The July 20, 2010, Times-Dispatch featured another article about City Council’s conviction that the criminal background of a Shockoe Bottom club owner will definitely, negatively influence the behavior of the club’s patrons. To this I wonder when it was established that the past behavior of the former is a solid predictor of the future behavior of the latter, since it seems unlikely that club owners fraternize with their patrons at all, let alone to a degree that would be so influential. But let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and take a fresh look: Going by City Council’s calculus of reason here, the Shockoe Bottom shootings from this spring (hereafter “Unwitting Impetus”) that precipitated the current security debate should have occurred outside Club Velvet, whose then-owner was well known for his flirtations with lawlessness—but they didn’t. Jeremy Uzzle’s murder occurred outside Have A Nice Day Café, and we have neither read confirmation that the owner of Have A Nice Day has a criminal background nor that, if he or she does, it has been identified as a causal factor in Uzzle’s shooting. Likewise, Rashawn Devon Thurman was killed in the 1600 block of East Grace Street after leaving a nightclub whose owner’s background also has received no mention for good or ill. The July 20 Times-Dispatch article makes it clear that City Council persists in defending public-safety ordinance changes on the basis of a causal connection that has not even been established.
Adding insult for those whose intellect feels injured by now is the part of the proposed ordinance revisions which, according to Will Jones’ June 22, 2010, Times-Dispatch article, will allow revocation of the $100 permit (to do business) if the club is “frequented by persons engaged in disorderly, violent, indecent or unlawful conduct.” There are two obvious problems with this provision. The first is that there is no documented series of incidents leading up to Unwitting Impetus, meaning that without a precedent of violent actions as a predictor of future problems, one young man can still kill another in Shockoe Bottom. The other obvious problem with the vision and the verbiage here is that “frequented” has not been defined. Is there going to be yet more debate over what constitutes “frequented,” yet more legalese and energy spent over yet one more layer of removal from the problem? Yet more discussion, this time over whether “frequented” means a history of three past incidents or five? (And what will happen after the threshold has been set at five and then incident number four at a particular nightclub turns out to be a fatal shooting?)
City Council has defined Unwitting Impetus as a public-safety issue whose origins lie in the personal backgrounds of Shockoe Bottom club owners and an arbitrary amount of dance floor space, when it is neither of those things at all. It is your modern-day, urban, wannabe-thug rivalry among specific young people from Petersburg and Richmond who, it has been established, know each other. It is a much narrower and very different problem than the “solution” proposed to treat it. City Council is doing the equivalent of blaming high school teachers for the behavior of young people on school property after hours, except that now it’s in the real world, and sadly for that hopeful student and citizen in all of us known as Common Sense, they lack the wisdom to know it.
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