Tom Barbour on Flock, ICE, and how he'd improve Richmond public safety

If you’ve been reading The Lookout for any amount of time, you’ve probably noticed I cover Flock Safety quite a bit. Last year, the Richmond Police Department contracted the surveillance-technology firm for hundreds of thousands of dollars to install its cameras and audio sensors all over the city, including Church Hill. The cops say they’re a “force multiplier;” civil-liberties advocates say they’re a privacy nightmare. Tom Barbour, a neighborhood resident who is currently campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the Commonwealth’s Attorney of Richmond, sees them as a symptom of a deeper problem.

“I don’t know that Flock is a force multiplier,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I think it's more a signal of a deterioration of trust in communities.”

The use of automated license plate readers was just one portion of my conversation with Barbour, who served as a Marine in the Middle East and a prosecutor in the previous Richmond CA’s office and currently works in private practice. We spoke for the better part of an hour about his work defending tenants and workers, his philosophy on public safety and recidivism, and how his CA’s office would differ from that of the incumbent, Colette McEachin, who is campaigning for reelection. (The Lookout has contacted McEachin requesting an interview about her candidacy.)

Below is a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. This is The Lookout Interview with Tom Barbour, the Democratic candidate for Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney.

Dave Infante, The Church Hill Lookout: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Tom. Why don’t we start with who you are and how you wound up running for Commonwealth’s Attorney?

Tom Barbour: My name is Tom Barbour, and I’m a trial attorney. I live in Church Hill with my wife, who's a much better trial attorney than I am. We've got two young daughters, a one year-old and a three year-old. Before I started running my own practice and my own firm, I was a prosecutor for the Commonwealth’s Attorney's office under then-Commonwealth’s Attorney Mike Herring. I was a line prosecutor, just like any other assistant CA would be, but I also was a senior policy advisor on criminal-justice reform issues. I've been involved with those issues in the city since about 2015. With my wife, we’re really a single-issue household: public safety and criminal-justice reform.

I came to that office and the city as a different, younger lawyer. I had been a captain in the United States Marine Corps, served for six years and served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a foreign military advisor. Everything you see Richmond Police Department doing, I have done it personally. I’ve raided houses, run traffic checkpoints, arrested people. I’ve policed. And I've not just done that, I've understood the limits of what that can achieve, and the cost of what is required to achieve that. I’m running for Commonwealth’s Attorney not just as a lawyer, but as a public safety professional who understands that the law is a tool and should be used for the public good. That means keeping people safe, treating people humanely through that process. I ran in 2021 on those issues in a moment in time, in both the city and the country, when people were asking, “What are we going to do about this criminal-justice system?” My point is, I don't think we need a criminal-justice system, we need a public-safety system. I’m running again to continue that conversation with our local Democrats in the primary on June 17th, and I think we're in a much better position to win them over this round.

OK, that’s a lot to dig into. Tell me more about what you do in your private practice, and how that intertwines with your vision for public service.

I'm a trial attorney, so I like to say that I tell simple stories to people. I ground my practice in criminal defense, and I try to run what I refer to as a “public-interest law firm.” By that, I mean that I incorporate into my general trial practice issues that tend to lead people into the justice system. I am always on the tenant side in landlord-tenant cases; I am always on the employee side in employment litigation; I prosecute wage theft for people who have had their wages stolen by businesses.

There's grim joke you hear sometimes in lefty circles that goes like—

[laughing] A leftist? Grim?! No!

I know, hard to believe. But it goes like, “Being a leftist in the United States means being a connoisseur of defeat.” That's probably not how you feel about the work, but it seems fair to say you’re typically fighting on the side of the underdog in your practice.

You say “underdog,” I say I'm working for people who really need to help. And I'm proud and honored to do it.

So let’s talk about something you’ve experienced as a resident of the neighborhood, and may have some views on as somebody who thinks about and works in the public safety/criminal justice space: Flock Safety. The of devices that's shown up around Churchill. You've obviously seen these devices, we've got dozens of them across the neighborhood. When did you first take note of what they actually were?

My wife and I, we started down the hill in Shockoe Bottom, on Tobacco Row, and we moved up and bought our house back in August 2019. We got to know each other on walks around this neighborhood, I proposed in Libby Hill Park, we got married in Libby Hill Park. On weekends, my Richmond gets zoomed to about 10 square blocks in the neighborhood. We are often out with our daughters, walking the neighborhood, going to Chimborazo Playground. And yeah, you see [Flock devices] out there, and you’re like What is that? And when you start looking into what the answers are, they're not good ones.

I haven't encountered arguments from serious people claiming that Richmond couldn't do a better job with public safety. There’s a real demand for that in Church Hill and across the city. When I spoke with RPD Chief Rick Edwards about this last year, his contention was that Flock devices enable his force, which remains understaffed, to do better and more accurate policing. He’s described it as a “force multiplier.” But obviously there are costs to this system, in terms of both money—RPD’s contract with Flock is worth around $400,000—and privacy. How do you evaluate the alleged benefits of this sort of system against those costs?

