Portland's Gilded Cage

How much longer will the city’s progressives put politics first?

Four years ago, Portland created a shiny new service called Portland Street Response to handle “unwanted person” calls.

At the behest of then-City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, Portland Street Response was based on a decades-old Eugene program called CAHOOTS, which sent unarmed responders to calls for people having mental or drug breakdowns.

CAHOOTS was a national model, and Portland was going to make it better with their own national model.

Now three members of the Portland City Council want to expand Portland Street Response (PSR) from weekdays to a 24/7 operation and make it co-equal with police. But nobody is extolling CAHOOTS anymore. The Eugene program took its last call this month after the city could no longer fund it.

With Portland facing a roughly $93 million deficit, can this city afford to expand Portland Street Response?

That question — among others — was raised repeatedly last week by City Councilors Loretta Smith and Eric Zimmerman on the council’s five-member Public Safety Committee.

“End discussion and move to council…,” motioned Councilor Angelita Morillo. “Send to full council with a recommendation to adopt.”

Angelita Morillo: “I’m going to be passing policies that impact thousands of people.”

On a 3-2 vote, with Councilors Morillo, Sameer Kanal and Steve Novick in the majority, the proposal to make Portland Street Response an equal to Portland police will move to the full 12-member City Council, which has a six-member progressive caucus. (Morillo, Kanal, Candace Avalos, Tiffany Koyama Lane, Mitch Green and Jamie Dunphy).

The full council should pursue answers to the questions raised by Councilors Smith and Zimmerman, as well as several citizens.

Not only is the city facing a possible $93 million deficit, but only days before the Public Safety Committee met, City Auditor Simone Rede released her audit on Portland’s aging infrastructure.

It has been so long since the city has taken care of its roads, streetlights, parks, water and sewer systems, public buildings, equipment and technology that Portland now needs more than $1 billion more per year to keep the city’s public assets in good shape.

“The City’s infrastructure crisis has been well-documented for over two decades, but nevertheless continues to grow,” according to Rede’s audit. “As early as 2002, deteriorating infrastructure was reported as a top strategic priority for Portland City Council. In 2007, the City estimated that its annual infrastructure funding gap was $112 million. By 2013, that estimate had grown to $287 million, before ballooning to over $1 billion in 2023.”

An employee quoted in the audit noted that Portland is “great at buying shiny new things.”

Mundane things like deteriorating streets and parks can’t compete with an emotional concept like Portland Street Response, using unarmed sympathizers to answer 911 calls for people presumably having mental health crises.

Here’s a different glimpse of Portland Street Response on the job, courtesy of pirate media PDX Real. A man OD’s in front of a business, PSR responds and Narcans him. He comes to — and resumes smoking fentanyl.

Councilors Morillo, Kanal and Avalos introduced the resolution to expand PSR and establish a companion Portland Street Response Committee. (Portland loves citizen committees. It lets “the community” have its say.)

Among the experts cited in the resolution are Street Roots, a newspaper sold by vendors, many of whom are homeless. Avalos is former vice chair of the Street Roots board of directors. Among those testifying before the Public Safety Committee was Kaia Sand, former executive director of Street Roots. The resolution includes a link to the results of a survey of 184 people experiencing homelessness, called “Believe Our Stories and Listen.”

They have wholeheartedly supported Portland Street Response. They liked that PSR was unarmed, never ran warrant checks, treated them with compassion and dignity, listened to their needs, distributed supplies and offered shuttling to services.

The resolution cites sympathetic evaluations by Portland State University researchers. Among the findings: Out of 7,418 calls to PSR team members, only one — a co-response with police — resulted in an arrest.

“In contrast, during this same period, there were 371 arrests associated with police responses to welfare checks and unwanted person calls during PSR’s operating hours.”

Could it be that warrant checks led to arrests because folks having behavioral crises can also engage in criminal behavior? That’s not a question anyone asked.

The evaluation found that Portland Police Bureau enjoyed positive collaboration with PSR because it reduced the number of calls cops had to respond to.

The expanded version of PSR as envisioned by Councilors Kanal, Morillo and Avalos calls for the City Council to urge Mayor Keith Wilson to have the Bureau of Human Resources designate PSR staff as first responders with all the benefits afforded other first responders, like police and fire.

And the mayor should “immediately launch a nationwide search for a new permanent Program Manager of PSR, with community representation on the search committee … as well as the Portland Street Response Committee.”

Kanal, Morillo and Avalos rallied supporters to show up and testify (with easy-to-follow video on social media). Many of the 36 persons who signed up to testify were in their corner.

Ben Coleman once worked the graveyard shift at Gretchen Kafoury Commons. He estimated that about 20 percent of the population was moving out of homelessness or into it.

“I would love to have had PSR,” he said.

Opponents had specific objections.

Tom Littlefield found it maddening to hear people talk about not needing the police. He lives across the street from four tenants who scream all night. Is this the standard that Portland wants, he asked.

“Let’s do something radical,” he suggested: Merge Portland Street Response with the county’s Project Respond.

Loretta Guzman, owner of Bison Coffee, which was vandalized by anti-police activists after it offered to host an event called “Coffee with a Cop,” said she had only seen Portland Street Response hand out water.

Who will PSR be accountable to for the decisions they make, she asked.

“We are constantly under the experimentations of leaders,” Guzman said.

