Police, who have heretofore stomached deliberations of the city's Citizen Review Committee that they often disagree with, threatened to stop showing up to the monthly (and sometimes bimonthly) meetings, if security wasn't tightened. The CRC's chair announced she'd consider throwing people out for disruption, which hasn't happened in recent history. A Portland Building security guard will now sit in on the CRC meetings for the first time.
But another thing changed after the water flew: The dream of free sub sandwiches died.
In a routine agenda sent out ahead of next week's scheduled meeting, the CRC indicated in bold: Please note we are no longer serving food at CRC meeting [sic].
The simple sentence puts an end to the sumptuous sandwich and cookie plate laid out in the rear of the meetings for at least the past few years, along with the more recent addition of ample coffee supplies. [ADDENDUM: Since posting this, I've been reminded by a knowledgable source that CRC meetings didn't just feature subs, but also frequently pizza, "and every once in a blue moon they would get good Middle Eastern food, sushi, and Vietnamese food." I apologize for any confusion.] Those provisions had been noshed openly by both the review committee's members and the audience members who care enough about police oversight to attend the evening meetings. No longer.
Is the public being punished for the outburst of one man? Not according to Constantin Severe, director of the city's Independent Police Review, of which the CRC is a part
"From my perspective, it’s not: Stuff went down and we need to take away food," Severe says. "One of the things that happened is we had to take a look at our own process."
Severe says the meeting food, as originally conceived, was never supposed to be for the public—it just sort of morphed into a public offering over the years. The IPR, a wing of the Portland Auditor's Office, is small enough that an outlay of $100 or so once or twice a month has begun to look imprudent.
"It was really bad what happened, but it was an opportunity to look at the whole process," Severe says. "Looking at what the purpose of this is.. we need to make sure community members who sit there for three or four hours as volunteers get taken care of."
The CRC, in case you don't know, takes up cases where the police have been accused of misconduct, but in which the police bureau itself says no misconduct occurred. It's an advisory board, of sorts, with the power to refer cases back to Police Chief Larry O'Dea if it disagrees about cops' conclusions. It does that a lot. Out of four citizen appeals brought before the CRC in 2015, it referred three back to the cops, Severe says.
Obviously there are far more important issues facing the committee, and Portland's police oversight system in general, than subs—for starters an ongoing and simmering antipathy that occasionally raises its head between cops and the IPR itself.
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