I'm wondering if you agree with me that this behavior is different from the way it was handled before 1.2? My opinion is that it is a minor bug, and that it works in the player's favor because you can play around with the effect of 9 units to adjust public order when you couldn't do that before.

The icon used to change immediately during the same turn when you took action to fix public order problems. Now, it sometimes doesn't change even in the next turn, and yet, the settlement has a green face, so everybody is just ecstatically happy. It just seemed odd to me for the patch to create that kind of behavior.