I’m starting to really enjoy these interviews. My favorite part? Staying in touch with all of the candidates. They’ve all sent me prompts on issues they care about since our individual conversations; not one in aggrandizement of their contributions to anything. Just, “Hey, look at this problem! Help me fix it. Give it some ink.” You start to really feel a part of the food chain of progress. The darker side of me also sees the dimly lit roads to appeasement and apologistic complicity beckoning. Lucky for me, I was raised by punk rock — specifically, Richmond punk.
What that means needs no explanation to those that share the same upbringing. To those that didn’t, let me describe the ethic: our best and our loudest always stood firm in the face of oppressors, protected our vulnerable, judged ourselves by our willingness to fight against our collective past, and win our futures. Mostly through song and the sharing of ideals, but when needed –and without hesitation — in marches, collective giving, community organization, and sometimes using our bodies as barriers to fascist intimidation.
As I grow older I have replaced my studded belts with stretch waistbands, and my Docs see the inside of my hall closet more than the sticky venue floors they knew so well. The local punk heroes from my youth are now real estate agents, dads, moms, contractors, and such, but the values that raised our clenched fists high in defiance of institutional evil still fly, arthritis and all.
One of the most potent fronts in the ethical battle for equity has been in confrontation with policing; it is an American’s most common intersection with state sponsored violence. We’ve seemingly encouraged some of our worst to apply for sensitive positions of power in the police ranks locally and nationally, and we seem to be stymied by the Thin Blue Line when it comes to holding those officers accountable. We often hear about the bad apples. How does the adage go? Bad apples spoil the whole bunch? Remove the rotting fruit, or don’t be surprised when we consider throwing out the whole basket.
I’m walking into Kuba Kuba in the Fan to meet Maurice Neblett. He’s a product of the most challenged and neglected neighborhoods in Richmond. The front lines of the battle littered with the bodies and freedoms of the least powerful. Mr. Neblett is a graduate of Virginia Union University. He’s an American that has seen this violence done against his neighbors and himself. He’s a thriving survivor of the worst Richmond can throw at you. I’m very stoked to talk to this guy. I feel I have a great story to listen to, and some empanadas to eat.
CHRISTIAN DETRES: Maurice Neblett, this is your first time running for office for anything. This is your first foray into politics at all. How’s it going?
MAURICE NEBLETT: Yes, sir. It is my first time running for office. I’ve supported other candidates, as a team, coming up through college.
CD: Why are you doing this? You’re putting yourself under a lot of scrutiny. Also, God knows these jobs don’t pay well.
MN: I’m doing what I love: serving the people of Richmond and this area. I’m a Richmond native. I graduated from Virginia Union University. I’m an entrepreneur. I also sit on the Board of Directors of a Federal Credit Union here. I’m a community organizer. I’ve always been involved in helping to pull up individuals out of disparity. My mother passed away when I was a child and I felt helpless. I had made a promise to myself that I was going to help my mother. But what could I do? I was a kid. From there on, I knew I was to be a protector. That’s my purpose, my purpose is to be there for people and to be true.
CD: You have had the experience of growing up in some of our most challenged neighborhoods. That is a unique background amongst the rest of the mayoral candidates. You have to be intimately aware of all of the most troublesome components of our most troubled areas. Given your perspective, what needs to get fixed first? How do we make a sustainable impact in those areas? Things that actually can be done within the budgetary confines of our city.
MN: First off, I attended a lot of RPS schools. Fairfield Elementary, Carver, Linwood Holton, J.E.B. Stuart… Not limited to that because there are more. I’ve lived in Fairfield Court, Mosby, Gilpin. Swansboro, Blackwell. Look at the statistics I had to overcome. “Live in your environment, but do not become your environment.” That’s what I had to live by coming up.
The budgetary apportioning that you mentioned is going to be what I push on my platform. I’m pushing for police reform. Though we can’t have real police reform without community formation and organization. We have to have a seat at the table and have access to the conversation. When we do have that access we can effectively communicate the immediate issues. But, we can’t use the legacy political stance because, like you mentioned, that hasn’t changed a thing.
CD: It has not. I don’t want to be a cynic, but I’ve been around long enough to have heard the announcement of the beginnings of that conversation between the police and the community many times. It never happens. I either have to assume that the people saying that these conversations are gonna happen are bullshitting us, or I could assume charitably that there’s something in between that motivation to dialogue and the actual reality of it producing any benefit — to anyone other than a candidate’s PR team. What is that barrier if it exists? What’s keeping us from actually delivering on those promises?
MN: So first off, that’s included in my purpose. To bridge that gap. My understanding and knowledge in criminology and criminal justice teaches me that we do need order in our society. I also know we need to convert the current antagonistic methods of community policing to solid, collaborative, community relationships with RPD. We need to be sure we’re deploying officers that can be community engaged. We need to implement that in their training. Not just a cursory re-training, but to make them experts in community engagement. So they can understand the community they’re serving.
