How Dallas Became a Role Model for Community Policing, The Secret Streams That Keep Hawaii Pristine and More


A Different Beat, Texas Monthly
The sniper attack that killed five Dallas cops this summer shocked locals: “Why here?” they wondered. Unlike other racially diverse urban areas, police relations in this Texan metropolis were quite strong. Since 2010, Police Chief David Brown harped on the need for community policing — even after his own patrol cops called for his resignation — saying a team of 80 neighborhood specialists are the city’s best crime-fighting tool.

Uncovering the Potential of Honolulu’s Hidden Streams, Next City
Open a manhole cover on Oahu, and one might find a stream of crystal-clear freshwater, dotted with fish wriggling upstream — just one of the many auwai, or canals, that native Hawaiians dug, then paved over centuries later. In Honolulu, a city well known for its sandy beaches, architects are reclaiming the rest of the tropical island’s buried waterways to accent public parks, buffer against flooding and repair coral reefs damaged by impure runoff.

America’s First Offshore Wind Farm May Power Up a New Industry, The New York Times
Several miles from New England’s shore, a brand-new energy project could have massive environmental ramifications. No, not oil drilling (with its hazardous spills), but the first-ever offshore wind farm. When three massive turbines near Block Island, R.I., begin twirling this October in the unobstructed Atlantic Ocean breezes (likely at faster, more consistent speeds than those on land), they could turbocharge  the already booming renewable energy sector.

MORE: 5 Ways To Strengthen Ties Between Cops and Citizens

Why Youthful Indiscretions Shouldn’t Result in Jail Sentences, How to Save Babies Born with Opioid Addictions and More

 
A Prosecutor’s Vision For A Better Justice System, TED
Adam Foss, a prosecutor with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Boston, recently asked a group of TED participants how many had ever drank underage, tried an illegal drug, shoplifted or gotten into a physical fight. While viewed by most as youthful indiscretions, these same offenses often land black and brown youth in criminal court, viewed as being dangerous to society. Which is why Foss is using prosecutorial discretion to dismiss minor cases that aren’t worthy of a criminal record.
Tiny Opioid Patients Need Help Easing Into Life, Kaiser Health News and NPR
In this country, addiction to heroin and prescription painkillers like hydrocodone, oxycodone or morphine continues to rise, even afflicting new moms. During pregnancy, these mothers must decide between getting clean and risking a miscarriage or delivering a baby that’s likely to experience drug withdrawal. With about 21,000 infants suffering from withdrawal each year, doctors in Rhode Island, nurses in Connecticut, researchers in Pennsylvania and public health officials in Ohio are all working on solutions to help these new families.

Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through, New York Times
Just because the government releases endless pages of data to the public doesn’t mean it’s easy to turn those statistics into something that you can actually comprehend and use. DataUSA, an open source brainchild coming from the M.I.T. Media Lab, organizes and visualizes the information, presenting it in charts, graphs and written synopses. Thanks to this project, instead of just hearing a statistic of how many people in Flint, Mich., live in poverty, for example,  you can see it visually represented on a map.

5 Cutting-Edge Ways That Cities Are Digging Out After Record Snowfall

Snow removal hasn’t changed much since the introduction of the horse-drawn plow in 1862. But this winter’s blizzards, which have already shattered records for the sheer amount of snow (Boston’s been deluged in 78.5 inches of powder — three times its average — and Worcester, Mass., has received a hefty 92.1 inches), are prompting smart collaborations and innovations to get the white stuff out of thoroughfares.
Make it a group effort.
Local governments plow the streets so that school buses and emergency vehicles can pass through, but some fed-up pedestrians say the policy prioritizes drivers over those who walk, bike or take public transit. Instead of griping, neighbors in Ann Arbor, Mich., banded together to operate the Snowbuddy, a 32-horsepower tractor to clear 12 miles of sidewalk each storm. Paul Tinkerhess, a 30-year resident and the lead organizer, says a unified effort makes much more sense than individuals shoveling. “It’s like taking something that’s really a linear transportation corridor, it’s one line, and dividing its maintenance responsibility into hundreds and even thousands of little links,” he says, “and assigning that responsibility to people who have a widely varying ability and even interest in maintaining that walkway.”
Solicit others to shovel.
One of the downsides of plowing the roadways is that all that snow gets piled up in huge icy banks on the curbs and corners, impeding pedestrians and upping their risk of taking a hard fall. To remove the windrows, some public transit authorities, like Rhode Island’s, have negotiated deals with advertising companies, requiring them to clear the snow around bus shelters where their signs are posted.

