🎃 Good morning, RVA: 902↘️ • 24↘️; spooooky Halloween guidance; and the Task Force to Reimagine Public Safety reports

Good morning, RVA! It’s 62 °F, and today looks like rain. Tomorrow, probably, looks like rain, too. Sunday though! Actually, Sunday, we’ll have to wait and see. You can expect temperatures in the 70s and low 80s throughout the weekend, though.

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 902↘️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 24↘️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 86↘️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 19, Henrico: 40, and Richmond: 27). Since this pandemic began, 365 people have died in the Richmond region. A couple of days ago the CDC released their Halloween guidance, and I love its specificity. The general coronarules still apply, and by now, I hope, you can figure out what’s a low risk way to spend your spooky evening: Keep your distance, Scream masks don’t count as coronamasks, and wash your hands after touching whatever sugary loot you come across. Definitely don’t spend the night literally handing people candy and covering them in whatever potential virus you may be shedding. Here are few examples of the (very) specific activities from the CDC guidance in decreasing order of risk level: going to an indoor haunted house where people may be crowded together and screaming (high risk); going to an open-air, one-way, walk-through haunted forest where appropriate mask use is enforced and people can remain more than six feet apart, however, if screaming will likely occur, greater distance is advised (moderate risk); doing a Halloween scavenger hunt where children are given lists of Halloween-themed things to look for while they walk outdoors from house to house admiring Halloween decorations at a distance (lower risk). These are all direct quotes from the CDC, and I find them wonderfully charming…but serious! Colleen Curran at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says Halloween on Hanover has been canceled, so you know it’s serious.

This is awful: GRTC bus operator John Thrower, 49, died from complications caused by COVID-19 earlier this week. These words from GRTC CEO Julie Timm really hit home for me: “But the virus can be anywhere, anytime, unseen, and we are all at risk each time we step out of our homes and every time someone enters our businesses. Still, GRTC exists to serve our community’s essential mobility needs. John was proud to be a GRTC Operator, and he did everything he could to safely serve the public during this crisis while volunteering many hours and days of overtime to support the essential mobility needs of our community…This loss to GRTC hits directly into our hearts and reminds us all how deadly this disease can be, and how all of us are susceptible.” I know I make a lot of jokes in this email (see entire section above about Halloween), but Timm is exactly right. The virus can be anywhere, anytime, and we should all take the role we each have to play in public health seriously. Wear a mask, keep your distance, wash your hands, make smart choices, protect your neighbor.

Interesting PDF alert: The Mayor’s Task Force on Reimagining Public Safety has released their initial recommendations (PDF), and you’re gonna want to read through them all. The Task Force had three sub groups—Human Service Lens, Use of Force, and Community Engagement and Healing—each of which reported back a number of recommendations. This is a really interesting document, and you can tell that the three subgroups all had different perspectives and goals. If you’re looking for the recommendation to delete the police department, you’re gonna be disappointed, but the report does recommend something that sounds like a Marcus Alert, supports a Civilian Review Board, and points out a bunch of police- and community-related programs from across the country that are seeing results. The vast majority of the recommendations either rely on police leadership buy-in or will require a bunch of cash. An example of the former is the recommendation to “standardize the approach language utilized by officers,” (Use of Force recommendation #6) which goes on to say “Expecting a respectful manner from residents when the officer is not engaging in a respectful dialogue is not reasonable.” TotalIy agree with that, and I’d love to hear more about the specifics on implementation and accountability. For examples of the latter, check out the Community Engagement and Healing subgroup which has the most interesting and reimagine-y set of recommendations (summary table on page 17). I think all of these recommendations require staff, support, and operating funds, which is the challenge here. The Richmond Police Department has a $100 million budget. Seems like a lot, but, like yesterday’s conversation about coronavirus in schools, I have no idea if $100 million is a big number for a city like Richmond or not (that’s in part because City Council rejected RES. 2020-R047 which would have asked for a report on the RPD’s budget). Still though, $100 million seems like a lot. If, as we always say, a budget reflects our priorities, I’d like our elected officials to dig through that $100 million and find enough money to fund a CRB and the recommendations in this report—and fund them generously so that those efforts actually have a chance at success.

Hilariously, despite keeping an entire document about candidate events, I totally missed that the potential mayors had a debate last night. You can watch the full two-hour replay over on WRIC’s website if you, too, totally forgot. After watching most of it, it sure seems like a lot of the mayoral candidates just plain hate Richmond. Why would I vote for someone who hates it here?

RVA Rapid Transit, my previous place of employ, is looking to hire a full-time Director of Community Engagement focused on “grassroots organizing with current core bus riders and potential bus riders (where lines do not currently exist) in order to center their stories, concerns, and interests at the heart of RVA Rapid Transit’s work.” Y’all! A full-time job, with benefits, pushing public transit forward in the Richmond region! If that’s not you, maybe you know someone who’d be a perfect fit? Spread the word!

This morning’s longread

Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches

This is, by far, the nerdiest thing I’ve linked to in a while. Just skip over the code parts and be amazed at how wonderful people can be.

So, how do we make optimal peanut butter and banana sandwiches? It’s really quite simple. You take a picture of your banana and bread, pass the image through a deep learning model to locate said items, do some nonlinear curve fitting to the banana, transform to polar coordinates and “slice” the banana along the fitted curve, turn those slices into elliptical polygons, and feed the polygons and bread “box” into a 2D nesting algorithm. You may have noticed that I supposedly started this project in the Spring, and it’s now August. Like most idiot engineers, I had no idea how complicated this stupid project was going to be, but time’s meaningless in quarantine, so here we are.

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This morning’s Instagram