That had to be an ego stroke to Councilor Morillo. After she was elected, she took to social media and boasted, “I’m going to be passing policies that impact thousands of people.”

Now in office, and forcing people to accept her policies, Morillo had few answers for critics.

“I support PSR and the work they do…,” said Councilor Smith. “Where is the funding coming from?”

Councilor Zimmerman thought the resolution was a leap backwards in its politicization of police work. He wanted to know what it means for Portland Street Response to be “co-equal” with police as a first responder.

“What are they getting that they aren’t getting now?” asked Councilor Smith. And again she asked, “How do you plan to pay for this?”

There is no impact on this year’s fiscal budget, said Councilor Kanal. Currently, PSR costs about $8 million. It will go to $10.5 million once it’s 24/7.

“What does co-equal branch mean?” Councilor Zimmerman asked again.

Councilor Kanal said it doesn’t require creating a bureau. The idea is to not have Portland Street Response under the police.

Zimmerman was troubled by the idea the resolution wants PSR to be first responders — but they don’t work anything like first responders.

“First responders take orders and get in there,” he said.

The resolution exempts Portland Street Response from all enforcement activities — “PSR should never be used to carry out sweeps of unhoused people, enforce camping bans or require individuals to engage in shelter or service use.”

Not mentioned in the discussion, but notable in the resolution: PSR is to prioritize communication and outreach to “correct the misconception that PSR’s primary purpose is to end homelessness, and thus the suggestion that the continued presence of visible homelessness is a failing of PSR.”

Other issues that came up but weren’t explored: Councilor Kanal mentioned that under Oregon Health Authority rules, the city would be able to bill Medicaid for PSR services. Is this an example of what Elon Musk calls wastefulness in Medicaid?

Kanal also reassured the Public Safety Committee that the resolution would not affect employee bargaining for PSR staff.

On that point, the council should consider the fate of CAHOOTS, the Eugene service that Portland Street Response was based on. Why did it take its last call in Eugene this month?

Two weeks ago, several former CAHOOTS employees took to Instagram to explain they had been fighting almost two years for a union contract. Now they were cleaning out their work lockers and leaving without union representation.

Just as well that issue didn’t come up, because Councilor Morillo could not have handled it. As it is, her patience ran out. She invoked her youth and started to lecture on why opponents need to expand their political imaginations — and Portland Street Response.

“Back in the olden days, I’m sure we didn’t have a fire bureau, and then we have it. Now it’s standard, right? We didn’t have a police bureau and now it’s standard.”

At one point, Councilor Morillo blurted: “Our police killed too many people who have a mental health crisis.”

That is untrue. In her spin, she has merged James Chasse’s wrongful death into the justifiable killing of men who were armed and fought with police.

Chasse’s death led to an U.S. Department of Justice investigation and a settlement agreement. It has yet to be concluded because the case moved beyond mental illness after the riots of 2020 led to accusations against police for using force against protesters.

As Portland Dissent has reported previously, the spirit of Chasse, a 42-year-old Portlander who had schizophrenia, hovers over any discussion about the mentally ill.

Both fans and detractors of Councillor Morillo have compared her to New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez — each with their youth, their long dark hair and red lipstick.

Morillo appears ready to coat-tail on the current uprising in the Democratic Party that is targeting elders like Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif., who calls herself “Speaker Emeritus”).

On city council, Morillo plays the role of City Council wench. She performs it to the hilt in her TikTok videos — showing how much more attractive she is in “sunlight” than in the oppressive Council Chambers. This former peasant girl from Paraguay now knows how celebrities feel when they are caught not looking their best.

Morillo giddily recalls picking up her council laptop and phone after being elected, and the city staffer assisting her seemed shocked that a “28-year-old infant” had been elected to the council.

The older Morillo gets, the faster time will pass. She may discover sooner than she can imagine that her thinking has grown old.

Children growing up today could lump Morillo’s generation in with the Boomers and Generation X for condoning — even encouraging — drug abuse.

Think what kind of change could come if a younger generation made substance abuse something related to old farts who can’t handle their booze or drugs. It could be the start of a great sobering up. No police or 911 calls required. Just harsh reality that there are some drugs you should never play with.

The predecessor to CAHOOTS in Eugene, was the White Bird Clinic, which began post-60’s to provide street medicine for hippies coming down off bad LSD (and other drug-related) trips. The White Bird Clinic continues to operate a crisis hotline and, since last year, a Harm Reduction & Treatment Center that offers low-barrier access to drug abusers.

There’s important history in White Bird’s name. It’s from the 1960’s song, “White Bird” by It’s a Beautiful Day, a San Francisco folk-rock band founded by David and Linda LaFlamme. “White Bird” became an anthem of the psychedelic era.

“(W)ith its imagery of a ‘white bird in a golden cage’ who ‘must fly or she will die,’ the song encapsulated a longing by the flower-power generation to escape a conformist life and soar toward a loftier plane of existence,” according to The New York Times obituary of Linda LaFlamme, who died last year at age 85.

The chorus, “White bird must fly, or she will die,” later seemed to echo the disillusionment and realities of drug addiction and social turmoil, The Times said when David LaFlamme died a year earlier at age 82.

“If I would have kept going that way,” he said in an interview 20 years ago, “I would have ended up like Jim Morrison, getting more and more into that personal torture trip.”

Councilor Morillo is flying high now. She won’t always be twenty-something.