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PPB's New Policy on Queer Community Contacts Shows
Promise, Other Directives Treading Water

From time to time, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) crafts entirely new policies and sends them out along with existing Directives for public comment. Portland Copwatch (PCW) has been sending in comments since 2014, which sadly makes it easier when the same policies pop up in a cyclical fashion. It's rare the PPB agrees to our proposed changes, so we often copy and paste our old comments during each new review. In February, they posted an all-new Directive about interactions with members of the LGBTQ+ communities, which, as PCW noted, is one of the most progressive policies they've designed. Below are summaries of our comments made since the last PPR.

January: We posted an updated version of our lengthy comments on the Force Directive, focusing on de-escalation, levels of force, and shooting at moving vehicles (noting its relevance to the December 24 PPB shooting-- see Shootings article in this issue). The January policies also included the Deadly Force Investigations Directive and two administrative policies around weapons. PCW's comments on all four can be seen at http://www.portlandcopwatch.org/force_policies0121.html.

Per the Council resolution outlining the City's relationship to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the PPB also posted the JTTF Directive. We repeated our concerns about the overall relationship allowing "case by case" cooperation between the police and FBI, and repeated previous comments to cut ties if the FBI's training is biased. (For more on the JTTF, see the article in this issue.)

February: PCW updated its comments on the Public Safety Support Specialists, non-sworn PPB members who are unarmed except for pepper spray (PPR #78). Once again we raised concerns about the limited job description and training for these "non-certified police support staff employees."

In our comments on the LBGTQ+ Directive, we highlighted the PPB's recognition of gender and gender identity when officers search a person, the instruction to refer to people by the name and pronoun they prefer, and the concern that identifying a young person as queer could be very harmful if they are not "out" to their families. We made a few suggestions to improve the new policy including expanding the question of who conducts a search of cis-gender females.

March: The PPB's Foot Pursuit Directive contains many flaws, we noted, including that it does not apply to crowd control situations. There are copious amounts of footage from last summer's protests showing officers running after, then tackling demonstrators whose only crime appeared to be that they weren't dispersing fast enough. We also repeated a past recommendation to prohibit officers who carry "long guns" from engaging in foot chases.

The Bureau also updated their drug use policy, which did not include a mandatory test after use of deadly force as we had suggested (PPR #82). It now tells officers they cannot use marijuana at all, despite Oregon's laws allowing use for medicinal and recreational purposes.

Find the PPB Directives at https://portlandoregon.gov/police/29867.

May, 2021
Also in PPR #83

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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