The Anti-Cop Crusade

Without police, who holds criminals accountable?

In the throes of George Floyd hysteria, Portland voters passed a ballot measure creating a new and costly bureaucracy to ride herd on cops. Turns out police aren’t the biggest problem in this town.

The anti-cop crusade is turning the Portland Police Bureau into a laughing-stock.

Look at Portland Police Chief Robert Day’s attempt to talk tough to thieves in preparation for the post-Thanksgiving shopping season. After announcing increased law enforcement patrols downtown, he was careful to add:

“This is not an attempt to criminalize poverty or to not recognize the challenges that people are facing in tough economic times,” Day said.

No, let’s not criminalize theft.

It’s not surprising that social media was full of sneers at Day’s warning: “Understand that if you’re going to come out and steal things, that we’re going to be watching.”

That’s all Portland cops can do now is watch, people joked.

For a couple of decades, police oversight has been a cause for certain Portland activists. Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch and co-founder of Peace and Justice Works is the elder statesman. Anytime the local media want a quote on police reform, they go to Handelman. (He is such a committed pacifist, he objects to the word “bullet point” when used in graphics. He prefers “dots.” )

Portland’s anti-cop crusade received its biggest boost in November 2020 with the passage of Ballot Measure 26-217. It was the creation of former City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who hitched a ride on George Floyd’s death.

The Minneapolis fentanyl user resisted arrest after a storeowner called police when Floyd bought cigarettes with counterfeit money and wouldn’t return them. Floyd, who was black, died during the struggle with Sgt. Derek Chauvin who tried to subdue him. Chauvin was convicted of murder and is now in prison.

After Portland rioted for 100-plus nights in support of Floyd, Ballot Measure 26-217 was a slam-dunk. The Portland City Council unanimously approved it for the ballot, and voters did the rest.

The city then appointed the 20-person Police Accountability Commission to bring Hardesty’s measure to life. What kind of citizen board should sit in judgment on police? Who should serve on it? What powers should it have? How could it encourage complaints against the police and make them stick?

Among those appointed to the commission was Handelman. What most of the other appointees had in common with him was a righteous desire to reinvent Portland police according to their progressive values. The police oversight board they came up with was so antagonistic towards cops and police work in general that it could have been designed by members of Antifa, who scrawled ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) during riot season. In fact, rioters with their lived experience could be appointed to the oversight board to sit in judgment on police.

It’s fair to say that most Portlanders who voted in favor of Ballot Measure 26-217 in November 2020 have never heard of the Police Accountability Commission. Most Portlanders never attended the 120 or so public meetings via Zoom held by the commission.

From the meetings I observed there were generally only four to a dozen people tuning in. “Public comments” were relegated towards the end of the meetings and were frequently limited to two minutes and strictly controlled by a facilitator. There were also 23 in-person “community events” where some commissioners clearly became uncomfortable when citizens challenged them. (For previous coverage, see “Cops and Community Standards,” “Portland’s Reckoning,” and “The Dream of a Ridiculous City.”)

It says something that when commissioners had to create a name for the new oversight board, the discussion was agonizing. One commissioner suggested that it not include the word “police” because just the word “police” could be traumatic to some people.

But the name needed to reflect what the oversight group was about so commissioners finally settled on the “Community Board for Police Accountability.”

It would sit in judgment on police and mete out discipline. It would be composed of people who have never been in law enforcement or have family in law enforcement. However, board members could have criminal histories, particularly if they had experienced “systemic racism.” Those filing complaints against police would be assigned “complaint navigators” to help them through the process. (These are complainants who will never be called “Karens.”)

Other features of the proposed board would be the ability to subpoena police officers. As required by the ballot measure, the board’s director and staff would have a budget equal to 5 percent of the Portland Police Bureau’s annual spending.

The City Attorney’s Office took the proposed package and reworked it to be less hostile towards police. While board members still can’t have any experience in law enforcement, three police representatives could serve on the committee that will nominate board members.

Another change would prohibit anyone with a bias for or against law enforcement from being on the board. That could be highly subjective, and Portland has shown a willingness to be subjective when “progressive values” are at stake. (Last year the city rescinded a job offer as police training dean to a Los Angeles police sergeant whose social media accounts suggested he could be fan of Fox News, the Cato Institute and Canadian writer Jordan Peterson. Instead the job was offered to a woman of color who is a clinical social worker.)

Ballot Measure 26-217 was built on resentment and revenge, specifically that of Jo Ann Hardesty, a black woman and native of Baltimore. It’s a city with major crime and a police department that reflected the violence it had to deal with. But Portland is no Baltimore and never has been.

As I noted five years ago when Hardesty was elected to the City Council, she was the perfect candidate for Portland’s white progressives. She had the kind of street cred that impresses naïve Portlanders. She had a long history of marching against police. White progressives, in their safe white neighborhoods with Black Lives Matter signs posted in their lawns and windows, could feel good about voting for her. (See “Turning Police into Uber Drivers”)

Hardesty, like Handelman, is so committed to police reform that she condemns officers who have defended themselves against armed assailants. She wanted to force change, and she did. The local media climbed on board, repeating almost as a mantra that “the public” was demanding police reform.

