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In Historic Hearing, Council Votes to Hold Officer Accountable for
Misconduct...
Case #2018-x-0003: Officer Retaliated for Community Member Taking Photos, Making Face This is the fourth time we are writing about the case of Kristin Bowling, a community activist who took pictures of a tank-like vehicle returning from a SERT* mission in Northeast Portland while expressing disapproval with the look on her face. Officer Neil Parker admitted to investigators he wanted to get information about Bowling because he didn't like the face she made at his armored vehicle, deciding the best way to do that was to ask Lt. Leo Besner to give her a jaywalking ticket. Although Mayor Wheeler cited Parker's testimony where he said "I did not retaliate," that is not a reliable way to determine if a person committed misconduct. CRC convinced Commissioners Hardesty, Eudaly and Fritz, who each read the case file, that Parker's other statements constituted a preponderance of evidence of retaliation. Wheeler and the Chief continued to point to the jaywalking ticket being upheld in court as proof Parker didn't give it improperly, even though the Retaliation Directive says if the officer's actions are motivated by retaliation, it doesn't matter whether the enforcement action is lawful. Wheeler also kept echoing the Chief's point that she, the officer's commander, an Assistant Chief, the IPR, and Internal Affairs all agreed with the original "Not Sustained" finding. Bowling rebutted that except for IPR, those are all Bureau members. Wheeler, the Police Commissioner, said more than once he believed there was no misconduct, which implies he thinks Parker should have been "Exonerated." Thus, he should have voted with the majority that the Bureau's finding was not supported by the evidence even if he disagreed that it should be Sustained. He also complained the vote was essentially an "HR decision" which should not be made by a majority of Council overruling the Bureau Commissioner.
Chief Outlaw let Portland Copwatch know the Police Review Board would recommend discipline in this case, but would not be able to change Council's finding. City Council voted three times to sustain allegations of misconduct between 1997 and 2001, and each time the Chief (first Charles Moose, then Mark Kroeker) ignored the Council's decision (PPRs #12, 13 and 24). This flaw-- that an appointed Chief could overturn the vote of our elected leaders-- in part led to the creation of IPR and its Citizen Review Committee. The City Code establishing the IPR/CRC system indicates Council's vote will be final. The previous two CRC cases which made it all the way to Council (in 2003 and 2017) ended up with insufficient evidence findings.
The Council hearing took place across two dates: May 2 and May 16; Eudaly was absent at the first hearing, but (a) it was clear there were not three votes for any finding and (b) Commissioner Fritz had not read the case file.
Case #2019-x-0001: Talk to My Lawyer In August, CRC heard the appeal of a woman who said a Detective was rude to her when interviewing her as a criminal suspect, showed favoritism to the person whose items she allegedly stole, and spoke to her despite her being represented by an attorney. CRC and Internal Affairs (IA) indicated they had recordings of the officer's calls to the Appellant and found no rudeness. Detectives Commander Jeff Bell claimed the civilian who directly called the Detective normally wouldn't generate an investigation, but he'd turned over text messages and surveillance video supposedly showing the "theft." The woman says the man had left two pug dog statues (value $100) in a common area in their downtown building which she thought were abandoned. And, though the lawyer was supposed to be engaged if police called the Appellant, he technically wasn't representing her at the time the Detective called. Despite questions about Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights, CRC voted 5-0 to affirm all three "exonerated" findings. They did, however, call attention to the fact that the Detective told the Appellant he was giving her a chance to turn herself in because she lived downtown and "not way out in Southeast," clearly an issue of class bias. Bell agreed to talk to the officer about that statement. IPR Staff Turnover When previous IPR Directors have quit, there has been a deputy to take over in the interim; in fact, this is how Severe rose to lead IPR when Mary-Beth Baptista left in 2013 (PPR #60). Anika Bent- Albert, the Deputy IPR Director, left to join the City Attorney's office less than a month after Severe headed to Salem, and Program Manager Rachel Mortimer left about a week after the first City Council hearing on Bowling's case. This must have been stressful for the Interim Director, an employee of the Auditor's office which houses IPR. However, that person is used to stress-- Amanda Lamb, a former analyst for Multnomah County who was fired for publishing data which showed racial bias in the criminal justice system (PPR #73), took over from April to late July. Lamb did not show a great leap forward in hearing community voices, sidelining Portland Copwatch (PCW)'s questions about the IPR's annual report at the June CRC hearing, for instance. Lamb did concede, though, that IPR would reprint the report to correct mistakes including one made about the outcome of CRC's 2018 appeals, a mistake brought to their attention by PCW. The new Director is Ross Caldwell, who had worked at the Criminal Justice Commission since 2015, but was previously a Multnomah County Assistant District Attorney. PCW looks forward to seeing whether Caldwell will nurture a more open, community-friendly IPR. That said, the Auditor's stakeholders who created a "candidate profile" for the new Director included the CRC, the Portland Committee for Community Engaged Policing, City Council, the Bureau and two other City agencies, but nobody in the general public. The group who chose Caldwell included the Oregon Center for Public Policy, which so far as PCW knows has never attended any CRC meeting or followed the work of IPR.