D.I.Y.
Chicago residents invented an ingenious way to make every ordinary citizen into a street-clearing machine: By attaching plows to almost any kind of personal vehicle. You name it, SUVs, Priuses, lawn mowers, ATVs. The Nordic Plow is a lightweight, rounded snow blade that works on almost any surface, too, so you can clear your grassy lawn or your gravel driveway. “The idea for the Nordic Auto Plows came from watching people struggle with shovels and snow blowers in cold, wintry weather,” says Richard Behan, the founder and CEO. “I believed there must be a better way.”
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Move it out of town.
Conjuring odd images of the original Tea Party protest, hard-hit Boston has considered dumping the snow into the harbor. But concerned citizens have cried foul, worried that the snow will also carry salt, litter and residue of gasoline that could pollute the bay. The strategy in Minneapolis has always been to use payloaders and dump trucks to pick up snow and consolidate it into giant piles in vacant lots. The strategy is the same in Portland, Maine, where one of the collection sites has been filled with so much snow that the mound is now 40 feet tall, just below the FAA height regulation.
Melt it.
This one’s a no-brainer. In Boston, the city is using machines that can zap up to 400 tons of snow per hour. Some of the technology is so advanced that it filters debris out of the water before releasing the cleaned H20 down a storm drain, as the Snow Dragon does by heating snow over a tank of hot water. (Other melters work like giant hair dryers, blowing out hot air.) While effective, these machines are expensive and require lots of energy to operate. But until the city implements civil engineer Rajib Mallick’s idea — building a network of pipes that could be filled with rushing hot fluid near the surface of streets, warming the pavement and melting the snow — it’s Boston’s best bet to get rid of 6+ feet of the white stuff.
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The Smallest State’s Big Move to Build College Savings

Newborn infants in Rhode Island will leave the hospital with two things: a birth certificate and bank account.
Starting this month, the Ocean State is streamlining an existing college savings program known as CollegeBoundBaby. Since the initiative’s start in 2010, enrolled infants each receive $100 in a 529 savings plan from Rhode Island, but it’s been highly underutilized due to a unwieldy application that required parents to supply multiple pages of information and pick an investment strategy. As a result, only 400 families enrolled, according to the Providence Journal.
But now, parents can now sign up the day their child is born by simply checking a box on the birth certificate form, a small fix that the newly elected governor hopes will boost the program’s reach.
“The system now requires parents to take the initiative to open an account,” says Governor Gina Raimondo, the state’s first female governor. “With this program, before the parents leave the hospital, all they have to do is put an X in the right box and boom, the account will be set up.”
Here’s why this simplification matters: More than one-third of all Americans have no money in savings and even fewer have funds stored away for college. Many low-income youth will leave college burdened by debt, if they choose to attend at all. State governments like Connecticut and a cluster of nonprofits are aiming to change that by incentivizing families to open 529 accounts by fronting the initial seed deposit. (It’s worth noting that there can be cons to putting money in a 529 plan, so families should always look at the specifics before investing.)
The small cash incentive not only provides some economic certainty, it also forces the parents to think about long-term financial planning and sets goals to which young people can aspire. It’s proven to work. Studies show children with dedicated savings for higher education are seven times as likely to attend college. (For those not seeking a B.A., money in 529 accounts can be used to pay for trade, technical or vocational school; if not used by age 25, it reverts back to a state’s education fund.) Even beyond the benefits that come with a college degree like higher job earnings, one study found that just having a bank account aids children’s social and emotional development and correlates with optimism and decreased depression for the children’s mothers.
“From the research, we know that kids who have a college savings account, regardless of the amount, are much more likely to get an education beyond high school and graduate,” says Raimondo, a Democrat who previously served as Rhode Island’s state treasurer. “Some think it is because they have the money. The real reason is they know they are college material. It changes the way they think about themselves.”
Because the underlying principle is that families can advance themselves through smart fiscal planning, college savings accounts have bipartisan appeal to both Republicans and Democrats, Andrea Levere, president of the Corporation for Enterprise Development, notes in a New York Times op-ed. The accounts have a number of models — publicly funded, donor-supported or a mix — but so far, they haven’t taken off widely: only about 200,000 young kids have the potential to receive seed money for one instead of the millions who should have access, Levere says.
Rhode Island’s streamlining of the process could improve the national model. According to Margaret Clancy, policy director at Washington University’s Center for Social Development in St. Louis, where researchers first posited college accounts in 1991, this initiative makes Rhode Island one of only three states promising universal savings accounts. Nevada starts every kindergartner with a $50 deposit, and Maine recently switched their $500 grants from opt-in to opt-out, automatically applying to every infant.
“Everybody thinks their child will grow up to be President of the United States or go to college when they’re born, but what we see is that at age 4, those goals have decreased in a lot of people’s mindsets,” Clancy tells NationSwell. Children never develop a “college-bound identity,” then financial and academic preparation fall by the wayside. Universal sign-ups, which have proven to enroll 18 times as many families as would sign up voluntarily, Clancy notes, are the most efficient way to set babies crawling in the right direction.
Raimondo admits this largely bureaucratic change is “hard and unsexy work,” but she believes “it’s going to really change people’s behavior. Small changes like this can have big, powerful impacts.”

