Good morning, RVA: 841 • 15; Phase Two; and a hopeful night in Richmond

Good morning, RVA! It’s 72 °F, and today looks hot and humid. Expect highs in the 90s until the sun goes down. If you spend some time outside, expect to sweat.

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 841 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 15 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 157 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 59, Henrico: 61, and Richmond: 37). Since this pandemic began, 196 people have died in the Richmond region. Pandemic Tuesday did not bring its expected numbers bump, and VDH has reported 20 or fewer people dying from the coronavirus each of the last five days—an encouraging sign.

Yesterday, the Governor announced that, except for Richmond and Northern Virginia, evvvvveryone else moves into Phase Two of recovery this coming Friday. Folks get a whole three days notice! You can read the 40 pages of guidelines here (PDF). Notable changes:

Gatherings of up to 50 people, with proper social distancing, are now permitted. I think this only applies to random, unspecified gatherings like LARPing with your pals in Monroe Park (although see the section on recreational sports below, and be sure to keep it to just jousting). Lots of places can open to 50% of their internal capacity, which, for places like the VMFA is way more than 50 folks.

Restaurants and “beverage service” (aka breweries, I think) can open up to 50% of their internal capacity with social distancing, disposable menus (quick! call the printer ASAP!), PPE for restaurant workers, and increased cleaning procedures.

Gyms can open up to 30% of their internal capacity with 10-feet of social distancing—that’s up from the standard six feet found elsewhere in the document.

Pools are back, but only for “lap swimming, diving, exercise, and instruction.” Kids are bummed.

You can play recreational sports if “ten feet of physical distance can be maintained by all instructors, participants, and spectators with the exception of incidental contact or contact between members of the same household.” Basketball = No. Doubles badminton = yes, but only if you play on the same side as your housemate.

Museums can open up to 50% of their internal capacity.

Social distancing, teleworking, and masks are all still part of this “Safer at Home” plan.

So there you have it, Phase Two. We never really learned what the goals and metrics were for getting here, but the Governor says “key statewide health metrics continue to show positive signs,” which I guess is good enough for him. You can probably expect Richmond and NOVA to enter Phase Two in the next couple of weeks, although, I imagine the desire to sync up the entire state will eventually be too strong to resist. In the Governor’s original Forward Virginia Blueprint document (PDF), he said Phase II could last 2–4 weeks, and, since we’ve stopped using data to guide these decisions and started using the calendar, I’d circle July 19th for Phase Three.

Last night, hundreds, maybe thousands, of protestors took to the streets for the fourth? fifth? straight night in Downtown Richmond. Much like yesterday—minus the violent escalation by the police—the crowd’s vibe was angry, peaceful, and hopeful. @echadwilliams grabbed these excellent drone photos around the Lee Monument right as curfew started (which was promptly ignore by both protestors and cops) and will give you an idea of the scale of things. The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Sabrina Moreno was on the scene throughout the night and her thread on Twitter is worth scrolling through. I have to point out this particular video of hundreds of bikes rolling down Franklin Street and this one of what it looks like when people, bikes, and cars all get equal priority on a street (and also what it looks like when drivers drive the wrong way down Broad Street??). The night ended peaceful, again, at the Lee Monument with folks celebrating the day.

Earlier yesterday, though, at the Mayor’s public apology, the mood couldn’t have been more different. For about an hour, legitimately angry citizens took the Mayor to task for all kinds of things, shouted him down when he tried to address the crowd, and demanded he take a handful of actions—including the Marcus Alert, a Civilian Review Board, violence de-escalation techniques, and, very loudly, the firing of the Police Chief and the officers involved in yesterday’s unprovoked gassing of peaceful protestors. The Mayor and the Chief said the officers would be disciplined, which, as you can imagine, didn’t sit well with the crowd. The rally ended, folks we still mad, and the City’s leadership hadn’t set a vision for moving forward other than the Mayor agreeing to join protestors on a march from the Capitol to the Lee Monument. Via /r/rva here are a ton of pictures that do a great job capturing the frustration of everyone involved.

But at that march later in the evening, walking-and-talking to a smaller crowd, maybe we got the first steps forward on police reform. Sabrina Moreno and Frank Green at the RTD say “The mayor vowed to expedite policies that would remove choke holds, establish a civilian review board to hold police accountable and investigate de-escalation techniques — demands activists have called for in Richmond since the killing of Marcus-David Peters during a mental health crisis in 2018 by Richmond police department.” Mayor Stoney also retweeted reporter Brad Kutner saying “@LevarStoney agrees to: Civilian review board, Marcus Alert…[, and] no choke holds.” I’d love to see immediate action on each of these, but, honestly, I don’t for sure know the process or timeline for getting any of these things implemented. The police policies sound like something the Mayor could just lean on the Chief to get implemented ASAP, while the Marcus Alert and the Civilian Review Board will almost certainly require City Council (and possible the General Assembly for the latter).

I’m most interested in how Richmond puts together a meaningful Civilian Review Board, and have been reading through some PDFs to get me up to speed. I’ve got a ton more to learn, and am looking for suggestions! So please, if you’ve got a favorite CRB or a clear vision for what Richmond’s should look like, let me know. Until then, your homework for tomorrow is to read through Oakland’s Measure LL(which is intense!) and Charlottesville’s Civilian Review Board ordinance (which is way, way less intense but something we could definitely implement in Richmond if we wanted to).

This morning’s longread

Becoming a Parent in the Age of Black Lives Matter

Here’s Clint Smith, who I’ve linked to before, about becoming a parent over the last handful of years.

In 2015, before I had children, I wrote a letter to the son I might one day have. In it I wrote, “I hope to teach you so much of what my father taught me, but I pray that you live in a radically different world from the one that he and I have inherited.” Now I do have a son, and all the fears, anxieties, and joys I wrote about five years ago are no longer an abstraction. They exist in his curly hair, his soft face, and his voice full of songs and questions. I am not sure how different the world I entered is from the one he has, but the past several weeks—to say nothing of the past several years—have made clear how fragile the project of progress truly is.

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