My general position is that Richmonders, Virginians, Americans, should not want to live in—and our Constitution would not allow for us to live in—a city, country, or Commonwealth where the public is mass-surveilled in real time by agents of the state. That just cannot ever happen in a country founded on the liberty interests, and frankly, we shouldn't want that to happen. To the point about this being a “force multiplier,” something people should understand about crime in Richmond is that we don't really have “whodunnits” the city. This isn’t C.S.I. The sources of crime are essentially individuals that are generally known to police and community members. If you've got a shooting, for example, when the police department shows up, there are absolutely community members who know what has happened. I know this because I have prosecuted shootings and I've defended shootings. You can read the reports and understand that there are people who know what's happened, but those people don't really trust law enforcement or the Commonwealth Attorney's office or the process enough to stay involved as witnesses.

Rather than do the long, hard work of culture change and relationship building, it is sort of a natural tendency for a police department to say, We need to solve that problem, let's fill the gap in trust with technology. I think that’s what we’re seeing. I don’t know that Flock is a “force multiplier. I think it's more a signal of a deterioration of trust in communities. You know, if we've got witnesses who trust the process, they should be able to tell us who did what, and they should be willing to come to court to say that. What we're doing instead is we're trying to substitute. It's more of a force substitute than it is a multiplier.

If we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars for a Flock system, sure, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the RPD’s overall budget, but it’s tax dollars that could be spent elsewhere. It isn’t the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s role to allocate those funds. But you talk about your preference for a public-safety system over a criminal-justice system. Can you give an example of how you think that money could be better put to work?

Ultimately, a public-safety system should be achieving accountability, but that accountability needs to look like violent risk management, reparation of harms, and, most importantly, accountability for circumstances or root causes that keep cycling people back into the system. What folks who don’t have as many touch-points in the [current] system might not understand the way folks who are involved in it every day do, is that the vast majority of crime in Richmond is actually recidivist crime.

Say a little bit more about that.

Imagine, for example, if there was only one person in the city committing crime. The crime rate for the city would be that individual’s personal recidivism rate. When that person committed new crimes, the crime rate would go up, because their personal recidivism rate was going up. When they stopped, the crime rate in the city would go down, because their personal recidivism rate was going down. In that world, the problem would really be too small to have a police department or a court system or all the things we see now. We could just have what we’ve always had, which is community. And we would go that person and say, Dave, what's going on? Why is this happening? And inevitably, we would hear some combination of mental health issues, substance or alcohol abuse, housing and economic instability, lack of education, lack of access to employment. If we were serious about reducing the city's crime rate, we would address those circumstances to reduce the likelihood that that person reoffends. We would work on their personal recidivism rate.

When you come back to reality, we don't have a single person committing crimes in the city, but we effectively have a single cohort of people, right? It is an absolute rarity as a prosecutor or a defense attorney to pick up a criminal record for an accused person and have that record be blank, no prior [criminal-justice system] involvement whatsoever, not even a previous arrest. When you see that, it's a terrifying moment, because you understand that this is the moment where we’re either going to get this right, support this person through an accountability process that moves them out of the system and a future of wrongdoing, or they're going to be here [in the system] for a very, very long time.

There are costs associated with that, too, right? Not to be crass, there are a bunch of first-order problems with that, but then there are second- and third-order problems, which gets into economic costs for everyone.

If you are dealing with essentially recidivist crime, and you're serious about reducing crime in the city, then you have to engage with the root causes. You have to engage with why people are doing what they're doing. And you're gonna hear those same things. You need to apply resources to address those things. And if you do, you will find that people recidivate less, and you will drive down crime. You will actively drive down crime by actively reducing the individual, personal recidivist rates of people in that cohort. Instead of what we do now, which is investing in things like Flock cameras, when we could be spending on housing assistance, treatment, education, more training programs, and things like that. It begs the question: What is the actual public safety return on that investment?

I want to come back to something you said earlier. When a high ranking law-enforcement official is faced with persistent crime, they are under pressure to produce either results, or at least something that looks like progress towards a solution. Even if Flock Safety is technological snake oil, it looks like something, right? I bring this up because you're running for an elected office. As CA, you would have to weigh political concerns like, for example, the pressure to show progress, versus some of these longer-arc efforts to reduce recidivism. Can you speak to how you would balance political expediency against longer-range, more substantive projects?

Your question reminds me of this quote from The Departed, which—

Perfect, the famously crime-respecting movie The Departed.

