In January, the highly contagious omicron variant brought coronavirus cases to an all-time high in the Charlottesville area. The Blue Ridge Health District reported over 11,000 new cases and nearly 200 hospitalizations—the largest surge since the pandemic started in February 2020. Over the past few weeks, cases and hospitalizations have significantly declined. On February 13, […]
After protests over police brutality rocked the nation in the summer of 2020, both Charlottesville and Albemarle ended their school resource officer programs. The districts replaced the officers with care and safety assistants, unarmed adults tasked with building relationships with students, monitoring hallways, de-escalating conflicts, addressing mental health concerns, assisting with security issues, and upholding […]
For nearly two years, the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail has been hit hard by the pandemic. While the virus shakes up life outside the jail’s walls, those incarcerated at ACRJ have reported poor COVID containment procedures and unhygienic living conditions. Now, with the highly-contagious omicron variant spreading across the country, coronavirus cases have reached an all-time […]
From redlining to racial covenants, Charlottesville’s long history of racism and segregation has created the affordable housing crisis the city now faces. Over the years, the city’s largest employer, the University of Virginia, has contributed to the problem. As UVA continues to grow and expand, more and more students have signed leases at apartments and […]
In November, newly appointed Charlottesville City Manager Marc Woolley quit the job—the day before he was supposed to start work. It was the low point in a three-year period that had seen five people, not counting Woolley, serve as the city government’s lead executive. In response, City Council addressed the desperate situation by hiring a […]
The Charlottesville Police Civilian Review Board was among the key criminal justice reforms put in place following the 2017 Unite the Right rally. More than four years later, the board remains mired in controversy, with conflict between its appointed members and persistent legal questions about its powers hampering the board’s ability to keep law enforcement […]
Nearly two years after arriving in Charlottesville, COVID is still here—and it’s more prevalent than ever. On January 10, the Blue Ridge Health District reported 610 new cases, the most in a single day. Before the surge of the last three weeks, the highest single-day case total was 245, in February of 2020. The surge […]
Before the U.S. abolished slavery in 1865, thousands of enslaved Black Americans escaped from Southern plantations and fled to Canada, where slavery was officially banned in 1834. Many used the Underground Railroad—an extensive network of secret routes, safe houses, free and enslaved Black Americans, and white abolitionists—to make the dangerous journey to freedom. The former […]
Charlottesville’s most famous monument made national headlines last week, when City Council voted to hand the statue of Robert E. Lee over to the Jefferson School African American History Center, which will melt it down and reshape the metal into a new piece of art. Across the street, meanwhile, a less conspicuous but no less […]
“Typically, everyone just goes away. They make these agreements and people go away,” says former Charlottesville police chief RaShall Brackney. But she’s not going away. Two months after her controversial termination, Brackney—the city’s first Black woman police chief—filed a string of formal complaints against the city, accusing government leaders of directly retaliating against her efforts […]