Takoma Park’s new special projects coordinator says she is excited to support the city in becoming more walkable for its residents, especially children walking to and from school.

Kaysi-Ann Webley began working for the city in June and hit the ground running to make walking in the city safer.

“It bugs me to no end when I see children walking and looking at their phones and not paying attention to traffic,” she says. “I want to do something to improve that.”

Webley says she already conducted several “walk audits” near schools, with the involvement of school staff, PTA members and other city staff. These audits looked at traffic conditions, street signs, sidewalks and other areas that could use improvements.

“We walk on the same routes that children will take to school and see what traffic is like, what the street crossings look like and see if any changes need to be implemented to make it safer,” she says. “That’s the main goal to make it safer for children to get to school whether walking, riding or rolling.”

She says they’ve already seen a few places where improvements could be made so people are safer.

“There are a few areas that we noticed that some work needs to be done,” she says. “Whether the sidewalks would benefit from
being widened or are overgrown, or reevaluating a crossing. I want to understand the unique challenges schools are having to keep children safe as they walk or bike to school and help them improve.”

To keep improving on the city’s walkability, the city conducts a survey of parents in the fall and spring to help better understand how children commute in the mornings and afternoon.

“That will give us a baseline for how our children get to school,” she says. “It gives us a lot of data on how to implement these programs and gives parents support so they feel good about having their children walk to school.”

Another way to bring focus on walking to school safely is the city’s annual Safe Routes to School Day, held this year on Wednesday, October 4, which gets children and their parents out to walk or bike to school.

“The simple act of choosing to walk to school instead of drive contributes so much to our goals of reducing traffic congestion
and emissions and providing built in exercise for the students and parents,” says Webley.

She says there are plenty of other advantages to walking to school too, including increased attentiveness and confidence. Webley says she hopes to have a lot of participation in the event and that it encourages growth in walking over the school year.

Webley says her own interest in street safety stems partially from her 3-year-old son who she teaches to be safe near roads. She says he’s already learning about road signs, is developing a keen sense of direction and can tell when they are close to home.

“We want to make the whole roadways safe for our children, not just for today, but tomorrow and into the future. We always want to keep improving.”

Webley, who lives in Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from the Takoma Park border, has a background in civil engineering and real estate and says she loves to dance and has been since she was 3 years old.

“I’m looking forward to meeting and talking with the parents and getting feedback from them,” she says. “I’m excited to get parents and students out walking or riding and being active.”

If you’d like to volunteer for Safe Routes to School, email kaysiw@takomaparkmd.gov. For more information, visit the City Safe Routes to School Webpage.

by Anna Mische John
Vegetation Maintenance Supervisor

Often people only think of grass as the short green stuff in a front yard or play field, but did you know that there are over 200 species of grass native to the state of Maryland? The short stuff (referred to as turf when in a mowed setting) can have utility as a play space and permeable ground cover, but from an ecological perspective, it doesn’t offer much.

Native grasses, on the other hand, support insects and birds by offering habitat. And they have ecological benefits, including soil stabilization and structure.

Ornamental bunch grasses have been used in gardens and landscapes for decades. Allowed to grow to full height and flower, they can be an interesting addition to perennial plantings. However, just like flowers and trees, some of the grasses planted for ornamental use are invasive and may escape from where they are planted, becoming established in natural areas, displacing other plants.

This spring, the vegetation maintenance team replanted six traffic-calming areas along Ritchie Avenue between Piney Branch Rd. and Oswego Ave., each featuring a single grass species with an informational label.

With this project I hope to both spotlight some of the beautiful Maryland grasses for their potential for ecological benefit, as well as offer alternatives to some of the ornamental invasive grasses (namely Miscanthus/Chinese silver grass and Pennisetum/fountain grass). Species were chosen for commercial availability, adaptability to roadside conditions, and “garden worthiness.”

I hope you will enjoy taking a tour of the grasses in masses on Ritchie Ave. Come now to see them in flower and throughout the year to see how they change with the seasons.

Want more? Continue around the traffic circle to Heffner Park to see Indian Grass (Sorghastrum nutans), this tall species was once the dominant grass of eastern tall grass prairies.

For more information

• Maryland Native Plant Society: mdflora.org/2020-Grasses

• Maryland Manual Online: bit.ly/3OGpdiN

Check out more stories from August on the Takoma Park Newsletter webpage: https://takomaparkmd.gov/news/newsletter/

by Gayle Stewart
Takoma Park Police Department Chaplain

Over the summer, several police departments around the country were in searches for police chiefs in addition to being in competition for police officers. Chuck Wexler, the executive director for the Police Executive Research Forum, a police think tank, commented on the police chief searches and said, “It’s a real challenge to find someone who meets the goal of dealing with crime while also reforming a police department.”

