The Richmond Police Memorial statue that was removed from Byrd Park in 2020 after being vandalized by protestors could be headed to a new home at the Richmond Police Academy on West Graham Road. 

“Where it was is not good for it to go back to,” Deputy Police Chief Sydney Collier told City Council’s Public Safety Committee Tuesday. “For us, we feel the best place to move the statue is going to be over at the Police Academy.” 

First, however, the city of Richmond has to accept the statue from the Police Memorial Foundation, which owns it and in September 2023 voted to donate it to the city. On Tuesday, the three-member Public Safety Committee voted to recommend that City Council do so. The full body will need to support the proposal in order for the city to take legal possession of the statue.

While the vote only concerned the transfer of the memorial and was not an endorsement of the relocation plan, several of the councilors made it clear they thought the Police Academy site was the correct choice. 

“This feels like it’s the right decision, and I fully support it,” said 4th District Councilor Kristen Nye.

Eighth District Councilor Reva Trammell said she had “gotten a lot of calls” about the memorial.

“The citizens think that the safest place for that statue would be at the Police Academy — not in the park, where it could be destroyed again,” she said, adding, “I do not ever want to see it destroyed again the way that I saw it destroyed in 2020.”

Andrew Goddard, president of the Friends of Byrd Park, made a plea for the statue to be returned to the park, calling the vandalism “a shameful act.” 

“It does not represent the feelings of the majority of the people who live near or in the Byrd Park area,” he said. “And we would be very happy to see it back in that location if nothing else works out.” 

The statue, created by sculptor Maria Kirby-Smith in 1987, is dedicated to 39 officers killed in the line of duty and was initially placed in Nina Abady Park near the Coliseum but was relocated to Byrd Park in 2016 in an attempt to make it more visible to the public. 

There, it was vandalized in June 2020 during protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd and anger over persistent racial disparities in policing nationally. The city quickly removed the statue and placed it into storage, where it is now being held in a city warehouse on Ingram Avenue. A memo from Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards states $30,000 worth of work was needed to restore the statue after the 2020 vandalism, in which large portions were spray-painted with red paint. 

Retired police officer Glenwood Burley later pushed for the memorial to be relocated to Capitol Square but was unsuccessful. 

“The Capitol refused to put the statue over there,” Collier told the committee Tuesday. 

The General Assembly has significant control over Capitol Square. House of Delegates Clerk Paul Nardo said in an email that there was no record in his office of the city asking for the statue to be placed on Capitol grounds and noted legislation is typically required to add statues to the site — “which is how the Virginia Indian Tribute, Women’s Monument and Civil Rights Memorial ended up at the Capitol,” he wrote. 

He also noted that the statue was specifically designed to honor fallen Richmond police officers and Capitol Square contains a Commonwealth Public Safety Memorial dedicated to fallen public safety workers.

“While Richmond of course is our capital city, it’s important to remember that there are over 140+ other local jurisdictions throughout our large and diverse Commonwealth,” he wrote.