Good morning, RVA: Precrimes, City employees can unionize!, and tons of old magazines

Congratulations, City employees!

Good morning, RVA! It's 73 °F, and highs today will stay in the 80s! That’s relatively cool and exciting! Keep an eye on this afternoon, though, because we could see storms roll through again, and I’d hate for you to get stuck outside during some thunder and lightning.

Water cooler

I don’t know how to process this reporting by Meg Schiffres at VPM: “Richmond police have arrested dozens based on list of potential ‘shooters’.” My first reaction is that this sounds a lot like Minority Report’s precrimes. I mean: “Approximately 100 individuals are on the list...which includes individuals who don’t have a criminal record. In addition to focusing on people who have shot others previously, RPD also added victims of gun violence and people who ‘will shoot other people’ to the list...police decide whether a person ‘will shoot other people’ by investigating their background and connections to confirmed perpetrators of gun violence.“ Creepy. My second reaction is that real life and real violence in real neighborhoods is probably a lot more complicated than a Philip K. Dick short story. But still, are there better ways to reduce violence in our public housing neighborhoods than creepy, predictive policing? Later on in the piece, Schiffres points to Boston’s Operation Ceasefire as a counter example, but it seems like that program also focuses on “aggressive law enforcement and prosecution efforts.” As with most things, this is totally not my area of expertise or lived experience, and I’d like to learn more. So far, police have arrested 45 residents of public housing as part of this program.

As foretold, City Council easily passed the collective bargaining ordinance last night (ORD. 2022-221)—in front of a packed house even. Patrick Larsen at VPM has a recap and reports on some next steps, including one tiny piece of the timeline: “the city must hire its labor relations manager within 120 days of passage, according to the ordinance.” That’s November 23nd, so we’ll check back then. Until then, congratulations City employees!

Remember how yesterday WRIC posted body-cam footage that the Richmond Police Department were required to turn over to the Library of Virginia? Well, now you can poke through some of that data and information yourself in the “City of Richmond 1 June 2020 Protest Collection” on the LVA’s website. Body-cam footage and radio recordings are not yet accessible, but sounds like they will be eventually. I don’t know that the actual information here is all that interesting, but the fact that it exists in this way is incredible. More of this, please!

Sarah Vogelsong, the newly-minted editor-in-chief of the Virginia Mercury, says hello in her first column from that new role. It’s worth your time; I love these sorts of inside looks into local journalism.

Via /r/rva, many, many issues of VCU’s ThroTTle magazine dating back to 1981! I could lose an entire day to flipping through these old magazines! Randomly tapping around, I found this strange piece about Safety Town at the old Azalea Mall, which was a real (and also strange) thing!

Teachers! This seems cool: Maymont will host an Educator Open House on August 17th to introduce teachers to “new learning spaces, programs, hands-on experiences and interactive tools to enrich environmental science, history and social studies.” This seems like something that’d book up pretty fast, so, if you’re interested in incorporating some Maymont into your curriculum, you should probably sign up soon.

This morning's longread
Cast In A New Light

I have never seen The Lost Colony myself, but it does play a big role in the stories I hear from my wife about her summers spent in the Outer Banks.

In its numerous revisions over nearly a century, the play has always appealed to an audience who believes they are the realization of this dream—a Christian nation of English descent that civilized the continent so that they could now watch a historical fantasy on a warm summer night, unafraid of what might attack them out of the darkness. “I don't think Paul Green meant any ill intent when he first wrote the script in the 1930s,” said Godwin, “but I just don't think he had enough information.” Bradley points out that Green wrote the play in the midst of the Great Depression. “He was trying to provide an inspirational story for Americans to coalesce around. The story depicted sort of an us-against-them mentality and that the colonists were the innocent ones ... It was sort of a cowboy, Indian, John Wayne sort of feature.”

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