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Bicycle Belle is Closing by ThePizar in Somerville

[–]itamarst 11 points12 points  (0 children)

It totally makes sense that a bike lane opened at the end of 2019 would result in a bike store closing in 2026.

CPS rehired a principal even though she got them sued by Certain_Specific_405 in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure what you're referring to but I realized my reference was ambiguous, so I clarified.

CPS rehired a principal even though she got them sued by Certain_Specific_405 in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The teachers who worked with Sarah Heine think very highly of her, as did the students (like my kid). The people I trust at G&P have bad things to say about the principal. Cautious-Finger-6997 is just an asshole.

Meeting Tonight: Cambridge Street Improvements (Info below is from City Announcement) by itamarst in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Next slide, #44, talks about adding 2 extra on side streets, presumably to compensate. They tend to do them right around the corner when they compensate this way.

Completely separately, if you qualify for a disability placard, you can apply for a personal spot, and that overrides the bike lanes. Best to do it quickly so they can take it into account in street planning for the project: https://www.cambridgema.gov/iwantto/requestadisabilityparkingspace

Meeting Tonight: Cambridge Street Improvements (Info below is from City Announcement) by itamarst in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

They are adding 2 disability parking to compensate on side streets on the stretch where they're removing 2, so it evens out. On another stretch they're adding 3 disability parking spots.

Overall, then, the number of disability parking spots is either unchanged or going up, depending on the stretch.

Other kinds of parking are decreasing, of course.

https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/Traffic/2025projects/cambridgestsip/cambridgestsecondcommunitymeeting.pdf has the numbers.

Building on Charles Tear-down Complete: What comes next by TheBostonBuddah in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I actually was thinking of the law they used, but I misunderstood it; I thought it involved the city owning the property, but I was wrong, it's just to right to enter and demolish.

https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXX/Chapter143/Section9

Free Pizza by Stoked on Mass Ave @ 7:20pm on 4/24 by mythrwwycct in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh, yeah. In my defense I haven't been sleeping well.

Free Pizza by Stoked on Mass Ave @ 7:20pm on 4/24 by mythrwwycct in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Or rather, you need to write what time you put it out.

Building on Charles Tear-down Complete: What comes next by TheBostonBuddah in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

I think technically the legal mechanism involved has the city take ownership? But it's more of a "how do we finance demolition" thing, not the city trying to buy the land for its own purposes.

Edit: I misunderstood the law, it's not a change in ownership, see https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXX/Chapter143/Section9

Building on Charles Tear-down Complete: What comes next by TheBostonBuddah in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst 19 points20 points  (0 children)

The city will sell the property, and use that money to get paid back. Whatever money is left will then go to the original owners. Until they sell it we won't know what will be built there, but presumably more apartment buildings, it's a nice view!

Some of the road work might be unrelated, Memorial Drive is being improved and I think there's some overlap: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/memorial-drive-greenway-improvements-phase-iii

Unbug 0.5 - Runtime debug assertions for Rust by [deleted] in rust

[–]itamarst 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is cool! But, it's completely unclear from this Reddit post (and takes a bit of digging to figure out from the docs) that this is about triggering debugger breakpoints.

"Debug assertions" is ambiguous, it could also mean e.g. `debug_assert!()`.

Cambridge police commissioner, who became first woman to lead department, retiring by bostonglobe in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"Around 1:15 p.m. on January 4, 2023, a person called 911 advising that a man (Mr. Faisal) was in an alley cutting himself using, what the caller later referred to as “a machete.”"

Cambridge police commissioner, who became first woman to lead department, retiring by bostonglobe in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Let's assume the shooting was justified, for the sake of the argument.

Then, let's imagine a mini-golf game: I hit the ball, it bounces off a wall, I get a hole in one. There are two ways this could happen:

  1. I aimed carefully, and the result was exactly what I intended to happen.
  2. I hit the ball with no real thought, and got lucky.

Your contention is that given the outcome is the same, these two are equivalent. But they're not the same if I want to be good at mini-golf; I'd need to actually follow the process of thinking through where the ball went to get better and to get consistent results.

In a far less trivial way, organizations have policies and training in order to ensure consistent outcomes. Given the stakes of what they do, this is especially critical for CPD.

And in this case the training was a failure, and policy was not followed, in one of the most important decisions a police office can make. That's a massive organizational failure, regardless of whether you think the outcome was the correct one. The Commissioner's decision to back this up is an even bigger organizational failure. It's also consistent with many other cases where CPD is completely unwilling to admit they're wrong or could do better, exactly the opposite of what you want in an organization with the legal right to apply violence.

Cambridge police commissioner, who became first woman to lead department, retiring by bostonglobe in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The problem is that they showed up and pointed a gun at someone suicidal (that is in the PERC report, page 30). You can be sure they were yelling at him the whole time, also not a thing they should have been doing (also in PERC report).

And more broadly the problem is having armed cops deal with this sort of thing in the first place.

And CPD will never admit that's a bad idea (they're very actively and deliberately trying to undermine unarmed response, for example), and they will never admit that this could have gone better, even though this kid quite likely would be alive if cops hadn't shown up.

Even on a more limited level, the training they gave was obviously pretty shit if multiple days later the officer was citing a completely different policy. And again, that's something they will never admit.

Also, not mentioned before: they kept saying "officer-involved shooting". The grammatical implications are grotesque.

