While the officer proceedings moved through their rooms, the city council took up the other part of the case, the part that was about systems rather than men. A council member named Regina Alden, who had read the prosecutor's referral and Yolanda's summary, proposed two changes, and she proposed them plainly, without rhetoric, in a council meeting that Desmond and Tanya attended with Yolanda, sitting in the back row with Hattie Adeyemi beside them and Otis Bannister and Alma Quintero and Ellis Crenshaw in the row behind. The first change was a dispatch-log transparency rule. Under it, dispatch logs for public gatherings and for stops at parks and other public places would be available, on request, in a timely way, with times and assignments recorded as they happened, and with no complaint recorded unless a call had actually been received. The rule, Regina Alden said, was not about mistrusting dispatchers. It was about trusting them, and about making their honest logs the public record they already were in practice. Willa Wolfe, who had been invited to speak, told the council, in her precise way, that she supported the rule, because a log that can be seen is a log that cannot be rewritten, and a dispatcher who keeps a true log should not have to worry that someone else's report will contradict it without consequence. The council listened, and asked questions about timing and about privacy for callers, and Willa Wolfe answered them, and Regina Alden adjusted the proposal to protect caller privacy while keeping the times and assignments public, because a good rule, she said, protects both the public's right to know and the caller's right to be safe.
The second change was a ban on overtime tied to arrest counts. Under it, no unit's overtime would be approved, tracked, or rewarded on the basis of how many arrests or citations its members made, and overtime for nuisance enforcement would be approved only for documented hours worked on assigned calls, with the assignment recorded in the dispatch log. Regina Alden explained the change the way a teacher explains a rule to a class, by giving the reason first. "Overtime," she said, "should pay for time worked. It should not pay for people stopped. When pay follows arrests, arrests will follow pay, and gatherings will become opportunities. We do not want our officers looking at a cookout and seeing hours. We want them looking at a cookout and seeing families, unless a real complaint has been called in, in which case we want them to respond, properly, and go home when the job is done." The council chamber, which had been quiet during the dispatch discussion, murmured at that, a low sound of agreement from people who had come to listen, and Desmond, sitting in the back, felt his throat tighten again, because a rule, stated plainly in a public room, can feel like an apology even before the apology itself is spoken. The council voted on both changes that evening, after further discussion and after hearing from Otis, who spoke briefly about his barbershop, and Alma, who spoke briefly about her truck, and Ellis, who spoke briefly about his church picnic, each of them telling their story in a few sentences, without anger, with the paper in their hands, and the council voted yes on both, unanimously, because some votes, when the paper is clear, are not close votes at all.
The department's written apology came a week later, in a letter on department letterhead, addressed to Desmond and Tanya Hayes, and signed by the chief. It was not a long letter. It did not use grand words. It said the department had reviewed the stop at Oakwood Park pavilion, and the reports and logs and notebook relating to it, and had concluded that the stop should not have happened as it did, that the arrest should not have happened, that the permit had been valid, that no complaint had been called in, and that the department was sorry for the night Desmond had spent in custody and for the distress to his family and to the team families who had witnessed the arrest. It said the department had taken action regarding the officers involved, and had adopted, with the council, new rules on dispatch transparency and overtime, to prevent a similar stop in the future. It said the department would pay the family's legal costs, as documented by Yolanda's office, and would replace the grill that had been impounded after the cookout, a grill Desmond had bought years before and had used for every Falcons cookout since, a grill that had been taken from the pavilion that Saturday and had never been returned in usable condition. There was no large sum in the letter. There was no sweeping promise. There was a specific apology, specific costs, and a specific grill, and Desmond, reading the letter at his kitchen table, thought that specificity was the point. A vague apology can be filed and forgotten. A specific apology, naming a pavilion and a permit and a night in custody, has to be remembered, because it names what actually happened.