When I saw those words, I thought, We are fortunate, as I sat across from Chief Antonio DeVaul in his office—his arm was just out of the sling, having undergone shoulder surgery. We are fortunate in that we have a chief who understands the needs of this community and how to lead a police department. His office shows his love of policing. It is full of memorabilia, challenge coins, miniature police cars, awards, and certificates detailing his life in policing.

I’ve watched this department ever since I moved here in 1984 when my colleague Tony Fisher was chief. I have watched as officers were hired, advanced through the ranks, and then retired and went to other police departments. In the 1990s, I worked closely with the department in the implementation of community policing.

We’ve had a pretty good police department over those years, but with Chief DeVaul, we have an excellent police department, and he’s been able to do what Chuck Wexler believes is missing in policing: deal with crime and reform the department. During his five years as chief, he’s overseen a turnover of 70% of both sworn and civilian personnel. We have a brand-new police department that is aligned with and responsive to the needs of this community.

Tony Fisher, our first African American police chief, had an impact on 15-year-old Tony DeVaul, whose family moved to Takoma Park when he was 3 years old—such that when DeVaul joined policing, he wanted to emulate Fisher. Like many African American youth, DeVaul had not always had a good relationship with the City’s police, but he admired Chief Fisher and community sports leaders like Lee Jordan.

Tony DeVaul knew he wanted to make a difference when he joined policing, pursuing his career with Maryland-National Capital Park Police, before coming back to Takoma Park as the police chief.

Chief DeVaul says that preventing crime means looking at the root causes of crime and disorder and putting programs in place that address those issues. The chief is a proponent of recreational programs like those he participated in. He wants to help make sure that people have housing, jobs that pay a decent wage, and an education that points to a future. He wants young people to have the upbringing and opportunities he had because he knows that people—particularly young people—who have opportunities, who know they are valued don’t commit crime. He’s excited about the City’s mental health pilot program, through which two mental health counselors are embedded with police officers. Calls can be diverted from the police to those counselors, who are trained to handle people who are experiencing mental health crises. This frees up police officers for other calls that require their services.

Chief DeVaul encourages a guardian mentality rather than a warrior mentality. All of this is a culture change for the police and for the community. It takes a strong constitution to advocate for and make these changes—because there will be complaints, there will be pushback from those who want the police to just lock up people and from those who just don’t understand.

He has worked to raise morale among all department employees. Since Tony DeVaul became chief, the starting salary has been increased, and there are other incentives for officers to transfer from other departments. The reward and promotional systems have been changed so fairness is the underlying component. Transparency is also key when it comes to sharing crime data throughout the community. The department is fully staffed, something most departments around the country cannot say.

Diversity is key in the department that serves a diverse community. Across the department, officers speak seven languages. Residents can see themselves reflected in the backgrounds of the police officers, in the racial, gender, and sexual orientation of department members.

Is there still crime? Of course, there is. The only way to eliminate crime is to have a police state—and even then there will be crime. But, here, data are used to deploy officers and to determine how crime is managed. The focus is on serious crime, and officers are assigned to areas where they will have the most impact. Again, the focus is on prevention, with arrests as necessary. There are no arrest quotas in this department. Good police work is rewarded and encouraged.

The Takoma Park Police Department culture gives officers the latitude to make decisions in the best interests of the residents. That is innovative. And it is also difficult in a national climate in which every action of police officers is scrutinized and videotaped.

Chief DeVaul is both thankful for and proud of the department’s personnel who never know what type of reception they will receive when responding to a call or answering the phone. But there are more compliments than complaints and the chief is quick to praise personnel formally and informally. Personnel have gone out of their way to assist people in need and that is because of the culture that values people regardless of their circumstances.

Police personnel work with the weight of the world on their shoulders and then go home to their own families—that is the goal, to go home to their families. These officers have experienced horrific incidents, and still they keep plugging on.

Under Chief DeVaul’s leadership, the department was among the first police departments in the state to sign the 30/30 pledge which commits the department to having 30 percent of sworn personnel female by 2030. They have signed a pledge committed to transparency concerning body-worn camera footage. The department’s use-offorce policies are consistent with #8CantWait, which requires de-escalation before using deadly force. All operational procedures have been evaluated to ensure that they align with best practices and that they were consistent with the department’s changed philosophy to truly serve and protect.

Personnel have undergone Active Bystandership Law Enforcement (ABLE) training offered by Georgetown University that trains officers to “successfully intervene to prevent harm and to create a law enforcement culture that supports peer intervention” when they observe bad behavior on the part of other officers. His job, according to the chief, is to maintain a culture that encourages personnel to remain.

We have a police department that can serve as an example to others around the country. To be the chief of police is to be the hinge point between the department, the community, and government leaders. It is to be our contact for policing at the country, state, and federal levels.

