That’s part of a question from the reporter - here’s the rest, with Watson’s response:

What does systemic change look like for you within the police department to ensure that something in 2020 doesn’t happen?

MAYOR WATSON: Well, a couple of things have already happened that make a difference. One is the system no longer allows for the use of the so-called “non-lethal beanbag weapons.” In a congregate-type situation, where you have a group of people, that’s a big difference. Another systemic difference already in place is that you have these mobile field units where people move around and are responsive. Where they are moved and sent has changed. And the third thing I would say is there’s been a change with deployment in a crowd-type situation. We’re making sure the training across groups and entities that are deployed is the same.

And then the final thing that we have already started putting into place is de-escalation. We want to de-escalate situations as opposed to having to resort to something like what happened in this case. And then the last thing I’ll say about this is that we want transparency. That’s a part of a systemic approach to make sure there’s transparency. And that’s one of the reasons we are agreeing to ask the Department of Justice to come in and look at this specific event and the patterns and practices, including executive-level decisions that were made.

Aside from the DoJ portion, this looks like a nothing burger of a response 😐 Banning one type of non-lethal weaponry just means the companies that sell to police departments have to change products. It seems like it would be more fruitful to establish regulations around what non-lethal weaponry can be used in protest or non-violent situations, along with defined penalties for violating the regulations that incentivize either leadership or individual officers from resorting to them unnecessarily? Or more generally general regulations on which non-lethal weaponry the department can even buy, based on what it does to the victim?

Updating training for those deployed in a crowd situation does seem relevant though, so hopefully that helps.

I don’t really get the point about de-escalation though - is there some way they intend to deescalate a protest? The point of the protest is that people are angry enough to come out and demonstrate. If the deescaltion procedures involve working with the protestors to make them feel like their voices are being heard, that seems useful, but if the intention is just to “pacify” the crowd I don’t see that preventing another situation like the BLM protests.

Overall, I’m kinda disappointed in how short the article is and how much of its limited time it sounds on how the mayor is trying to pacify APD

Man, the wealth tax ban is mind-boggling to me. I can only imagine what marketing they must have done to convince the average voter there was any downside to the POSSIBILITY of taxing high net worth individuals, without any specifics.

According to the video, the original effort to get this passenger rail set up died in 2016 because Union Pacific wasn’t interested and that’s (theoretically) changed now. I wonder if it’s just a change in management decision makers or if UP’s business is down on those routes and it’d actually benefit them to get a slice of that traffic.

I do wonder what the projected cost might be to make this a reality - the rep from the rail line project said a study projected a 20% in traffic on 35 if the rail line were to be completed. I’m guessing that’s the optimistic number and it doesn’t feel like 20% would be life-changing necessarily, so it’s a real question of whether it’d be worth whatever the cost might be

Code reform has always been such a hot button issue in the past, I don’t understand why I haven’t heard more about this until now. An I just out of the loop or is this different in some way from CodeNEXT and the other reform attempts that make it less of a slig to get through?

I think the compromise of requiring the historic facades and setbacks from the facades is a good way to not lose history while also turning Dirty 6th into something approaching usefulness.

I think the whole focus on small buildings and maintaining sightlines to the capitol building is stupid, honestly. If we want downtown to support a big city’s level of people (and not be a dead zone), we have to build it up like an actual city.

So she got BS from BS

To be fair, my guess about the source of those claims is also totally unsubstantiated and quite possibly bullshit 😉

Does she hold any investment in BlueSky?

Imo, it’s way more likely she got her information about BS from the website/a press release/a contact at BS and like you said, didn’t bother to get a contrasting opinion from anyone associated with Mastodon (probably because it’s a lot harder to get ahold of someone from a distributed project like Mastodon).