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City Extends Portland Police Association Contract Circumstances surrounding the pandemic led to a hasty renewal of the Portland Police Association (PPA) collective bargaining contract, despite a community campaign lasting over a year pushing for substantive changes (PPRs #79-80). While the one year renewal bought some time to re- imagine what can be done to minimize community harm while protecting the rights of officers to earnings and benefits, it left Portland waiting at least another year to have an empowered oversight system. The one concession made by the PPA was to allow five teams, rather than just one, to be part of the pilot program for the Portland Street Response as an alternative to police responding to houseless persons and mental health crises. In a subdued and lightly attended July 1 Council meeting over Zoom, the Council voted 4-0 to adopt the extended contract. Whereas people packed City Council chambers (ah, those were the days) in 2016, ending with police pushing people down the stairs and attacking them outside after that contract vote (PPR #70), only nine people testified about the renewal. This was quite disappointing considering it occurred while hundreds of people had been demonstrating nightly for police accountability, including a raucous showing at the PPA headquarters the previous night.
The same day, the Council also adopted a separate labor agreement for 911 operators, who merged with the PPA a few years ago (PPR #77). In a surprise move at the end of May, City Council had rejected a previous version of that contract because the PPA refused to make concessions for the tough economic times caused by the pandemic. In the adopted contracts, PPA agreed to defer a Cost of Living Adjustment until after June 30, 2021. This puts them in step with other bargaining units who agreed to take some hits to ride out the financial impact. However, for the city to guarantee this money now means that if the economy does not recover by next year, the police will draw down an even more disproportionate amount of the city budget by default. Finally, in terms of the transparency which had been unprecedented until the agreement was announced, it is clear there were negotiations which took place to put the contract together. The last known negotiating session, held at PPA headquarters on March 13, was reported to have been used to finalize the ground rules for negotiations. Those rules include that every other meeting be held in public. The contract was signed on June 8, about two weeks into the uprisings after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. While city officials hinted they were thinking about extending the contract in various public forums, nobody was told about sessions held to create the agreement which Council adopted on July 1. Apparently, the ground rule prohibiting recording of meetings (which would be hard to enforce over the internet) outweighed the rule requiring half the meetings to take place in public. |
September, 2020
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Portland Copwatch Portland Copwatch is a grassroots, volunteer organization promoting police accountability through citizen action.
People's Police Report
#81 Table of Contents
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Portland
Copwatch and other community groups have been demanding that the contract be changed
to allow an independent civilian agency to investigate deadly force cases, which is currently
prohibited. That agency also needs to be able to compel officers to testify and not be required to
interview officers in police facilities, among other issues limited by the current contract. The
community letter we signed also called for drug testing of officers after deadly force incidents,
which is not allowed now.