Re: hiring policy:

Danshoe District has in the past participated in "red deputy" programs to maintain order and visibility into the red districts and their potentially unstable elements. These programs were discontinued due to province-level decisions but in Danshoe worked well. Hiring decontaminated reds who choose grey is a natural extension of the same idea and such a hire would be principally dispatched toward managing incidents pertaining to other decontaminated reds, possibly including outside of Danshoe if neighboring districts need the expertise.

- Vik be-Sonza de-Nanedur, assistant to the office of the Danshoe Chief of Police

Hm. It's almost like a distorted mirror of his exact concerns, except sort of... stripped of any concern for the wellbeing of the reds and ex-reds or investment in integration. And not really seeming to care about their well-being is probably sincere on priors but not really evidence, but the implicit pessimism about integration is more of an actually worrying sign.

Who does he know who knows anyone from Danshoe?

He has a first cousin once removed who has a friend there!

He asks his cousin for the friend's email so he can ask the friend if they know anything about Danshoe's red deputy program.

Before my time, it was like twenty years ago.

Thanks anyway! Do you know anyone who remembers it?

Though that's a while ago and might not even reflect much on the current decisionmakers. Might be more useful to see what if anything the cleans have said about the topic recently.

Great-great-grandma maybe? She's a voice calls person though.

Voice calls are fine!

He can provide his number and schedule and inquire about hers.

He gets a call the following evening.

He answers it and drops the cleaning he's doing so he has both hands free for notetaking if that seems like a good idea.

"Hello? Somebody wanted to know about the red deputy program from twenty years back?"

"Yeah! The person who answers the Danshoe Chief of Police's email mentioned it when I asked what they're hoping to achieve by hiring ex-reds and I'm trying to figure out exactly how concerned to be about that."

"Those initiatives mostly worked all right as far as they went if the cops were on board. They just collapsed because reds don't snitch as much as they were hoping and they wouldn't take 'nothing to worry about' for an answer - especially if there was something to worry about, like a riot about somethingorother, though robotics was barely an idea that long ago..."

"Huh. That's better than I was expecting. What did not taking 'nothing to worry about' for an answer tend to look like?"

"Oh, I don't know, I wasn't the deputy, my uncle was and he's long gone now. I think he said something about arrest quotas? Something about scapegoats?"

Sigh. "I guess that sounds like a thing they'd do. So what makes you say they mostly worked all right if the cops were on board, and what did it look like when they were on board?"

"It meant there was something you could do if someone in the district was starting trouble, stealing or beating their kids or whatever, we'd talk to the deputy and they could take them off to the lockup - it was near the incinerator on red land, I'm not actually sure we couldn't have finessed most of something like this all on our lonesome, but the deputy got a dedicated car and could radio the other cops and stuff, got paid for it..."

"Huh. That sounds like something it'd take at least thirty seconds to tell apart from a real attempt to do right by the local reds."

"Yeah, not a high bar but not much clears it."

"And - how are things now?"

"Well, it's back to normal now, isn't it? They dismissed the deputy and he tried to go on a bit for a while but eventually a drunk knocked one of his retinas loose and he went to work the incinerator instead."

"Well, that sucks but I meant - normal's not exactly the same everywhere and I'm trying to see what I can figure out about the culture of the police over there, if they still have the kind of institutional culture that leads to running programs like that."

"Oh. We've had the same ones on our beat for a long time and once I addressed one by name and he didn't act like that was very weird?"

"Well, that's not a bad sign. I'm guessing you don't know much that'd be useful for guessing whether I could get along with them as people but do you?"

"I don't. I don't even know you and who you get along with among reds!"