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Police Accelerate Alliance with FBI
Around Community Gun Violence, Which is Up Nationwide
Continued Disparate Numbers in Traffic Stops
May Be Stemmed by New Approach to Enforcement

City leaders, some community members and many mainstream media outlets have been expressing exasperation that there are not enough police to slow the tide of community-on-community shootings which have shaken Portland since the pandemic struck. Occasionally, you will hear one or two of those people admit the shootings and murder rates have gone up in most major cities, regardless of whether or not they "defunded" police. Nonetheless, there is still a myth that disbanding the Gun Violence Reduction Team (GVRT) in 2020 led directly to the upsurge in community violence. As noted in PPR #83, after creating the Enhanced Community Safety Team (ECST), mostly detectives who investigate shootings after the fact, the City also assigned 20 officers to the "Metro Safe Streets Task Force," with the officers deputized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). The City further sought to militarize Portland's streets by adding the Focused Intervention Team (FIT), which would essentially do the work of harassing mostly Black community members previously done by the "Gang Enforcement Team" and the GVRT. Funny story: they can't get enough officers to volunteer to be on the FIT, in part because their work will be monitored by a community oversight board-- which itself has not been fully staffed (Oregonlive, July 18). Meanwhile, new traffic stop data for the first quarter of 2021 shows that as usual, Portland Police disproportionately stopped African American drivers. In an effort to change those numbers, Chief Chuck Lovell announced a plan for police to stop pulling people over for non-moving violations such as expired tags or broken tail lights.

Months into the rebooted, and fractured, new gun violence efforts, Portland Copwatch (PCW) still cannot figure out whether the ECST and the Safe Streets teams are the same. District Attorney Mike Schmidt said the Safe Streets Task Force is in addition to the ECST (KPTV-12TV, April 13). A PCW ally pointed out that the FBI calls the deputized group the "Violent Gang Safe Streets Task Force," indicating Portland's work to stop blaming all shootings on "gangs" doesn't extend to their federal partners. After a mass shooting incident downtown in July which killed one and injured six, the Mayor called for "more resources." The next week it was announced the FBI would be patrolling downtown's "entertainment district" along with the PPB. PCW has long been wary of team-ups between the FBI and the local police-- particularly on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, because of the FBI's history of targeting, spying on and disrupting communities of color, certain religious communities, and mostly left-leaning activists. It's important to note that the incomplete oversight board is only supposed to focus on the street-side FIT and not the investigative ECST or, if it's not the same, the Metro Safe Streets Task Force.

According to data released for the first quarter of 2021 about traffic and pedestrian stops, 19% of those stopped by the PPB were African American drivers, over three times the representation of Black people in the general population. Pedestrian stops continue to be grossly under-reported, with the PPB saying they only stopped 14 people on foot in the three months of January-March 2021, yet three of those people (21%) were Black.

The 2020 annual stops report was published on August 3. The PPB claims to have only stopped 241 pedestrians in all of 2020. Nineteen percent of them (46) were African Americans. Comparing that to the 2019 totals of 1131 pedestrians and 178 African Americans stopped, or 16%, even if you believe the cops dialed back enforcement by nearly 80% due to COVID, things got worse for Black Portlanders.

The annual stop data reports also include information on searches at traffic stops. The PPB admits the search rate of African Americans has been disproportionate in four of the last five years, with 227 of 4268 drivers searched (5.3%) vs. 417 of 17,135 white drivers (2.4%). The "hit rate," or how often contraband was found, remains imbalanced despite the PPB's claim to the contrary: only 54.6% of Black drivers had something on them while 63.3% of white drivers did. As in the past, this means they are finding illegal items only about 86% as often when searching African Americans.

Not long after the Chief's office told the Portland Committee on Community Engaged Policing of their plan to change guidelines for traffic stops (see article in this issue), a formal announcement was made in late June. The rules still allow officers to pull people over "if there's a safety concern or a specific subject is being sought" (Oregonian, June 23). Moreover, they do not have plans to change the Directive guiding traffic stops to reflect this change, so officers won't be held accountable if they continue busting people for minor infractions. However, the Directive is going to be changed to require officers to (a) let people know they can refuse a search, and (b) audio- record the responses. Still, if the model being used is similar to that of Fayetteville, North Carolina, where officers were given less discretion to pull people over and searches of Black drivers went down by 50% (USA Today, April 15), perhaps we will finally see the numbers change here.

September, 2021
Also in PPR #84

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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