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New Scrutiny for US Dept of Justice Agreement Rolls Out
Slowly Most of the recent activity around the US Department of Justice (DOJ)'s lawsuit against the City of Portland for the Police Bureau's excessive use of force has focused on the new accountability system for the police (see article). After starting work on July 1, the new Court Monitor team (PPR #93), which took over duties previously assigned to the Compliance Officer/Community Liaison (COCL), was set to finalize plans for its work in December. Their first actual report is expected to be published on May 1. Since September, the Portland Committee on Community Engaged Policing (PCCEP) has been covering important topics, but meeting at unpredictable intervals. They've covered the over-representation of Black drivers in traffic stop data and the way the police failed miserably in their response to a white supremacist shooting at a Black Lives Matter protest (PPR #86). In contrast, the Behavioral Health Unit Advisory Committee (BHUAC) told a steadily shrinking audience at its most recent public meeting that the information about deadly force incidents involving people in mental health crisis they indicated would be released was never intended for publication. Monitoring Plan Echoes Existing Reviews, Omits Outcomes Mark P Smith and Associates, the monitoring team, released a draft of their monitoring plan in early November. In essence, they plan to continue evaluating the remaining paragraphs of the DOJ Settlement Agreement for compliance using similar methods to the COCL. When Portland Copwatch (PCW) asked at the November 20 PCCEP meeting why there was no mention of outcomes, which is part of their charge, the Monitor said that outcomes are required to be reported on separately. This is a place where they could learn from the COCL, who eventually merged the two sets of data into one document to make it easier to follow. PCW was able to meet with the team in early October and stressed the importance of ensuring that the City learn lessons and change policy/training based on lawsuits filed against the police, something that's required in Paragraph 222 (subsection e-viii) of the Agreement. It took the COCL nearly nine years to do any reporting on lawsuits, and even then their report only covered the average amount per payout rather than the substance (PPR #92). Given the City Council's reluctance to examine what led to the lawsuits (see article), it is important for the Monitor to cover this in its first report. PCCEP Looks at Night Time Traffic Stops as Key to Profiling Question, Revisits Normandale Park Shooting Due to massive turnover (only one member of PCCEP has been on longer than three years), earlier work done by PCCEP members on traffic stops and racial profiling has pretty much been abandoned (PPR #91). They talked about the data in recent meetings, hearing from the main analyst at the Bureau and discussing the "veil of darkness" theory. That concept shows that in some jurisdictions, the percentage of people of color pulled over in traffic after sunset goes down, in theory because officers' implicit bias isn't kicking in when they can't see the race of the driver clearly. It seems there are many other factors that need to be considered, such as whether they are over-patrolling certain neighborhoods, pulling over certain kinds of cars, etc. However, given the Bureau's ongoing efforts to deflect attention away from their racist patrol tactics, anything that can be done to break the logjam is welcome. Seemingly in violation of their history and their bylaws, the PCCEP members at a November Community Engagement Subcommittee meeting adopted a recommendation that the PPB begin using the "veil of darkness" analysis without passing it to the full group. Speaking of police bias, a documentarian presented a 40 minute film about the February, 2022 Normandale Park shooting at a meeting of PCCEP in late October. The main messages that came out: the Police Bureau responded as if the victims of the white supremacist's shooting spree were criminals, put out incorrect public information that he was a "homeowner" who got into a fight with protestors (he was a renter inflamed by right-wing blog posts to attack march support personnel), and refused to correct the record. The movie, "The Murder of June Knightly" is heart wrenching and important. Charlie Michelle-Westley, a survivor of the incident, challenged the filmmaker to examine the connection between the political beliefs of the killer and the inherent nature of the police (specifically in Portland, and as an institution in general). It created a great space for dialogue. Probably best due to the trauma the movie provoked, no police officers were at the screening (or if they were, they kept quiet). PCCEP is also awaiting having their group enshrined into City Code, so that even if the USDOJ Agreement goes away (by the City fulfilling its obligations or by political whims), their community space that allows for information sharing and important recommendation-making will continue to exist. At their December meeting, PCCEP spent most of their time looking back at the previous year and looking ahead to 2025. They worked off a staff slide listing some of the policy areas they had discussed over the course of the year including consent searches, pretext stops, crowd control, surveillance policies and indigenous people's interactions with police. They indicated that rather than stop holding non-public work sessions to draft many of their proposals, they would just try to do a better job communicating what they decided. Like the veil of darkness decision, this failure to be inclusive is a far cry from the early days of PCCEP.
Three Years Later, Community Still Not Hearing from BHUAC About Deadly Force Incidents The BHUAC's regular business meetings are not open to the public. They began quarterly public engagement meetings in early 2021. In October, 2021, Portland Copwatch asked whether they ever looked at deadly force cases, and they claimed it was not in their purview (PPR #88). It took 1.5 years for them to agree to hear presentations about those incidents, and so far they have made only one recommendation: to have someone with mental health expertise sit in on Police Review Board hearings on deadly force cases. As far as we can tell from comments at a Citizen Review Committee meeting and the October BHUAC public meeting, that is not happening. In any case, they had stated in April that this year's presentations, unlike the 2023 ones, would be recorded and posted for the public. However, it turns out there were really two presentations: one on "routine" uses of force against people in crisis, presented by the Inspector General, and one on deadly force, presented by homicide detectives (not Internal Affairs-- PPR #93). Lt. Chris Burley, the police co- chair of the community committee (if that makes any sense), and not unimportantly the person who claims to have been shot by Keaton Otis in 2010 while fellow officers fired 32 bullets at the young Black man, said the plan was only ever to release the less- than-deadly-force presentation. (Side note: That video is not public on the Bureau's website, meaning you have to know it exists in order to find it.) Although there were only a few members of the public present, the BHUAC (as usual) ate up most of the scheduled one hour meeting time, and public input was invited at 7 PM, the time the meeting was supposed to be over. This allowed for a short but interesting conversation about how the FBI works with the Behavioral Health Unit to determine whether someone poses a real threat or might be more in need of mental health support services. Since many of the cases covered in the PPB annual reports about the Joint Terrorism Task Force are about such people (PPR #92), this raises issues about whether the FBI will open, and never purge, criminal files on people who do not actually engage in criminal activity. The BHUAC seems convinced the FBI honestly wants to get people help. We hope that's true.
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![[People's Police Report]](/PPRHEADER.GIF)
January, 2025
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Portland Copwatch Portland Copwatch is a grassroots, volunteer organization promoting police accountability through citizen action.
People's Police Report
#94 Table of Contents
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