Which is, “Do you want to be a cop, or do you want to look like a cop?” Do you want to actually reduce crime, or do you just want to pretend that you are? I think that Richmonders are very ready for things that work, and can be patient with processes that take time to win out. So long as leaders are communicating about those, saying Here are the steps we are taking. We’re going to give you a progress report. We're going to share data with you. Part of why I love Richmond is because of how how active and involved Richmonders are in our city. There’s incredible civic pride here. I think that you've got this opportunity, especially in Richmond, to do things that are long-term focused, and people will trust you to do that, so long as you're being transparent. I think it's really easy to pretend, and I think that's a lot of what we see sometimes, especially about out of this current Commonwealth Attorney's office. But I think people are eager for authenticity, communicating that problems are hard to solve, but we're working on it, and I'm willing to do that work over the very long term.

You mention the current Commonwealth’s Attorney. A voter who doesn’t pay much attention to the news might tune into this race a week or two before, or even on June 17th, might think to themselves, My Amazon packages get stolen off my stoop every once in a while, but overall, there seems to be less violent crime than before. According to RPD statistics—which, grain of salt, I know, but still—total violent crime was down 5% last year. Why should that voter vote for Tom Barbour?

Well, first, our team has looked at these numbers, and when you compare the six-year period before the current Commonwealth’s Attorney, to the past last six years, what you actually find is that homicides are up on average 24% between those two periods. The problem with these purported reductions is that they don't also come with any sort of increase in accountability. The clearance rate for homicides in the city hovers around 50%. That means that only about 50% of people who are killing other Richmonders are ever being arrested, let alone prosecuted for those crimes. So people are literally getting away with murder.

Additionally, I think this Commonwealth Attorney's office is narrowly focused on processing paperwork, prosecuting cases after they come in, whereas my point of view is that the Commonwealth’s Attorney should be the city's chief public-safety officer, and should be involved in being a public-safety partner to community stakeholders and other governmental organizations like City Council and our departments to actually proactively try to prevent crime. I think people should give us a shot to do that work. What’s happening now is we're just riding this crime curve up and down, and if there's a down year, we look back and say, Oh, we did it! And if there's an up year, we look back and say, Oh, the community just won't work with us.

And maybe, Oh, we need more money.

In reality, the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office really isn't doing anything to tie its advocacy in individual cases to long-term crime reduction by way of reducing personal recidivism. So that, in a nutshell, is why I think folks should give us a shot.

This is a local race, and it's important to not pretend otherwise. That said, I think the voting public, especially the Democratic base, is activated by the national political environment. What can voters expect from your leadership as CA on, for example, how Richmond engages with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or pressure to prosecute immigrants?

People should understand that the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office has nearly unilateral control over the world of individual criminal cases in the system in Richmond. Constitutionally enshrined protections to charge or not charge, to prosecute or not prosecute, to dismiss or not dismiss a case. With that power, I think, comes responsibility to ask exactly the question you're asking. What can this office do to fight back against extreme federal immigration enforcement or extremism that might be emanating from a General Assembly, or a Governor or Lieutenant Governor’s office that is filled with Republicans. For my part, I will absolutely use the discretion of the Commonwealth’s Attorney's office to not prosecute any attempt to criminalize access to reproductive health care or equality. We're not going backwards on those issues, at least not in the city of Richmond, so long as I'm the Commonwealth’s Attorney.

With regards to ICE, I am committed to not cooperating with ICE, specifically in two ways that the Commonwealth’s Attorney's office can control. The Commonwealth’s Attorney effectively controls who is in the jail and who isn't, and who is in the courthouse and who isn't. Here's what I mean by that. I will require our prosecutors to incorporate into their advocacy on bail, like detention at the very start of the criminal case, the collateral consequences of extreme immigration enforcement. We cannot have even undocumented persons who are accused of crimes that don't require incarceration to manage violent risk, to be held pre-trial and then have them be deported for what might otherwise be a minor or manageable offense. In those cases, we will also incorporate that same thinking into advocacy for what outcomes should be. If someone can be managed successfully in the community, then they don't need to be at a jail where they can be subject to an ICE detainer.

The next way is to control who's coming to the courthouse. The Commonwealth's Attorney’s office has the ability to advocate for and waive the appearance of accused persons in the disposition of their cases. That matters a lot, because ICE is effectively slow to react. Right? If someone's coming in on an arraignment, [ICE agents] probably won't be there, but they definitely will be at the trial date set in three to six months. If we know there's going to be in a disposition in the case that doesn't require that person to be incarcerated, then, frankly, it doesn't require that person to be present. We can actually enter that disposition without them being at the courthouse, so long as they agree with that. Those are two tools that exist within the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s power to fight back about against extreme immigration enforcement that I would use on that issue.

Thanks for your time, Tom. I’m sure I’ll see you around the neighborhood.

Yeah, if you see me, say “hey.” I’ll probably be chasing a three year-old around the block.

The Richmond’s 2025 Democratic primary takes place June 17th. Check the full ballot here, and find your polling place here.