This Injured Vet’s Motto: Keep Moving

After attending the University of Connecticut’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities, South Kingstown, R.I.-based veteran Steve D’Amico emerged with a bright idea.
D’Amico, a Rhode Island Air National Guard Technical Sgt., wants to help other injured veterans remain active through his new business, Broken Gear. He tells the Associated Press that the company “was founded on the principle of disabled athletes empowering themselves to get back into sports, whether they’re disabled veterans or disabled civilians.”
So far, Broken Gear is selling a variety of t-shirts with messages to inspire disabled athletes and their supporters, such as, “I am broken and I run,” and “I am broken and I ride.” D’Amico’s company also sells camouflaged gear bags made from uniforms of servicemen and women and specially designed to be easy to use by people who have prosthetic hands or suffer from other injuries.
As D’Amico sells these items, he has plans to use the profits to support disabled athletes, “buying equipment and getting vets involved in different activities,” D’Amico says. “For example if a veteran wanted to ride a bike, and didn’t have the funds or the ability, we can sponsor him, get him a bike, get him the Broken Gear jersey and pay for his admission.”
His mission just received a big boost: Work Vessels for Veterans presented D’Amico with a Dodge Durango (which was once used to transport Boy Scouts to camping trips) that he envisions using to take veterans and their sporting gear wherever they need to go.
“I feel so honored. To me, when I see this vehicle, this is what a Broken Gear vehicle would be. It’s rugged. It’s tough. It’s kind of beat up a little bit, but that’s what we’re looking for. You’ve been through the ringer, but that’s OK, you just press on,” D’Amico says.
MORE: Bravery After Battle: How This Navy SEAL Uses His War Wounds to Help Fellow Soldiers

The Most Vulnerable Citizens in Rhode Island Finally Have Some Good News

For years Rhode Island residents with intellectual and developmental disabilities spent their time in “sheltered workshops,” where they were supposed to perform menial tasks like unwrapping bars of soap or putting caps on bottles of lotion. They only made about $2.21 an hour, the AP reports.
Fortunately, the Justice Department and the state of Rhode Island put an end to that last Tuesday.
The two parties agreed to a settlement that requires Rhode Island to give disabled citizens a chance at regular employment that pays at least the minimum wage. The agreement will affect about 3,250 people statewide.
If you’re surprised that disabled residents were spending time in sheltered workshops in the first place, perhaps you shouldn’t be. About 450,000 people with disabilities nationwide work in segregated centers, where they have little contact with the outside world, according to the AP.
“It’s a serious problem across the country, and Rhode Island is hardly unique,” Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuels said at a press conference.
Segregated workshops like the ones in Rhode Island used to be viewed as the model for people with mental or developmental disabilities. But in the 1990s, the Supreme Court ruled that people with disabilities should be served in the most integrated settings possible. Rhode Island was accused of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act for years.
Now that the settlement has been reached, Rhode Island will provide minimum-wage job opportunities to about 2,000 people over the next 10 years. The state also agreed to provide transitional services, like trial work experience and job site visits, for disabled residents who are ages 14-21.
Some of the money that will fund the new program will come from the money already being spent on sheltered workshops.
This is a hopeful sign that disabled citizens in Rhode Island (and around the country) will finally have a shot at fair and meaningful employment.