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"Independent" Police Review Delegates
Community Board to Mayor's Office
While Meeting More Often, Citizen Review Committee
Holds No Hearings, Looks at History

While the Police Accountability Commission (PAC) continues to design Portland's new oversight system (see PAC article in this issue), the existing "Independent" Police Review (IPR) has managed to say afloat, working out a new labor contract with its employees. Secretly tucked into that agreement was a sentence allowing IPR to get the Community Safety Division (CSD) to take over staffing responsibilities for the Citizen Review Committee (CRC). From an institutional standpoint, this makes no sense since the IPR is fully independent of any elected official, but the CSD is housed in the Mayor's office... and the Mayor is also the Police Commissioner. CRC, for its part, began meeting more regularly (it only met 7 times in 2022), though the meetings often last less than an hour and rarely develop information advancing police accountability in a meaningful way.

In January, the CRC set up two workgroups to examine the CRC's past and future. Intended to align with the work of the PAC, these workgroups have been meeting formally and informally to write up a history of the IPR/CRC system and suggest parts which could be used for the new Board. To create these groups, CRC abandoned its Crowd Control/Use of Force workgroup and its Policy/Outreach workgroup. The remaining workgroup, Recurring Audit, is trying to revive one of CRC's main functions: to review the existing complaint system's elements to see how they are working. The last time the Recurring Audit Workgroup was fully functioning was in 2012, eleven years ago, and their draft report on cases dismissed by IPR was never completed.

CRC members continue to rotate onto Police Review Boards (PRBs) when serious cases including shootings are heard, but those meetings are closed to the public and members cannot talk about the substance of what happens. Portland Copwatch has suggested they should have a presentation and community session on the PRB reports when they come out, starting with the one from December 2022 (PPR #88). That has not happened.

Similarly, CRC did not follow up with City Council on its 2021 Crowd Control report (PPR #85), even when the PPB put out its Crowd Control Directive for review and the Independent Monitor, LLC group sought community input on the protests of 2020 (see DOJ article in this issue).

IPR's Director presents a monthly report to CRC about past and upcoming activities. These have shrunk to be only a few sentences long which aren't even fully read into the record. Accompanying data about the number and timelines of complaint investigations, including deadly force cases, are not even mentioned. The March report indicated that at least 13 of the 17 officer involved shootings in 2021 and 2022 had not yet completely made it through the system. A fourteenth case involving Officer Matthew Masunari (#56874) who hit Brian Burman, 32, on the head on February 12, 2023 is also under investigation as deadly force.

Two other reports required of IPR are quarterly reports, which contain minimal information about caseloads and deadly force incidents, and the review of officer involved shootings currently contracted to the OIR Group. OIR's latest report was published in March and is supposed to be presented to CRC at its May meeting. City Code requires IPR and CRC to work together to address issues raised in these reports, but that also has not been done since about 2010. (For substantive details on the OIR Report, see the shootings article in this issue).

IPR is still conducting intake for all complaints about Portland Police. Their most recent monthly report stated that the level of complaints is coming back to where it was prior to the pandemic, which was nearly 400 per year, where it has been under 200 for the last two years-- even with the police crackdown on the racial justice uprisings in 2020.

May, 2023
Also in PPR #89

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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