Stop 7 of 8 · Weekly
Council and command presentations
The quarter's published numbers into a deck built in Claude Design, the three slide version for when time gets cut, and the questions answered before they are asked.
Nine council members and eleven minutes
Once a quarter Reyes stands in a council chamber with a deck. The audience is nine people who are not police officers, half of whom read the packet, and the agenda always runs long. The same deck, minus the plain language, goes to command staff the week before.
The numbers are not the hard part. The department publishes a quarterly report and the city runs an open data portal, and everything Reyes needs is already cleared for release in one of them. The hard part is that the deck is built at ten at night, so it becomes twenty-two slides of tables and the argument never surfaces.
The argument comes first, the slides second
Attached are our published quarterly figures and the same quarter last year. Find the three things worth saying to a city council, in order of how much they should care. For each one: the claim in a sentence, the two or three figures that support it, the period each figure covers, and the honest counter-argument a sceptical council member could make from the same numbers. Nothing about individual incidents. No deck yet. [upload the published quarterly figures]
Build a nine slide deck from those three claims, using the style rules in this Project. One idea per slide, and the headline is the idea written as a sentence rather than a label. Every chart gets a takeaway line above it and its source and period below it. Slide one is the quarter in one sentence, the last slide is the decision I am asking council for. Leave a marked empty frame anywhere a photo belongs. No clip art, no icons, no seals.
Cut this to three slides for the day the agenda runs long. Keep the claim council most needs to hear, the single figure that proves it, and the ask. Not the first three slides of the deck: choose them on what survives being cut. Then give me the ninety second script I say over them, written to be spoken.
Read this deck as the two council members who are hardest on the department and as the finance director. Give me the eight questions they will ask, ordered by how likely they are, and for each one a two sentence answer that uses only what is on the slides or in our published report. Mark any question I cannot answer without data I do not have, so I can say so rather than improvise.