CD: What do you feel is at the heart of that issue? There seems to be a problem that’s deeper than training.
MN: When I started running for Mayor, I stepped in with the understanding that I have to be accountable as a leader. The Mayor’s office has to be accountable to this issue. The Chief of Police, the whole police department, has to be held accountable. But we have to do it together. It’s not a problem that will just dissolve or be changed from one single direction.
I want to incentivize officers to get to know the individuals in the community they patrol. We have to set an amount of hours that officers have to engage with community members – without waiting for a conflict to arise or in response to a call. Not being reactive but proactive. We need a different approach.
CD: What do you think the community’s reaction to an initiative like that would be in those neighborhoods? How do you build a trust that’s already been lost, maybe never been had? How do you get the community to look at the police department as an assistant, as opposed to a prowling entity to fear interacting with?
MN: So trust is key. The way policing has been instituted in our city — in our nation — since they transferred over the practice from England is problematic. The dynamic of policing has to change. We have to be innovative. We have to be more equitable. The thing is this: the community may not be initially trusting because of that history and those methods, that have terrorized the poor for centuries. We have to be persistent and organized. I do have tactics that will ensure that we are able to bridge that gap. A lot of us have experienced interactions with police. We’ve had some horrible experiences with police officers, with bad actors. We have also had amazing interactions with officers who are there to actually serve.
CD: One of the reasons why I said I was excited about talking to you is because this issue irks me a lot. I know it’s difficult to be strident on this topic. As a politician seeking the mayor’s office, you know, no matter what, you have to work with RPD. With, not against. These are partners that you have to bring into your fold. When you address the idea of bad apples, we start from the premise that it’s a fringe element in the police ranks. I call bullshit. If it was, there’d be no problem. There wouldn’t be a culture that shuffles bad apples around like we’re not going to notice they’re just terrorizing a different community now. We shouldn’t have to deal with that problem. They have to deal with it. And they’re not.
For me to believe there is an overwhelming populace of “good cops”, there would have to be an unimpeachable policing of themselves. How can you be a good cop and look the other way when your colleagues treat us like animals? To continue to let us be paper targets instead of taking their badges? Where is that disconnect? I cannot be supportive of people that stand beside and watch a bad cop. Knowing that they’re putting somebody within a hair’s breadth and death by virtue of their state sponsored weapon. How do you incentivize the police to police themselves?
MN: That’s a key point. That problem and approach is like an onion. There are many layers to it. From start to end, I have a plan for that. We have to increase the morale in the police department on this issue. Change the way peer to peer evaluations happen within the police department. There are going to be key initiatives to encourage and welcome officers who are there to protect and serve.
CD: Doesn’t that initiative start at home for RPD?
MN: It does start at home, but we have to also implement real civilian oversight. So that we can have a transparent process with the de-certification of those who are not fit. To weed out those who are not there to serve the community. The ones that have lost themselves or never had themselves in the beginning.
CD: Yeah, right? All that said, I can imagine being a police officer is probably a hard job not to lose yourself in. As much as I can damn them for harm, the vast portion of their job is essentially dealing with assholes. They don’t get called to attend cookouts and birthday parties. They’re responding to domestic violence calls, robberies, murders etc. Not the best scenarios to meet cool people. How many assholes would I have to talk to during a day before I start yelling at people? I understand the frustration, but that’s the thing. Not everybody is cut out for that job. You have to be able to withstand and transcend that frustration to create a positive outcome. And that’s the job. Take it or leave it.
I think that I speak for myself and a lot of my peers, especially coming from RVA magazine, when I say the youth culture, the counterculture of this city, is very dialed in to the troubles of policing. That’s a big issue. I’m glad to know there’s somebody serious, coming to that situation. When we look maybe a year from now, two years from now, and you’re sitting in that office, with regular connection to the police department, what type of things are you going to be suggesting to them?
MN: So first of all, understanding politics, some politicians have a different view point of purpose. They have a different view of their desire. But one of the key points in the seat as Mayor, policing is number one, It is a responsibility of the Mayor to make sure that we are a productive engine. There are many parts of the city that need attention, but this is an essential key piece. Because safety is first. Safety first.
As Mayor, I am the capital “A” Administrator. The Police Chief is the direct administrator of the department, but I am still responsible for the manner in which they administrate. Let’s look at the use of force. We need to implement effective mental health awareness in our officers, so that they know how to engage with individuals who are in crisis. How to tell the difference between someone trying to do harm and one crying out for help.
CD: How do you teach empathy and patience?
