Portland Copwatch Analyzes "Independent" Police Review Division
2023 Annual Report

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

2023 Annual Report from "Independent" Police Review Full of Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing
an analysis by Portland Copwatch, September 16, 2024

The "Independent" Police Review (IPR), the office which processes complaints about police misconduct, is supposed to put out its Annual Report by May of each year. Their 2023 Report was released in August*-1, just like it was last year. At 16 pages long, this year's Report is one page longer than last year's. However, unlike the 2022 Report, it does not contain summaries of complaints. It continues to omit the demographics of who filed complaints. In a new development, it uses its last four pages for a lengthy glossary, defining terms that have been used in the Report and sometimes already defined. So it's actually more like a 12 page Report. Meanwhile, police continue to shoot people, including those in mental health crisis, unabated, with these and many other likely acts of misconduct not leading to officers being held to account.

Once again, the volunteer community members who serve under IPR's umbrella on the Citizen Review Committee (CRC) do not even merit a mention in the Report. This is especially disappointing given the letter CRC Chair Yume Delegato submitted to federal court in September in which he describes CRC members as "people who agreed to serve in a system they believed to be flawed in the hopes of ushering in a more equitable form of police oversight."

Previous years' Reports listed how many officers received multiple complaints, the time it took to complete intake investigations, trends in allegation types, and most significantly, deadly force cases. IPR participates in the Police Review Boards which process administrative reviews of these most serious incidents. The IPR Director also presents (confusing) monthly reports to the CRC. Unfortunately, the Annual Report does not contain cumulative data on the number of shootings or the number of hearings about them (much less the names of those shot/killed, which are in the IPR's Quarterly Reports*-2 but not here).

In 2023, IPR received 176 community complaints, still down from roughly 400 a year prior to 2020, but almost exactly the same as the 174 from 2022.

In the section reviewing the outcomes of the 422 allegations making up the 176 complaints, IPR claims that 23, or 14%, were "Sustained" (found out of policy). This is clearly based on a smaller set of allegations, likely only those which received full investigations, as 23 is only 5% of 422 (and thus, the real total). Fourteen percent of 422 is 59, not 23. Portland Copwatch pointed out that last year the figure of 7 out of 316 allegations being Sustained only made up 2% of incoming allegations. So in that sense, there was improvement, though not in the mathematics department.

Compare this, though, to how many complaints generated by police officers get Sustained. Fully 39 of 78 allegations, or 50%, stemming from 81 complaints were Sustained, 10 times the rate at which community complaints are Sustained. In 2022 it was 27 of 51 allegations, or 53%.

The Report helpfully notes that of the 23 Sustained community allegations, four were for Force, while the majority were for Procedure (10) or Conduct (9). The Report on 2022 said that six of the seven Sustained findings that year had to do with the 2020 protests, but did not specify the types of complaints.

On that note, the number of complaints related to protest actions has plummeted since 2020. Oddly, one of the 176 allegations _made in 2023_ was about a protest in 2020. A graph shows that almost 35% of complaints in 2020 were about protests, dropping to the 10-15% range in 2021-22, and now 0.5% in 2023.

The number of officers receiving discipline went back up, though PCW has conducted this analysis as the IPR did not: In 2021, 34 officers were subjected to discipline, in 2022 that number was down to just 15, and in 2023 it was 21. Only three received time off without pay (one for one week and two for two days each), while the majority received Letters of Reprimand (6) or Command Counseling (12), the latter of which technically isn't considered discipline as we understand it. In 2022 there were six who received suspension without pay (one for 100 hours, five for one day), three who got Letters of Reprimand and six who got command counseling.

As has been the case for many years now, the data in the IPR Report are confusing as most of the time they are presented as raw numbers or percentages, but not both. On the graphs where the potential represented numbers are shown on the vertical axis, there is no display of the actual numbers for each vertical bar graph line. As a result, diligent readers need to hold a straight edge across the graphs to determine roughly what the bars represent. If the goals include educating the public and instilling confidence in the data (and the oversight system, such as it is), these charts must also include the raw numbers.

