameras, the surveillance when you go into the 7-Eleven or the vape shop. All of that is incredibly helpful.

I have to follow-up on your parallel between a Ring camera and a Flock camera. There’s a substantial difference between individuals choosing to put this technology on their private property, and a state actor, in this case, RPD, putting it throughout our neighborhood. The difference in power dynamics between private individuals and the state is vast. Especially since other law-enforcement offices have access to the data ALPRs generate. It’s not just RPD, or Chesterfield PD, but also regional and federal agencies, including Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. We know ICE has accessed ALPR readers’ data already in so-called “sanctuary cities” to track individuals. These are considerations that I believe any prosecutor ought to be making about balancing the public good against the constitutional right to privacy and guarding against potential for state abuse of these types of surveillance systems. Can you describe how you view the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s role in striking that balance?

There will always be some new scientific thing that the law has to figure out how to balance with public safety and privacy rights. That is not new. So when there is a question, then the lawyers on both sides are very active in bringing those motions before the court. Right now, everybody in the Fourth Circuit—which is Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland—is waiting for the Fourth Circuit to issue its opinion [on the lawsuit over the city of Norfolk’s Flock usage.] That will, if not answer a lot of questions, temporarily answer a lot of questions, until it's appealed to the Supreme Court.

Our duty as a prosecutor's office, regardless of the nature of the concern, is we always are trying to strike a balance. We are the scales of justice. That's what we do. We balance the public, the private, the community, the defendant, the victim, the witness. We balance all of that on a daily basis and and that is a sacred duty, and trust that I do not take lightly, because, as a Black woman, honestly, I know how quickly things can fall off the rails.

I mentioned potential federal intervention in these systems because of the video taken in a Charlottesville courthouse earlier this month of purported federal agents in plainclothes and masks detaining someone they alleged was flagged for deportation. That hadn’t happened when your opponent spoke with The Lookout, but I posed a similar hypothetical scenario to him and asked what the Commonwealth’s Attorney could do about it, and what he would do about it if elected. Obviously it’s less hypothetical now, less than a month later. I wanted to give you an opportunity to speak about how you view the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s role in mediating the tension between local public safety and federal intervention in this sort of situation.

Let me just put a pin on your Flock camera concerns, since you mentioned ICE and people's fear that the Richmond Police Department is providing information from that system, or from speed cameras, to ICE. They are not. That is not happening.

Oh, I wasn’t saying RPD is proactively providing those data to ICE. Rather that ICE has accessed similar systems without a warrant in other cities. But yeah, put a pin in that.

So, since Tom [Barbour] was only a prosecutor for 10 months,³ I think he is still laboring under a misapprehension about what our powers and authority are, and how that works within the state and federal system. Any of his musings about “Oh, I would do this as a local prosecutor to prevent or obstruct federal law enforcement from doing X, Y and Z.” He actually doesn't have that authority. He can say what anyone can say, about how they feel about it. I have said publicly that that power does not exist at my level. If ICE officials come into the courthouse, they're allowed to come in the courthouse, just like you're allowed to come in the courthouse, just like the defendants’ friends who want to support him. It's a public forum.

What I have been doing as Commonwealth’s Attorney, is talking with the chief judge of the circuit court. The judges are working on a policy that all of them will follow regarding what happens if any law enforcement tries to come into a courthouse to arrest someone or detain someone or remove someone without legal authority. The judges have to be involved because they and the sheriff are responsible for what happens in the courthouse. So all of us are talking about that. In addition, I'm speaking with the chief judge of the Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court to make sure that they are aware there is such a thing under Virginia law as a “standby guardian,” so that if someone does gain entry to the courthouse, people know beforehand that there is a way for them to legally name a guardian for their child if they are removed from the courthouse, or their home, or they’re taken while at their job, whatever the case may be. I want that information to go out to the Hispanic community, and that is being disseminated. ICE cannot just barge into the Richmond Circuit Court courthouse, or any of the courthouses, and just grab people. That's just not going to happen. So the judges are working on a policy in all three of the courthouses to to handle that situation. But for people to believe that because you're the Commonwealth’s Attorney, you get to act like Donald Trump and just trample over other people's roles, authority, and powers, and disregard them because of what you want to do, I think is stupid and ridiculous and is not something that an elected official should do.