Amanda Lamb filed a $500,000 suit against the County in June for her firing (Oregonlive, June 27).
CRC Continues to Meet, But Doesn't Make Much Progress CRC cancelled its May meeting, met for only an hour in June, and considered just two topics at its July meeting: recapping the Crowd Control forum from April and talking about the Council hearing. The summary PowerPoint recapping public input about PPB crowd policy did a fairly good job capturing concerns expressed by the community, including the militarized police uniforms escalating tensions, the use of dangerous weaponry, and the apparent bias of police toward the alt- right and against anti-fascists. Despite finally getting the momentum together to hold that forum after almost a year of delay, the Crowd Work Group cancelled its May, June, July and August meetings. CRC's discussion about the Council appeal looped back to their ongoing effort to get their standard of review changed. The majority of Council agreed with CRC's 8-1 vote, under the same "reasonable person" standard, that it was not reasonable to conclude anything other than that Officer Parker retaliated. However, it appears there may not be an opening to change the standard to "preponderance of the evidence." Some Council members seem to be worried more cases would end up coming to them, while others seem to want to throw out the whole system and start again (which didn't go so well in 2001). At the June meeting, CRC had only set aside a total of 15 minutes to discuss both the above issues and to hear a presentation on IPR's Annual Report. They spent most of the time hearing from Director Lamb about the Report. Only four CRC members were physically present and a fifth had to be contacted by phone to constitute a quorum. On June 26, City Council appointed a new member to the CRC to replace Albert Lee, who resigned. The new member is a gender non-binary person, Courtney Fraser. They are in their late 20s, meaning CRC still has no members over age 50 despite PCW repeatedly noting this is not reflective of the population of Portland... a City Code requirement for CRC's membership. Mx. Fraser works with interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, and noted in their application: "I have met some great people who are law enforcement officers-- some of them in my family -- while others close to me have been hurt or frightened by police." Contact IPR at 503-823-0146. See video of the Council hearing at tinyurl.com/CRC2019v.
* -Special Emergency Reaction Team, Portland's version of SWAT. |
September, 2019
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Portland Copwatch Portland Copwatch is a grassroots, volunteer organization promoting police accountability through citizen action.
People's Police Report
#78 Table of Contents
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In May, Portland City Council voted for the first
time since the current oversight system was
created in 2001 to find an officer out of policy for his actions. The significance of this vote is hard
to overstate: our elected officials agreed with the Citizen Review Committee (CRC) that the officer
had retaliated against a community member, despite multiple Police Bureau employees including the
Chief only conceding maybe the cop was wrong. Mayor Ted Wheeler, on the losing end of
the 3-1 vote, declared his intent to overhaul the whole system. All of this took place about a month
after the "Independent" Police Review (IPR) Director, Constantin Severe, left his job to work for
the Governor as a public safety advisor, and his two deputies announced they, too were leaving. A
new Director was named in July. Meanwhile, the CRC held four meetings but heard just one new
appeal, following up on their Crowd Control public forum
(
The Bureau's discipline guide
puts Retaliation one level above Disparate Treatment, so the minimum
penalty Parker will face is two days off without pay. If it is found to be "aggravated," which it might
since he was earlier found out of policy for not giving Bowling his business card during the same
incident, he could get three weeks off or be terminated at worst.