Good morning, RVA: Themed public schools, drones, and slowing streets with paint & posts

Good morning, RVA! It’s 48 °F, and today we’ve got highs in the 60s. That’s hardly fall-like! There’s a small but decent chance for rain throughout the day, and, honestly, throughout the weekend. Keep your eye on the weather map.

Water cooler

At 9:49 PM this past Tuesday, Police were called to the 2900 block of Route 1 on the City’s Southside and found Carlos D. Delgado, 65, shot to death in the doorway of his home. According to the RPD’s website, this is at least the 51st murder in 2019.

Justin Mattingly at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has some details on the Superintendent’s proposal to create theme-based middle and high schools 💸. This proposal should ring some bells: Action 1.1 under Priority 1 of the District’s Dreams4RPS strategic plan (PDF) is “Passion4Learning”, which seeks to launch “a comprehensive, multi-year effort to nurture our students’ passion for learning by creating an exciting, hands-on, and rigorous theme at every RPS middle & high school.” The five proposed themes are science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; visual and performing arts; languages and international affairs; law, policy, and public service; and advanced career and technical education. First up to get the theme treatment: STEM academies at Henderson and MLK middle in Fall of 2020. STEM is cool and all, but let me know how I can get involved in the public service academy. In my experience, youth have the absolute best ideas about how to fix/save our city/world. You can flip through the administration’s presentation to the School Board (PDF) for some details on the process planned over the next couple of months.

The RTD’s Editorial Board has mixed feelings about the Richmond Police Department’s recent acquisition of small fleet of drones 💸. I’ve got mixed feelings, too, after reading this piece last week by Ali Rockett that has all the droney details. Some of the language in Rockett’s piece is a little loosey-goosey—even for me, and, as I’ve said a bunch of times before, I’m not a privacy expert. Like: “The department’s operating manual has other safeguards, such as preventing any recording until the drone is over the point of interest. So the drone doesn’t record its trip out or back.” But does the drone stream video to police on its trip out or back? And, as with all these sorts of things, what is the data retention policy on the video that the drones do record? While the RPD said they consulted the ACLU when putting together their internal drone policy, the ACLU “did not return a request for comment” for last week’s story. Sounds like I’ve got some research to do!

I’m so ultra tired of engineers, elected officials, and everyone else blaming “distracted pedestrians” for the increase in injuries on our roads. Last week on Bainbridge Street, a driver crashed into a parked car, ramming it up on to the sidewalk. Thankfully no one was walking by at the time. Maybe the sidewalk was too distracted, though? Should it have been wearing reflective sidewalk clothing? Did it remember to pause its podcast and take out its headphones? Pfft. Residents of Bainbridge want traffic calming measures ASAP, and I don’t blame them. This wide, fast street seems like a good spot for some paint and posts, narrowing the intersections, increasing visibility, and slowing drivers, way, way down.

You think I jest when I say there are an infinite and ever-increasing number of NoBro meetings to attend? Well, JEST NO MORE. The Navy Hill Development Advisory Commission (that’s the group created by Council to help vet the project) just announced their four public hearing dates—which were, I think, required by Council’s establishing legislation. Public hearing means public comment so buckle up, y’all. If you’ve got strong feelings one way or the other, you should put one of these four meetings on your calendar. All of them start at 6:00 PM, and please note the lack of specified end time (😳): 12/16 , MLK Middle School; 12/17, Carver Elementary School; 12/18, Hickory Hill Community Center; and 12/19 Richmond Government Southside Community Services Center.

I can’t get this cover of the president’s “I want no quid pro quo” note, in the style of the Ramones, out of my head. Sometimes people are so talented and wonderful!

This morning’s patron longread

Gimme Shelter

Submitted by Patron Rachel. “Personal essay explores larger social issue” is one of my faves, and this one about housing in the Bay Area was a delight to read.

I was unwittingly among the vanguard of a wave of gentrification—a transient “creative” living in a “rough” neighborhood not yet fully colonized by the white middle class—and sometimes it was tense. I almost brawled one night with three teens who shoved me out front of a liquor store; another night I fought off a mugger and came home with a black eye. But otherwise the Bay was astonishingly convivial—for the first time in Oakland’s history, the city’s populations of African-American, Latino, Asian, and white residents were almost exactly equal in size—and I fell in love with dozens of squats, warehouses, galleries, and underground bars, where black hyphy kids and white gutter punks and queer Asian ravers all hung out and partied together, paving the way for later spaces like Ghost Ship. It felt like the perfect time to be there, like I imagined the Eighties on New York City’s Lower East Side.

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.