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Richmond law enforcement officials are offering strong hints that they’re working with federal officials to bring Project Exile back to the city amid a rising number of homicides and shootings.

“There’s going to come a time when I think the city is in a position to announce a more aggressive, as my federal partners like to say, forward-leaning strategy toward gun crime,” Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael N. Herring told the Richmond City Council’s public safety committee during a recent meeting. “This isn’t the time to announce that, but I think it will come.”

Exile was pioneered in Richmond in 1997 as a partnership between local and federal law enforcement to give people caught with illegal guns long sentences in faraway prisons.

Police Chief Alfred Durham has been calling for the program’s return for nearly two years. After a 7-year-old and his father were shot at a bus stop last week, Durham said he had a meeting scheduled to discuss Exile with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“We have to bring that back,” Durham said at the shooting scene last week. “A lot of people are against it, but when does it end? We have to send a message that it will not be tolerated, and we need to send these gun toters and shooters away from our city.”