Another drive-by, two more dead. Family, friends and community leaders gathered a week ago to remember 14-year-old Rah’quan Logan, who was murdered at a Richmond community store, in a drive-by shooting. Nine-year-old Abduel Bani-Ahmad, whose family owned the store, died in the same incident, in which occupants of an SUV drove past the store and let loose a hail of bullets. The boys’ deaths brought the number of slain in Richmond this year to 82, compared to 75 in 2020, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. JJ Minor, president of the Richmond branch of the NAACP urged fellow Richmonders and parents to take action. “I’m tired of marches, I’m tired of rallies, I’m tired of waiting on government,” he said. “We have to repair the village. We have to rebuild the village.”
Meanwhile, police morale continues to plummet. WTVR News tells of three-year Richmond police veteran Brenda Ruiz, who is calling it quits. She is one of 102 police officers who have either retired, quit or transferred this year, leaving the Richmond Police Department with a 600-person headcount, or 150 short. One issue can be solved easily, should City Council choose to make it a priority: raise police pay. The other problem is not so easy to fix — the lack of respect from local politicians. Amid last year’s social-justice protests and riots,” said Ruiz, “at least two of the City Council members made us look like the bad guys. … A lot of the time our command staff has their hands tied, and they can’t do much for us.”
UVa is now exporting wokeness. It’s not enough for the University of Virginia to become an incubator of wokeness and let its ideas seep into the broader community. Now it wants to proactively export its leftist ideology. The latest initiative is the Equity Cohort, a shared project of the Virginia Institute of Government and the School of Data Science.
“The core of local government is public service, of course, but there’s also the question of service for what?” said Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Siri Russell. “The fact of the matter is, I’ve never lived in an equitable community. I’ve never been able to see it. It’s almost like a thing that you’re aspiring to. This dream where your race, your ethnicity, your age, your gender, your income does not define your outcomes.”
And what does Russell propose? WVIR News says this: “She wants to see more governments creating and staffing equity offices, as well as implementing more equitable policies.”
Maybe she could start by participating in vigils like the one held for Rah’quan Logan, and then ask herself how staffing the city with more equity officers might have prevented the drive-by shooting that killed him.
In woke world, parents are the bad guys. The Virginia School Board Association (VASB) voted to leave the National School Board Association (NASB) last week, disassociating itself from the national organization that collaborated with the Biden administration in portraying parents protesting at school board meetings as a menace and calling for FBI assistance in tracking threats to school board members. The state board said the NASB “continues to persist in ineffective behaviors that negatively impact state school boards associations, member public school divisions, and the children served by our K–12 public schools as is evidenced by the recent letter.” So reports The Virginia Star.
Maybe the VASB needs more equity officers, too.
