The Dream of a Ridiculous City

Portland wants to be a national model for police accountability

To understand police accountability in Portland, it helps to ask young black males a basic question: Are you more afraid of police or drug gangs?

“Probably drug gangs,” said 16-year-old Jaamir. “Police have more history, but drug gangs are more ruthless.”

Jaamir, a slender guy wearing a “Hidden Truths” beanie, sat towards the front of a packed house at the latest community forum put on by the Police Accountability Commission.

This forum, held at the Mekong Bistro near Northeast 82nd Avenue, attracted a large, black crowd — far different from some of the other community forums held by the Police Accountability Commission in St. John’s, Sellwood, Multnomah Village, Lents and elsewhere.

Of course, a free buffet at the dinner hour probably helped. But so did the warm greetings from Lionel Irving of Love is Stronger, who helped get the word out.

“I stopped counting after 100,” he said of the turnout.

The Police Accountability Commission is a 20-member group appointed by the Portland City Council to help enact Ballot Measure 26-217. Written and championed by former City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, this ballot measure rode on the emotional waves of the George Floyd/Antifa riots in the summer of 2020. It passed with 82 percent voter support that November.

Just as telling, though, was that two years later Hardesty lost her bid for re-election. Full-throated, anti-cop sentiment had broadcast a message to criminal offenders: The welcome mat in Portland is out. All is forgiven.

For shoplifters, car thieves, drug-dealers and gangbangers, life became more accommodating in Portland. If all else failed, they could claim “mental illness” and demand services — not punishment.

How many Portland voters who embraced “police accountability” as the Number One issue of Portland in 2020 would do so now in 2023 after seeing what happens when fewer criminals are held accountable?

Back at the Mekong Bistro, that question did not come up.

Members of the Police Accountability Commission have been meeting for two years to design a new system to handle complaints against police officers. The commission has been sharing its proposals in a series of community forums. Next month, the City Council is expected to weigh in. If you want to read the 94-page draft, here’s the link.

As designed by the Police Accountability Commission, a new 33-member citizen board would sit in judgment on police. None of these members could be former or current law enforcement officers or have family who have done police work. Once the board imposes discipline on a police officer, the police chief cannot impose lesser discipline.

Although the new police oversight board members cannot have police experience, they can have criminal records.

At a community forum a week earlier in Lents, attended in-person by about 14 citizens (and another 20 via Zoom), Portland Accountability Commissioner Charlie Michelle-Westley urged people with criminal records to apply to the new board.

“Those are the very people … that they need on this new board,” she said.

Michelle-Westley also touted a feature that Portland’s new police oversight board would have that could be first in the nation — “a complaint navigator, which I call an advocate” — to help guide a person who has filed a complaint against the police. That would allow the complainant to remain anonymous.

If these complaint navigators are to be paid city employees, the money is already available. The ballot measure approving the new police oversight board guarantees it a budget equal to 5 percent of the police budget. In the past year, the estimated budget for the new board has swelled from $11 million to $12 million and now $13 million for police oversight. Not for more police. For more oversight.

Conceivably, under this proposal, a member of the community whose home has been burglarized or car stolen could end up paying for his thief’s complaint navigator if the thief files a complaint about the way police treated him. Or, if the community member becomes upset that the police failed to find the thief, the community member could file a complaint and turn his animosity towards the police and away from the offender.

At both the Lents and Mekong Bistro community forums, Police Accountability Commission member Seemab Hussaini promised “data dashboards” that would “create a system that can actually hold law enforcement accountable” by publicizing sets of data the community could easily access online. The new police accountability board could use this data to create policies.

Hussaini repeated two sets of data he found especially compelling: The adult population in the state Department of Corrections is 30 percent black, and the juvenile system is 80 percent black.

“That is a targeted system,” he stated as fact. “That is a system targeting all these youth.”

He predicted that many will be wearing handcuffs some time in their life.

When Hussaini shared that data at the Lents meeting, a black woman spoke up.

