It’s close to 7pm on a Friday night and seven local police officers stand around in bulletproof vests, a couple of them tugging at black police gloves monogrammed with the letters CPD, all of them bullshitting with each other. The IX building stands in the background, skeletal, and behind it the edges of Downtown Charlottesville’s skyline glow orange in the low sun.
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Charlottesville police detective Todd Lucas is among them, standing next to his white unmarked car, going through the pockets of his black police vest. Lucas is the city’s gangs and guns detective, responsible for collecting and coordinating any gang-related information. Detective Jim Hope, Lucas’ counterpart in the Albemarle County Police Department, stands across from him, leaning against his own unmarked vehicle. The other officers are members of the local, yet-to-be-named county and city gang teams, drawing members from both police departments, the local ATF bureau and the city and county Commonwealth’s Attorney’s offices.
“I was in the military, and I served with some people who were in gangs,” says Lucas, an Army veteran. “When I was in patrol, and even when I was in investigations, I saw that there were so many crimes being committed by the same people, the same groups of people, people who hung out together, who had common identifiers. It just kind of struck me that if we can deal with this issue, people’s quality of life would be so much better.”
Ten minutes from now, the officers will roll into the public housing complex on South First Street, the first of five “jump-outs” that they’ll do tonight. At the briefing 30 minutes prior, Lucas had gone over maps and the latest gang intelligence, coordinating the approach.
Albemarle Detective Jim Hope and Charlottesville Detective Todd Lucas lead the local gang teams. This six-pointed star near Grove Street is evidence of an increased Crip presence (i.e. not a Jewish one). |
With his car radio squawking, Lucas will drive up South First, jolt to a stop just south of the complex as his field radio lights up with chatter from the six officers. Covering ground quickly, he’ll walk over graffiti on the sidewalk, three pieces in all, each under a streetlight. Three-tined pitchforks and six-pointed stars. Crip tags.
After stopping one man on a red scooter and chatting with a family trying to enjoy their Friday night on their front porch—expounding on the intricacies of Dora the Explorer with the young girl—Lucas will round a corner where he’ll find four young men sitting on the curb. Behind them, a red Buick, its four doors wide open, three officers searching it, sharp barks coming from the K-9 unit that’s been called to the scene.
And the officers will pull out a small bag of marijuana, ammo for a .22 and, from the truck, a “Shelf Lite” box with a picture of a wobbly white plastic shelf on the front. From the box, they will pull an unloaded SKS assault rifle, a knockoff of an AK-47.
“This is exactly the shit we’re talking about,” the ATF agent will tell the driver of the car, the sun now all but gone, the corner lit by flashlights and headlines, “an assault rifle in the projects.”
The city’s gang team has 10 members, the county’s has seven. They meet once a month to share information. Lucas acts as the city’s clearinghouse for all the information. Known gang members are entered into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database. Lucas catalogues graffiti, trying to read the tea leaves from scraps of information about a part of Charlottesville that few ever see, though much of it’s hidden in plain sight.
“We have certain geographical areas where we know gangs operate based on their names,” says Lucas, pointing out South First Street, Project Crud and 752. “We have members validated that live in those areas or hang out in those areas a lot, where we know there’s gang stuff going on.”
After the serial number comes up clean, the officers confiscate the drugs and the rifle, then let the four go after snapping digital photos of their faces and a picture of a tattoo on the back of one man’s hands that reads “Southside.”
All this will happen in the next hour or so, and then on into the night. There will be four other areas to hit. But for now, the officers stand in the parking lot, joking and jostling each other, talking about when they’ll break for dinner.
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