This week is Police Week across Virginia, and modern policing works very differently than it did a few years ago.
Since 2020, Virginia has repealed the death penalty, implemented earned sentence credits, changed how probation works, allowed for expungement of criminal records, created mental health alternatives and eliminated jury sentencing. Alexandria Commonwealth's Attorney Bryan Porter says the biggest change to policing in the last few years has been decriminalization of marijuana.
"That’s really changed the context of policing. Many searches by police officers were predicated on the odor of marijuana emanating from a motor vehicle pursuant to a traffic stop, and that's now no longer a valid reason to conduct a search of a car," Porter says. "That's explicit in the code, and it's something the legislature has made very, very clear."
Shawn Weneta is a criminal justice reform advocate for Cavalier Consulting, and he says the biggest reforms have been ending the failed War on Drugs and abandoning the harsh mandatory minimum sentences of the 1990s.
"What we know from all the data is that severity of punishment doesn't deter a behavior; certainty of punishment does," Weneta says. "So, I think there's been more efforts into making sure that people are caught versus making sure that people are punished really harshly, and also making sure that we're getting people resources they need to, you know, maybe address the issues that they had that led them to criminality."
Advocates say another consequential change that will yield future reform is all the new data officers now collect about their interactions.