MN: We have to look at the problem from start to finish. From the process of the candidate being an officer to representing our government as a police officer. We need to re-evaluate our hiring standards. We need to be able to gauge their biases or ignorances. We need to make sure that we inform them of the cultures they’ll be interacting with. It’s not just the people that have been here generationally, we also have migrants coming into the country. How are we supposed to be able to interact with them without understanding their culture as well? To understand where they’re coming from? Keeping our officers culturally literate is key.
CD: I agree with that. I know you want to talk about financial accountability so let’s move on. Could you explain your position therein and how that factors into your plans?
MN: There’s a logical approach and stance on leadership. It requires a blend of humility, courage, and commitment to service. Ultimately, when it comes to cultivating great employees within the city government, valuable employees, it involves cultivating citizens that have the opportunity to be those people. Giving people good chances to thrive and become effective team members in city government and community.
The accountability aspect of it is baseline transparency. We want to make sure that we give access to transparency for budget allocation. A lot of departments, at the end of their fiscal years, try to hurry up and try to burn through remaining funds, so they don’t get shorted for the next year. We can instead use surpluses to provide contributions to other departments that may need those dollars now. Provide for nonprofit organizations or small business that support our community.
CD: How we manage surpluses is weird. So an agency has a million dollar budget right? It comes down to the end of the fiscal year, and they haven’t spent $180,000 of that million. Now for them to get the same million dollars in the next budget, they have to show that they are using that money. They see their budgets slashed for being efficient. How can we not incentivize those agencies to turn that money back in without losing that they budgeted as necessary? How they can maybe roll that surplus into the next year. So they start with $1.18M in 2025. That number grows in an interest bearing account and makes it so that when that agency has the opportunity to tackle a normally prohibitively expensive project, they can access this ‘war chest’ to accomplish their goals.
MN: We do need to take a strategic approach to this and review. In those instances where departments need additional funds to update equipment, that plan would be helpful. Outside of that, we have to actually stop overspending and allocate funds to support other departments without having their budgets in danger. One thing we can do now is review the useless waste of resources by looking at overtime at all levels across multiple departments within the city’s governance. You have individuals making a lot of money where their overtime pay is equal to or more than their salary.
CD: I haven’t even looked at this being an issue in Richmond, but in New York, specifically with the police department, overtime is an expected perk. I’m very pro-union, but sometimes you find there’s a lot of room for mismanagement. In the search for the best deal within the member ranks, we find the taxpayers most aligned with their communal goals to be on the hook. I’m only addressing wasteful overtime. Clearly there are times when it’s necessary.
We have created a place on the left where dissent from the absolute sanctity of the Union is attacked feverishly. If you’re on the progressive side of things (as I proudly am), it starts to feel that you have to be a union cheerleader or persona non grata. You can’t criticize or workshop ideas for streamlining. We have painted ourselves into a corner where people outside of our governmental system are telling us how to use our money with cultural impunity. How do we stop that waste or at least balance the conversation?
MN: That goes to allowing transparency and showing the systems we own in action. We’re developing a system where the community at large will have a seat at the table. Where they’ll be able to have input on city relations, especially when it comes down to finance. There are many areas that need to be touched in the city and many improvements that need to be made. When individuals have access to the line items they can see whether there’s waste in the use of funds. We can then make an adjustment or explain our judgment on specific spending.
CD: We are overspending in ways that are completely nonsensical, and it seems like these nonsensical things are not even hard to understand when you put human motives into the equation. Is there a certain amount of patronage that’s coming into the picture here? Where we get bloated bills from contractors because if you don’t pay the vig you’re not gonna get their support in the next election? It’s a slippery slope I guess. When it comes to “well, if it means I get to implement my administrative plans that I think are noble, then I gotta just pay this little tip over here, then I’ll do it”. How do we change that mentality?
MN: We need to take these decisions back to the home ground. We need to give the citizens, the body, more access to making these decisions. A politician is a working servant, in tune with the community, being a part of initiatives on grassroots ground level. That’s a way to circumvent budgetary restrictions and contain waste. We can do this collectively. But to touch on that piece, some politicians want to cater unevenly to developers and powerful-
CD: -”generous”-
MN: Yeah. That’s not me. I have infrastructure goals. I’m all for progress. I also know what Richmond has, and it’s not to be sold cheaply. We have a lot here in Richmond and we need to embrace it. We, together, need to take ownership of our infrastructure goals, and implement them within our means. We also need to make sure that the money we’ve allotted for certain programs are spent the right way. Yeah, you know what I mean, especially when it comes down to housing, and the displaced people in desperate need of it. We have to devise a plan that’s going to cultivate individuals in those circumstances to have hope, and to allow them to purchase homes within their communities while providing career development and financial awareness. We need to make sure our resources are not sold cheaply to developers.
CD: Ooh, you need to speak to Damon Harris at Teal House Company. I think you’d find some very aligned goals between the two of you. I want to say thank you so much for this conversation. I really look forward to seeing what you do. I mean that.
Learn more about Maurice Neblett here.
