Kevin Lamont Hicks can once again visit his mother and now grown daughter in Whitcomb Court, if they still live there.

He is among more than 9,500 people who no longer have to fear an arrest for entering Whitcomb Court or any of the other apartment complexes that Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority maintains across the city.

RRHA announced Monday that it has largely discarded the long list of names of those who were forever subject to arrest for trespassing if police officers saw them on any RRHA property.

Backed by the Richmond Police Department and the city Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, the agency said it has installed a new policy that is more family friendly.

From now on, only those who commit a violent or drug-related crime on RRHA property, vandalize or damage agency property or engage in a non-violent offense “which affects the health, safety welfare or quiet enjoyment of public housing residents” could face a trespass ban, according to the interim RRHA chief executive officer, Stacey Daniels-Fayson.

The new policy quietly went into effect in June, RRHA noted, with little fanfare until now.

Mr. Hicks is the most prominent of those affected given his challenge to the constitutionality of the original policy

that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Banned from RRHA properties in 1998, he fought the trespass policy in the courts after he received a summons for trespassing in January 1999 when he entered Whitcomb Court to take diapers to his baby’s mother, then living in Whitcomb Court. (The current whereabouts of Mr. Hicks and his family members could not be determined.)

Initially convicted in Richmond General District and then in Richmond Circuit Court, Mr. Hicks, who was represented by Richmond attorney Steven D. Benjamin, appeared to have won after both the Virginia Court of Appeals and the Virginia Supreme Court separately ruled as unconstitutional RRHA’s policy of allowing police unfettered discretion to bar people from its property and to arrest them for trespassing if they returned.

However, Mr. Hicks’ trespassing case, which was thrown out by those state appeals court decisions, ultimately was reinstated after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that the Virginia Supreme Court got it wrong in finding that the policy was overbroad.

A year later, the Virginia Supreme Court rejected other challenges to the policy, and Mr. Hicks ultimately served time on the original charge.

According to RRHA, the new policy seeks “to ensure that RRHA families are not unjustifiably restricted in having their family and friends visit them.” Anyone who is not under a trespass ban issued under the new policy can enter RRHA property, the agency noted.

If someone is banned, they can come to an RRHA property for the limited purpose of seeking reconsideration and removal of the ban. RRHA has provided for due process hearings.

An update of the policy has “been long overdue,” RRHA acknowledged, in noting that the number of people whom the agency and the Richmond Police had banned had become far too large to be enforceable.

The agency credited its Public Safety Prevention and Intervention Steering Committee with leading the effort to change the policy.

The committee included representatives of the Richmond Police Department along with representatives of state and federal law enforcement agencies and the city commonwealth’s attorney.

The committee also has representatives from Richmond Public Schools, the city’s Human Services Department, the Virginia Department of Health and Virginia Union University. The panel focuses on issues related to crime, public safety, health and wellness in RRHA communities, the agency stated.

The Richmond Tenants Organization and Central Virginia Legal Aid also provided input that was used in crafting the new policy, RRHA stated.