Austin Texas Community

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