You say that ICE is not just going to barge into the Richmond courthouse and take people. I watched a video of them doing exactly that in Charlottesville three weeks ago. Why are you so confident that they wouldn't do something similar here?

I don't know what the policy was in the Charlottesville courthouse. I can’t speak to that. I know that the sheriff and judges in the Richmond courts are well aware of what they can do legally if any law enforcement comes in. Right now, everyone is focused on ICE, as they should be, because under Trump, ICE is being used as a terroristic device to scare people, to remove people from their families, to remove people from their communities. But if you pull back, ICE is a law-enforcement agency. They cannot just roll up into a Richmond circuit courthouse and start grabbing people because they think they have a warrant or without any type of legal proof.

You drew a parallel a moment ago, or at least I think you did, between your opponent’s views on how he would use the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office and Donald Trump's views on the Constitution and the rule of law and so forth. Frankly, that feels like a reach, so I want to make sure I understand the parallel you were drawing there. Can you elaborate on that?

I have not had any conversations with Tom about this, so I am basing this on your interview with him and on other statements he has made. It is clear that he does not understand, as Donald Trump does not understand, that there are three co-equal branches of government. Commonwealth’s Attorney is an executive branch. The courts are the judicial branch. The General Assembly is the legislative branch. I certainly communicate with all of those branches, and one of the good things about having been in the office for 30 years is I have personal relationships that can be valuable to the city of Richmond. I've seen it before, I've done it before. Tom doesn't have that. And so from what I understand, he believes that as an executive, he can make the courts do something, or he can make the General Assembly do something. And he is saying that in the same manner that Donald Trump is saying, I don't have to listen to the courts. I am very clear about my powers and my authority, and I'm going to use them to the maximum effect, to protect as many residents, not even citizens, but residents of the city of Richmond, as I can. That is what I will do. And that is what Tom Barbour doesn't understand about this job

The Richmond Times-Dispatch framed this race as a choice between a traditional and a progressive approach to the Commonwealth’s Attorney role. How would you frame this race?

We’re both Democrats, so we both have progressive Democratic values that hopefully perceive the Constitution as a shield and not as a sword to be used against people. We share that. But where we differ, and what the actual distinction is, is we are at a time in the city of Richmond when more people are moving in, the population is growing. You can't walk around without seeing new construction. People actually know where Scott's Addition is now. That would not have been the case 10 years ago. People are valuing Richmond, and given the fact that Richmond is on the rise, that murders have gone down by 12% [from 2023-2024], that robberies have gone down 23% [2020-2024], that shootings have gone down 22% [2022-2024],⁴ given all that, Richmond in this time of Donald Trumpism does not need an elected prosecutor who is learning the job. Someone who only lasted as a prosecutor for 10 months is not the person that Richmond needs right now. Richmond needs someone with perspective, with experience, with a depth of relationships that can be used to protect all of Richmond and to provide safety, second chances, and accountability. That’s the difference between me and Tom Barbour.

I think that’s a good place to leave it. Thanks so much for your time and your candor.

And if and when you see me around Church Hill, please come up to me and go, “Hey, we didn't get to see each other face to face, but I'm Dave.” I would like meeting you.

I will. Take care until then.

Richmond’s 2025 Democratic primary takes place June 17th. Read The Lookout Interview with McEachin’s challenger, Democrat Tom Barbour of Church Hill, here. Check the full ballot here, and find your polling place here.

1  Both Hicks and Morrissey formerly served as Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorneys.

2  Homicides peaked in Richmond in 1994. The public-facing RPD database doesn’t track back that far, but retrospective reports from local media put the count that year close to McEachin’s ballpark, with WTVR clocking 161 and Richmond Magazine, 160.

3  The Lookout texted Barbour to fact-check this claim. He confirmed that his time as a licensed prosecutor in the Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney office was approximately 10 months, but pushed back on the framing, noting that he assisted former CA Mike Herring on “policy and internal office operations beginning in 2015,” and has run his own practice as a trial attorney for “about eight years.”

4  In a follow-up email exchange, McEachin cited RPD’s crime database as the source on these figures, and identified the reporting periods to which she was referencing, which are in brackets above. I should also note that if you compare the number of shootings the first full year of McEachin’s first elected term, 2020, to 2024, the drop is 16% (292 to 243). Still substantial, but less than the 22% mentioned above.