As Roanoke Neighbors and Police Gather, Gun Violence Takes Uneven Toll

At Melrose Plaza’s National Night Out, music pulsed over the crowd gathering in the sprawling parking lot. Children tumbled around a bouncy house as families drifted from table to table, collecting handfuls of fliers and free merch. Law enforcement officers in uniform dotted the gathering. 

At one table, Lloyd Merchant handed out the last of the RESET hats, representing the Roanoke Police Department’s Rapid Engagement of Support in the Event of Trauma program. As RESET’s coordinator, Merchant leads a team of volunteers that visits neighborhoods that have recently experienced traumatic events like gun violence. 

Despite the festive atmosphere, the weight of Merchant’s work wasn’t far from his mind. That night, he said he hoped to recruit new volunteers to help with a difficult task ahead: responding to three shootings that had occurred within 48 hours. 

“We do have a considerable amount of volunteers, but next up we're going to have to split up into two teams,” he said, raising his voice over the music. “We got three areas we got to cover.” 

National Night Out, celebrated in neighborhoods across the country on the first Tuesday of August, is an annual campaign meant to promote positive police-community relationships. In Roanoke, this year’s event arrived after a spike in violence — three shootings in the first weekend of the month brought a sobering undertone to an otherwise upbeat evening. 

“It’s tragic,” Mayor Joe Cobb said as he walked through the Northwest event. “But I’ll also say it’s very unusual because of the work we’ve done. Over the last five years, we've seen such a significant reduction, especially in juvenile violence. And so this weekend, it was kind of tough.”

Last week, Roanoke Police made arrests in all three shootings; two happened in Northwest and one in Southwest.

While gun violence is trending downward citywide, Northwest remains the most impacted quadrant. In a report of this year’s gun violence through mid July, the Roanoke Police Department documented 15 total incidents of aggravated assaults or homicides where the victim was hit by gunfire. Nine of those took place in Northwest — more combined than across Southeast (three), Southwest (two), or Northeast (one).

This pattern is supported by national research reporting that gun violence disproportionately impacts low-income, racially segregated communities. According to a study in the journal Injury Epidemiology, this pattern is linked to historical disinvestment in those communities, discriminatory lending practices like redlining and persistent systemic inequalities.

Throughout the evening, Merchant said many people had shared their feelings of disbelief and frustration. 

“They say, ‘This is crazy. It's ridiculous out here, that you have to live with such stuff like that,’” he said. 

Across the quadrants

Roanoke Chief of Police Scott Booth, who stepped into the role in 2023, said he’s seen a similar pattern in other Virginia cities throughout his career. 

“Whether it’s a Richmond, a Danville or Roanoke, you need to look at where these crime incidents happen,” he said. “That’s where people need us the most, right?”

Meeting that need requires building community relationships and trust beyond day-to-day policing, Booth said. Ensuring a strong police presence at National Night Out events in Northwest was a part of that effort, he said, especially on the heels of tragedy.

“To offset the negative, you certainly want to really double down on the positive,” he said. “That’s something I've believed in for a lot of years.”

While his department has directed many resources to Northwest, Booth said his team is aware of the risks of “over-policing” the quadrant or neglecting other neighborhoods where violent crime is less frequent. At National Night Out, Roanoke public safety departments attended all nine neighborhood events across the quadrants.

“The nature of what folks need the police to do in Southeast, Southwest might look a little different than Northwest and Northeast,” Booth said. 

“I don’t want to say, ‘Hey, I’m going to spend all my time only in the areas impacted by gun violence,’” he continued. “I feel very strongly about that, but I also want those voices in Southwest and Southeast to be heard, because they also need us and their concerns are important.”

On the southside of Roanoke, another National Night Out brought neighbors together on the lawn of the Crystal Spring fire station. Three neighborhood groups cohosted the evening: I Heart SE, Neighbors in South Roanoke and Old Southwest, Inc.

Barbara Andes, the webmaster of Neighbors in South Roanoke, said she feels a sense of safety living in South Roanoke, where the rate of violent crime is relatively low. 

“We have states of vandalism and stuff like that like any neighborhood, but we are a pocket of a pretty secure feeling community,” she said.

This sense of safety, Andes said, allowed the event to expand beyond establishing connections with law enforcement, focusing on bringing the different communities of Southwest and Southeast together. 

“Maybe that’s where our ability to broaden this from feeling so much like it’s about law enforcement or about public safety, that we can mix it up a little bit,” she said. “We don’t have to drill new ideas or certain behaviors or certain opportunities for heightened safety, because it’s not that much of an issue.”

I Heart SE secretary Essence Jewel called the police department’s approach to policing in Southeast “community-centered.” Drawing on her experience volunteering in the neighborhood group, she reflected on the range of public safety needs in the Southeast quadrant.

“Despite Southeast being its own quadrant, depending on the neighborhood you’re in, you might have a different relationship to police, and possibly policing,” Jewel said.

In an attempt to reach that wide range of Southeast neighborhoods, I Heart SE co-chair Jessica Mahuron said the group canvassed nearly 400 houses leading up to the event. Not everyone showed. 

“You know, in our audiences, I still think that there’s a lot of people that don’t know about this event, and don’t know they are invited,” Mahuron said. “We would love to see them, you know, at anything. That's why it’s going to be an ongoing effort for us to go to different neighborhoods.”

A ‘wake-up call’

The Melrose Plaza event was hosted by three Northwest neighborhood groups: Melrose-Rugby Neighborhood Forum, Villa Heights Community Unity Initiative and Fairland Civic Organization.

Former City Councilman Delvis “Mac” McCadden stood in a cluster of bright yellow T-shirts — the Melrose-Rugby Neighborhood Forum — watching over the evening’s events. As vice president of the forum, McCadden said the weekend’s shootings should feel like a “wake-up call” for the community to engage with law enforcement. 

“This is the opportunity to get folks involved in it, to understand that the police are here,” he said. “We pay them their salaries, by gosh, and we should expect something of them. But they should expect something of us.”

McCadden said that while he thinks Northwest’s relationship with police has improved in recent years, disconnect in trust still lingers. Scanning the crowd, he pointed out a missing demographic: young adults. 

Two of that weekend’s shootings involved teenagers.

“The most difficult part about this is that our younger population isn’t getting the turnout that I thought we would get,” he said. “I don’t think that our younger population has discovered or understood exactly what it means to be a good neighbor.”

The people missing from National Night Out events were on Booth’s mind, too. 

“There are folks that don’t come to these events that need us, and maybe they don’t have the trust to come out and hang out with the city and the police,” he said. “I want to make sure we somehow find a way to touch them, and we’re there for them as well.”

Even with gun violence statistics declining and the mood of National Night Out riding high, Booth said he’s mindful of those directly affected by the shootings.

“I think that any loss of life in our community shakes our community,” he reflected. “I could tell you we had a really, really bad 2023 and we had a much better 2024 statistically, when we look at lives lost, and especially lives lost because of gun violence. But how do I tell that mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, grandfather, that we’re better when they’ve lost a loved one?” 

“You have to be very careful with that,” he said.