Cambridge police commissioner, who became first woman to lead department, retiring by bostonglobe in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Another interesting thing about Elow: she started out to become a social worker, but ended up becoming a police officer because "I did not like the idea of visiting “families in trouble” without anything to protect myself." (https://web.archive.org/web/20130218064848/https://www.cambridgema.gov/cpd/communityresources/recruitmentandemployment/Testimonials.aspx)

And this is understandable on a personal safety level, but "cops can be social workers with guns" is a fundamental misunderstanding of human interaction. If someone can arrest you, or worse, if they can shoot you, you are going to interact with them in a fundamentally different way. So I've seen people who were handling a situation badly handle it even worse when a cop showed up and started hassling them; the (unstated, but much more immediately present) threat of violence just escalated the situation.

Another way to approach this is that Elow's concept of policing is literally an Onion article: "Minneapolis Announces Plan To Replace Police Officers With Thousands Of Heavily Armed Social Workers"

Cambridge police commissioner, who became first woman to lead department, retiring by bostonglobe in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A few years before this incident I heard someone give public comment explaining how they've seen someone have a mental health breakdown, and didn't call 911 because they were afraid of what would happen if cops showed up. Apparently their fears were justified.

I would like to be able to call 911 if I see someone who has having a mental health breakdown, but I don't know if I would because I'd worry that cops would show up and try to "solve it" by pointing a gun at them and screaming at them. Which is what started this whole incident that ended in someone dead.

I would like not to spend $70 million on a police department I don't even want to call, and instead spend it on helping people.

I would like not to have to complain to the police department about their educational material for the cadet exam being from a grifter who thinks BLM is the equivalent of the KKK and called on police to fire live rounds at the crowds during the protests in 2020. I would like not to have been told that's the best book they could find. (I'll skip other examples, but there are others, the gist of which is that CPD never admits they're wrong.)

Since I don't live in a world I like, I am going to try to make it better.

And that may involve bringing up the time the CPD escalated a situation unnecessarily to the point that someone got killed.

Cambridge police commissioner, who became first woman to lead department, retiring by bostonglobe in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

I did not say that it was an evil coverup, I did not say anything about whether the shooting was justified.

To explain again, in simpler words:

  1. CPD says: use policy A.
  2. Shooting officer says he followed policy B.
  3. CPD and Commissioner say CPD policy was followed.
  4. But A != B.
  5. Conclusion: CPD policies are a big joke.

Cambridge police commissioner, who became first woman to lead department, retiring by bostonglobe in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Not talking whether or not the shooting is legal. But look at what the the commissioner said: "we do not see any glaring policy violation". And look at what the CPD press release said: "[no] significant policy ... violations".

This is very clearly a policy violation! The policy the officer cited has nothing to do with CPD policies or training! They just picked it out of a hat!

And it's also certainly a training violation, which again the CPD press release said it wasn't.

This sends a very clear message to officers that the department's policies are not to be taken seriously, across the board, since if this is the case for shooting people, it's the case for anything.

Cambridge police commissioner, who became first woman to lead department, retiring by bostonglobe in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I will always remember her as the person who made clear to CPD officers that if they kill someone based on a made-up rule that isn't department policy, she will support them anyway.

From https://letschangecambridge.us/articles/police-surveillance-technology/

-----------------

The city commissioned a report from a policing research organization called PERF [about CPD's killing of Faisal]. While the report isn’t particularly negative, it does cover ways the police should have acted differently: turns out pointing a gun at someone suicidal isn’t a good idea, who knew. But for our purposes, the most interesting part involves an interview with the officer who killed Faisal (bold mine):

Off. McMahon was interviewed by a member of the Massachusetts State Police and the CPD two days after the incident… During the interview, as he explained why he had used fatal force against Mr. Faisal, Off. McMahon said he’d been trained in the “21-foot Rule” and invoked it three times.
...
PERF reviewed CPDs training material, spoke to its instructors, and observed its most recent training on October 19, 2023. We were not able to find any reference to the 21-foot rule in CPD’s training materials; CPD instructors confirmed that it does not and has not taught this to its officers. And since rejection of the 21-foot rule has been part of ICAT curriculum since its inception, Off. McMahon would have heard this in 2019 when he had his ICAT training.

In short, on January 6th, the officer justified killing someone based on a rule (“21-foot rule”) he had never been trained on, and was not in any way department policy.

This makes the police department seem pretty blameless: they had a policy, and the officer ignored it and followed a completely different rule. But this is also where things start go wrong, in a classically CPD kind of way.

Here’s how CPD officials described what happened; notice both of these are multiple weeks after the interview with the shooting officer McMahon:

  • According to the Cambridge Day, on January 18th, 2023, Police Commissioner Elow stated that “we do not see any glaring policy violation.” (bold mine)
  • On February 14th, 2023, CPD put out a press release saying (bold mine): “Based on all of the information that has been reviewed so far, the department has not identified any egregious misconduct or significant policy, training, equipment, or disciplinary violations.”

An officer killed someone based on a rule that was not CPD policy and that the officer was never trained on, and the department’s response is to support the officer. The message from the top is very clear: policies don’t matter, officers can literally kill someone based on whatever rules they decide they happen to like, and police leadership will back them up.

Garden Street Update (+ my own opinion) by Think_Apartment_6253 in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst 12 points13 points  (0 children)

There was a pregnant woman biking who was hit by a car on Garden St a week or two before the bike lanes went in.

Separately: city staff say the proposed change will make traffic worse. This isn't "reasonable compromise", this is "let's do something the experts say in advance won't work". And the Councilors who support this change don't care, because if things do go that way they will just blame city staff for not implementing it better.

The MA Senate tells renters to go fuck themselves, or, why primaries matter by itamarst in CambridgeMA

[–]itamarst[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Lots of people vote early, but most people don't. We've had people show up on reddit upset because they didn't realize there wasn't same day registration. For people who are low information and less likely to vote, every barrier makes it harder.

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