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"Independent" Police Review 2019 Annual Report:
Five Short Pages Signifying (Almost) Nothing

On May 7, the "Independent" Police Review (IPR) released its 2019 Annual Report, a strangely formatted document containing barely any data or important information. In past years, the Report has listed items around accountability including information on deadly force incidents, trends in use of force, most common allegations, and the like, but the new document mostly encourages people to visit IPR's website for details (some of which are not on the site). The five page document is in no way a full report on IPR's activities in 2019. The paid IPR staff should relay information to the community in a thorough and transparent way, rather than making community members jump through extra hoops to find data.

In a surprising development, the Report does not explain how many investigations were done by the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) Internal Affairs disivion versus those conducted by IPR. So the agency touting itself as independent from the police, trying to build community trust and transparency, isn't even motivated to report how many times they conducted investigations in 2019 without Bureau employees taking the lead.

Portland Copwatch (PCW) has also repeatedly expressed concern about IPR's coverage of their civilian review body, the Citizen Review Committee (CRC). The largest omission in this year's Report is that the extremely rare CRC appeal taken to City Council last May led to the first-ever "Sustained" finding by the elected Commissioners, meaning the CRC's recommendation was required by City Code to be accepted by the Bureau (PPR #78). Moreover, for the third year in a row, IPR printed incorrect information about the outcome of cases in which community members appealed the Bureau's findings to CRC. This year, they incorrectly claimed CRC heard four cases and upheld Bureau findings in three. In fact, CRC heard only three cases and agreed in the first two. In the third, they recommended a "Sustained" finding. The Report also ignores the CRC's forum on Bureau Crowd Control policies held on April 10, 2019 (PPR #77).

The first set of data in the Report shows what happened to 408 complaints processed by IPR. They explain that IPR administratively closed 38% of cases, which if thoroughly accurate would mark the lowest in IPR's 18-year history. They claim more cases are being investigated after the 2018 introduction of "Supervisory Investigations," a more formal way to process non-disciplinary complaints (formerly called Service Improvement Opportunities). However, the total percentage of cases with full (92) or non-disciplinary (75) investigations is 41% (156 of 408). That number was 30% in 2015, 38% in 2016 and 44% in 2017, before Supervisory Investigations were adopted; prior to that the number used to hover at about 20-23%. A huge reason the dismissal rate went down is that in 2019, IPR sent 76 cases to Precinct Commanders for their information, the largest number we have on record and a huge jump from the 11 such referrals in 2018. The referrals do not constitute investigations and do not necessarily prompt any kind of follow up action with the officer or the complainant. Combining the two categories of cases not investigated, the overall dismissal plus referral rate was 57% in 2019-- on a par with the 54-60% rates from 2016-2018.

A chart meaning to show how many allegations were Sustained from 2012-2019 does not include numbers to go along with the chart. It appears about 300 allegations were found "Exonerated" (in policy), "Not Sustained" (insufficient evidence), or "Unfounded" (facts don't support the claim) in 2019, while only 21 were Sustained. If that is accurate, it marks a 6.5% "Sustain rate" when measuring investigated claims, lower than the 9.8% in 2018, or 13% in the previous two years. PCW believes the more accurate way to measure the "Sustain rate" is to compare all allegations which were Sustained with how many came through the door, but the full number of allegations (prior to dismissal, referrals, etc.) is not provided.

Also of interest:

--In a rarity for recent years, the Report does note that six (about 1.5%) cases were handled through mediation between the complainants and officers.

--Of 69 internal police-on-police complaints, 50 were investigated.

--IPR reports 32 officers were disciplined in 2019, but only nine received time off with pay and none were terminated. Five resigned before being disciplined.

--The Report mentions, but does not go into details about, the Police Review Board (which recommends discipline), IPR's policy recommendations, and a new case management system.

--There is no mention of the February 2019 report on deadly force incidents for which IPR hires the OIR Group each year (PPR #77).

IPR Reports started out as 100+ page tomes, full of many tables and charts, and details on how the system works. In later years, more reasonably sized 30+ page Reports managed to get a lot of similar information into smaller packages. In the last several years, the Reports have shrunk to under 20 pages, mostly full of infographics and excluding the kind of analysis of trends one would expect from a vibrant police oversight body.

Find the IPR Annual Report here.
See PCW's analysis.

September, 2020
Also in PPR #81

Portland Copwatch
PO Box 42456
Portland, OR 97242
(503) 236-3065/ Incident Report Line (503) 321-5120
e-mail: copwatch@portlandcopwatch.org

Portland Copwatch is a grassroots, volunteer organization promoting police accountability through citizen action.

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