Portlanders didn’t think they had to worry about the repercussions after Hardesty was sworn in. By the time she lost re-election four years later, they knew otherwise. The city didn’t look the same. It didn’t feel the same.

So where was Hardesty last week when the Portland City Council finally weighed in on her long-awaited police oversight board?

During a three-hour public hearing, she was a no-show. Another notable no-show was Candace Avalos, formerly chair of still another police oversight group, the Citizen Review Committee, which has been around for two decades. Avalos has been lobbying heavily for the new oversight board and is now running for the expanded City Council, which she helped design and that will go from five seats to 12.

Could it be Avalos has sensed a shift in the political winds on police reform? Particularly since earlier this month Seattle progressives who were anti-cop suffered election losses.

As it is, the Portland City Council hearing last week reflected a shift in the community’s support for Ballot Measure 26-217.

Dick Perkins, who described himself as an ex-con and heroin addict, said he voted for it but changed his mind after watching “protests turn into riots” and “protesters dehumanizing the cops. … They did to the cops what they accused the cops of doing to them. … There are some very dangerous people living on our streets who need to be in jail. It is not safe for anyone today.”

Attorney Kristin Olson, who owns a small law firm in downtown Portland, urged the council to send the measure back to the voters.

“You have the power to do this. …This city is very different than it was in 2020,” she said.

Several speakers compared Ballot Measure 26-217 to Measure 110, approved by Oregon voters, and legalizing hard drugs. It has had disastrous effects, leaving the streets overrun with fentanyl addicts. There are calls to repeal Measure 110.

But the speaker to go first was Handelman. He knew the City Attorney’s office had rewritten the Police Accountability Commission’s plan for police reform, and the City Council was poised to approve it. He reached for the same emotions that worked in 2020.

“Black lives no longer matter,” he told the council.

The day before, OPB’s “Think Out Loud” did a story about the council’s meeting and invited exactly one guest  — Handelman.

He told OPB host Dave Miller, “One of the main things that this board’s going to investigate are shootings and deaths in custody and also any kind of bias against a community member based on their protected class… .”

Any kind of bias against a community member based on their protected class.

How exactly does that work? If the “community member” has just shot a couple of guys (like Patrick Kimmons did), are the police supposed to act like he’s harmless? And Kimmons was black, so were the police supposed to let him go because of his “protected class” after he shot two men? Were they supposed to wait to see if he was also going to shoot them? Were they supposed to ask permission to arrest him?

The premise of Handelman’s (and Hardesty’s) police oversight obsession is that all interaction between law enforcement and blacks is racist. As long as blacks continue to commit crimes in Portland and be arrested, there will never be enough police oversight.

OPB’s Miller let Handelman have his say without any challenge.

The one institution that has escaped blame in Portland’s deterioration is the media. They amplify complaints of police brutality by blacks without acknowledging black culpability in many cases. Only black politicians are allowed to talk back at people who look like them.

A recent New Yorker story about crime problems in San Francisco looked at a program initiated by Mayor London Breed that authorizes police officers to arrest people who appear to be using drugs on the street. Breed is black and grew up in public housing in the 1970s and 1980s. But her proposal to make it easier for police to arrest drug users was challenged by Dean Preston (a white democratic-socialist and member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors), who noted “such programs had been shown to target people of color.”

Breed shot back: “Here we go—another white man who’s talking about Black and brown people as if you’re the savior of those people and you speak for them.”

She said that he didn’t understand what worked for real people: “It’s not just services—it’s also force.”

Many journalists have the same blind spot. They forget that what police do is called law enforcement. Note the word “force.”

My colleague Richard Cheverton weighed in with several questions to the council, including: “Which of you — show of hands — is going to appoint a felon to this august body?”

The timing of the question was perfect. The previous speaker was Terrence Hayes, who sauntered to the front of the council chambers — “How you all doin’?” and said “I strongly disagree that this needs to go back to the voters. … We need something now.”

Hayes was a convicted felon. When he was 19 and involved in gangs, he shot and wounded a man and went to prison. Last year he became the first person in Multnomah County to benefit from a new state law making it easier to have criminal convictions disappear. (See “Wiping Away the Truth.”)

He was also appointed to the Focused Intervention Team Community Oversight Group — still another police oversight group, this one to ensure police don’t racially profile blacks. (Hayes is black.)

The City Council didn’t offer a show of hands to Cheverton’s question. They went to a recess instead.

The challenge for the City Council will be to withstand pressure to cave in to the demands of Handelman and the others. The City Attorney’s Office will take public feedback on the issue until Dec. 15. The police oversight package will next be sent to the Department of Justice for review.

To offer feedback, email: DOJ-Comments@portlandoregon.gov