To be chief is to put a human face on a system that resists reform and is derided by many—sometimes with good cause. And at the end of the day, to be chief is to be that 15-year-old teen who saw something in another chief and ended up leading that very same department.

By Jessica Jones

It’s hard to read the headlines now and not encounter news stories, think pieces, and personal opinions of varying levels of informed-ness about artificial intelligence (AI). We can feel all kinds of ways about it, but I believe we all have an obligation to do what we can to learn to recognize, use, and coexist with it, in order to mitigate harmful potential.

To be clear, a lite version of AI is what we are seeing now with ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s Sydney. None of these are really what we associate with the term “artificial intelligence.” None are 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL, for instance. They are powerful programs and algorithms that can be widely manipulated, though—so for the purposes of this article, when referring to “AI,” I am referencing the likes of ChatGPT, Bard, and Sydney.

Much of my personal background is in the humanities (emphasis on human-ities), and I fully recognize that it is a bias I bring to this topic, so efforts have been made to perform due diligence in understanding the positive potential of AI, as well as its pitfalls.

I wanted a more holistic look at the implications of AI in our lives, so I spoke with a friend who has as well-rounded an outlook on it as I could imagine. Dr. Jason Hemann is a professor of computer science at Seton Hall University with degrees in history, philosophy, and computer science—a perfect combination to put AI in context.

Dr. Hemann says that he has already changed how he teaches based on AI’s accessibility to the public. He believes that the technology isn’t going anywhere and that we need to adapt to it. For instance, in addition to straightforward coding assignments, Dr. Hemann has asked students to give a chatbot instructions to write the code for a program. The students have to learn how to effectively delegate tasks to it and understand its limitations. To demonstrate mastery of the material, he asks them to evaluate the programs that AI writes, as well as scale the programs up to test their flexibility and usability.

This type of assignment is an excellent example of applied machine learning, a field that is gaining exponential prominence in computer science and engineering curricula. Machine learning is essentially the practice of teaching computers (machines) how to learn and produce the desired outcomes.

Machine learning will facilitate the automation of many tasks, but humans still need to understand the code it generates. AI will never fully replace programmers in the same way that Google hasn’t replaced librarians (as so many people have been predicting … for years). But, just as the Internet has changed the way libraries operate, AI will likely change the programming landscape.

Will we need as many programmers in five years as we have today? I don’t know, but as AI comes for white collar jobs, I do expect conversations about universal basic income to escalate. But that’s another topic for another day!

One of the benefits of AI and machine learning is that programming and coding will become more accessible to people who do not have extensive experience and training—much of which is expensive and time consuming. Less gatekeeping can mean more inclusive innovation and fewer barriers to entrepreneurship. It can also be a form of informal oversight.

A more diverse programming landscape is good for all of us, especially in light of the biases that programmers can bring to their code. Scientific American published an article in May 2023 that found that “law enforcement agencies that use automated facial recognition disproportionately arrest Black people. We believe this results from factors that include the lack of Black faces in the algorithms’ training data sets, a belief that these programs are infallible and a tendency of officers’ own biases to magnify these issues.”

The AI bot Midjourney was asked to generate images of professors in different areas of study, and almost all of the generated images appeared to be white people, and the majority appeared to be men. That is not entirely misrepresentational of the demographics of American academia, but is it what academia should look like? Is that an impression we want to reinforce? This is a rhetorical question of course, because a diverse instructional body is better able to connect with a more diverse study body, which in turn facilitates better learning outcomes.

Earlier this year, a new Drake and The Weeknd track, “Heart on My Sleeve,” hit streaming services and quickly went to the top of the chart, but it wasn’t actually Drake and The Weeknd. Their voices, lyrics, and beats were generated by AI. The artists’ record companies immediately mobilized to have the tracks taken down because of copyright infringement, but the other issue that arises is
more existential: What is the role of authenticity in our lives now?

Is “Heart on My Sleeve” a real song? If the person(s) who wrote the commands that generated the work is not Black, does using Drake’s and The Weeknd’s likenesses count as cultural appropriation? How do we know how to respond to art when we doubt its origins?

I listened to the song, “Heart on My Sleeve,” and it was good! It sounds like Drake’s and the Weeknd’s voices, the lyrics are interesting, and the beat is catchy. If AI can fake art this convincingly, I feel for the English and history instructors out there who are already inundated with AI-generated essays and papers in their grading piles.

AI is a powerful tool, but it is not above criticism. It opens doors, but it can also reinforce problematic practices and ideologies from racism to plagiarism to copyright infringement. Now, none of us is above falling for a fake. Keep questioning, keep factchecking, and, when in doubt, go to the Library!

For more articles like this, check out the August Newsletter: https://takomaparkmd.gov/news/newsletter/