Though for several years now IPR has referred to cases that are dismissed as being "administratively closed," the reality is that someone took the time to file a complaint and there was not a full investigation or other resolution so, in short, they were dismissed. The rate of dismissed cases was once between 54-60% (2016-2018), but has been lower more or less since then. The new report indicates that 69 of the 176 complaints in 2023 were "closed," which is 39%. PCW has, in the past, also counted "Precinct Referrals" as dismissals, since those don't result in the investigation of or even a discussion with the individual officer. With 21 such referrals, that makes 90 of 176 or a 51% dismissal rate.

Apparently, from the chart showing the various outcomes of "administrative closure," investigation, supervisory investigation, precinct referrals and one ongoing investigation, nobody used the IPR's mediation program to sit down and talk to officers one-on-one as an alternative resolution. Portland Copwatch has been a champion of mediation for decades now and hope to see the effort revived both under IPR and the new system which is supposed to be in place within the next year or so.

These Annual Reports also used to contain a full data table on the most common allegations. IPR now seems to hope people will rely on their online dashboard, which is hard to navigate and whose data are usually updated after the Reports are published. This makes the point-in-time information included in the IPR Reports impossible to validate. At the time we are writing this analysis, the dashboards continue to show that the last data update was in July, 2023.*-3

The Report shows the broad categories of Force, Procedure, Conduct, Courtesy, Disparate Treatment, and Control, using one of those hard-to-read bar graphs. The narrative tells us that Disparate Treatment went up fourfold from five to 21 allegations, Control allegations went up from five to 11 (more than double), and Procedure went up less dramatically from 116 to 146 (a 25% increase). Force allegations, they say, remained about the same, with the bar graph showing roughly 100 allegations for each of the last three years after a spike near 250 in 2020.

Apparently IPR was able to process "a few complaints" using Body Worn Cameras during the pilot project (August-October 2023). While presenting the Report to the Citizen Review Committee on September 4, IPR Director Ross Caldwell described the existence of the footage as being very helpful compared to cases without recordings. However, he did not provide examples of whether the cameras were proving misconduct, clearing the officers, or just providing information while the question of policy violations rested on other kinds of evidence.

It appears that IPR still has not finished investigating supervisors who may have given bad instructions to the line officers responding to protests in 2020. The Report notes that the US Department of Justice Settlement Agreement required their office to conduct these investigations. The Report says that while investigating the four cases they began in 2022, they opened two more investigations, but are not yet done due to the "complex reviews" involved. The incidents in question happened _roughly four years ago_. It's likely that the supervisors involved will be promoted or retire before these investigations are done, not to mention that witnesses' recollections will have faded considerably.

Ironically, IPR has expressed concern that the staff doesn't know how long their jobs will continue while the new oversight system (voted on in 2020) is put into place, yet they do not seem to be paying close attention to the progress/non-progress of the change. They state that the Police Accountability Commission presented their recommendations to Council and "the Council approved a modified version after edits from the City Attorney's Office." That is an understatement, as the City Attorney took a 90+ page draft City Code presented by the PAC and cut it down to under 30 pages.

Overall, the IPR Report does not give the kinds of details the agency once shared in its earlier years compared to, for example, the 2008 Report.*-4 The Director's presentation of the Report at the Citizen Review Committee meeting was more a summary of what sections appear in the Report than the substantive data. The Report was not on the published agenda, and few members of the public attended. Rather than offer to present the Report to City Council or some other meeting where the entire community could benefit from a discussion, the Director invited CRC members to contact him for one-on-one discussions. Civilian oversight is put in place to enhance transparency. This year's Report falls far beneath the standards of even the less-than-fully independent oversight system Portland has had since 2001. IPR should help instill confidence in Portlanders that the City takes transparency and accountability seriously with better and more detailed Reports.

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*1- https://www.portland.gov/ipr/news/2024/8/30/2023-annual-report
And, notably, this was published at 4:30 PM on the Friday before Labor Day weekend, ensuring little public or media attention.
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*2-https://www.portland.gov/ipr/publications/quarterly-reports
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*3- https://www.portland.gov/ipr/ipr-data#toc-police-misconduct-complaints-reporting-trends-2011- present-
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*4- https://efiles.portlandoregon.gov/Record/5992573/File/Document/
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Posted September 16, 2024