“How are you putting this to the youth?” she asked.

Her son goes to Parkrose High School.

“I can’t have my son go outside. I can’t have him walk to school because of all the different gangs.”

None of the Police Accountability Commission members present at the meeting had an answer for her.

But the mother’s words led me to ask Jaamir, the black teen at Mekong Bistro, about who posed the greater danger — cops or drug gangs.

He’s in a better situation than the Lents mother who doesn’t let her son walk to Parkrose. Jaamir goes to Central Catholic High School, which he likes — especially after going to a “bad middle school.”

Which school would that be?

“Harriet Tubman,” he said. “There were just too many fights.”

Jaamir held information in his hand on how to apply to be a member of the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing — known by the unwieldy acronym PCCEP. The group has had a hard time getting youths to join.

Portland has had layers of police accountability for at least two decades. Just as most Portlanders have not observed any of the Police Accountability Commission meetings via Zoom or in-person community forums, most Portlanders have never heard of the Independent Police Review or attended meetings of the Citizen Review Committee, the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing or the Community Oversight Advisory Board (disbanded after two years when “mentally ill” agitators hijacked the meetings). There are also smaller, less formal police advisory groups at City Hall.

Membership in these groups is heavily weighted towards social justice activists. A handful of passionate police critics attend the meetings. Their voices are amplified by the media, who reach out to them for quotes.

Most prominent of them is probably Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch, who now serves as co-chair of the Police Accountability Commission.

Revealing anecdote: Pre-pandemic when the Citizen Review Committee met monthly in person in the Lovejoy Room at City Hall to hear complaints against police, Handelman was a regular attendee. On one occasion he complained that someone at City Hall had slammed a door in his face. Handelman can’t handle a door slammed in his face, but he expected cops to grin and bear it when Keaton Otis shot one of them.

As Handelman frequently recalls, Otis was a 25-year-old black man shot and killed in 2010 by Portland police. What is rarely mentioned is that Otis shot first and wounded an officer twice in the legs.

Otis’s name came up at Mekong Bistro during a reading of the names of persons who died of “police violence.” Rarely is it mentioned that many times the persons who died initiated the violence.

The police oversight groups at times compete for attention and credibility. PCCEP scored a point last week when Mayor Ted Wheeler and City Commissioner Rene Gonzalez appeared at its regular meeting.

Early into the meeting, though, the facilitator running the proceedings interrupted Wheeler when he was answering a question and told him that she would have to cut him off to allow more time “for the community.”

Wheeler seemed momentarily stunned and then said “Take your pick.”

Later, PCCEP member Ashley Schofield, who works for Metro's Government Affairs and Policy Development team and serves as the Racial Equity and Social Justice Chair of a PTA board, asked Wheeler to “apologize to us for what the police did in 2020. … Make all your sworn officers apologize.”

Wheeler replied that as police commissioner he could compel employees to do certain things.

“My mother always told me an apology isn’t an apology if it is a forced apology,” he added.

Celeste Carey, co-chair of PCCEP and the interim Co-Manager of KBOO-FM Radio, challenged Wheeler.

She noted that PCCEP is mandated to help the Portland Police Bureau improve its handling of the mentally ill. It’s part of a settlement agreement the city entered into  with the U.S. Department of Justice following an investigation into police use of force on the mentally ill.

In any healthy relationship, Carey said, there can be a pressing need to apologize.

“My question is why don’t the police feel like they have to apologize? Why are they not beating down your door … will you help us apologize?” (To see how one recent forced apology worked, read “Portland’s Reckoning.”)

Carey prides herself on being able to ask the difficult questions, as do other members occupying Portland’s police oversight groups. There are some questions they don’t touch.

Three years ago, a fentanyl addict resisting arrest died at the hands of a Minneapolis cop. What does it say about Portlanders, as a people, that they have so little control over themselves they had to riot for 100-plus nights on behalf of George Floyd?

What does it say that 82 percent of Portland voters, most of whom never read Ballot Measure 26-217, voted for it?