The city auditor's Independent Police Review (IPR)—"the central intake point for police misconduct complaints"—just released its annual report for 2015, providing statistics about allegations made against the Portland Police Bureau from last year.

Its most notable takeaway is that there were 416 complaints made, including 388 from community members detailing 800 separate allegations (an increase from 2014), and 28 complaints from police bureau employees (a decrease from 2014). Most of the complaints were dismissed, but the IPR also notes that it dismissed fewer of them in 2015 (67 percent) compared to a year earlier (76 percent), thanks to an increase in staff allowing them to launch its own independent investigation of them.

In 2015, 28 officers were disciplined. This includes eight with "command counseling," eight with letters of reprimand, six with between 10 and 80 hours without pay, one with 81 hours without pay, four who resigned or retired with a pending investigation, and one was outright fired.

Six officers fired their guns at people last year, up from four in 2014 and two in 2013.

You can take a look at the full report at the bottom of this post, or check out the highlights here.

Demographics

Six percent of the people in Portland are African American, but they represent 21 percent of the complaints filed against the Portland Police Bureau. White people—making up 72 percent of the population—filed 66 percent of the complaints.

Men filed 53 percent of the complaints, "which is consistent with historical data," it says.

Patrol precincts

Most of the complaints were about patrol and traffic officers, the report says. Here's the breakdown of the where the 388 community complaints stemmed from:

• 100 - East precinct patrol
• 86 - North precinct patrol
• 86 - Central precinct patrol
• 53 - "unknown/other agency"
• 28 - Traffic division
• 11 - "Other Portland divisitons"
• 9 - Tactical ops
• 8 - Transit
• 7 - Detectives

Types of complaints

The 388 community complaints contained 800 allegations. There are six categories of complaints—procedure, conduct, courtesy, use of force, disparate treatment, control technique— these complaints fall under. Here are the percentages of the 800 allegations:

• 42% - Procedure ("failure to follow an administrative or procedural requirement")
• 26% - Conduct ("unjustified, unprofessional, or inappropriate actions, or unsatisfactory performance")
• 20% - Courtesy ("discourteous or rude statements or conduct")
• 9% - Use of force ("inappropriate use of physical force or pointing a firearm at a person")
• 3% - Disparate treatment ("inappropriate action or statement based on a characteristic of a person such as race, sex, age, or disability")
• 1% - Control technique (Inappropriate use of a hold or other technique to control a person's movement")

Allegations of inadequate action or assistance jumped from 72 complaints in 2014 to 97 complaints in 2015. Allegations of rude behavior or language fell from 77 to 64. Use of force complaints stayed about the same (35 to 36), and allegations of improper or inadequate investigations dropped (43 to 35).

Complaint dismissals

Of the complaints IPR took in, 67 percent of them "were not eligible for further investigation... 75 of the complaints that IPR decided did not warrant a formal investigation were subsequently brought to the attention of precinct commanders for follow-up."

"More than half of IPR's dismissals (53 percent) occurred because the conduct as alleged did not violate Police Bureau policy," the report says. "Other dismissal reasons included: unable to identify the officer based on the information provided by the complainant, the complainant withdrew or was unavailable for follow-up, or a significant time lapse between the incident as alleged and the filing of the complaint."

IPR sent 96 of the community's complaints to the bureau's Internal Affairs division, "a higher rate than the past two years." For four of them, "IPR requested Internal Affairs to conduct an investigation after Internal Affairs initially declined to do so."

IPR and Internal Affairs "completed 62 full administrative investigations into community member complaints in 2015, double the number in each of the previous two years," and sustained one or more allegations in them only 11 times (18 percent; "sustained" means the allegations were valid) . "That is the lowest proportion of complaints without a sustained allegation since IPR began tracking such data in 2002.

Complaints made by bureau employees

IPR and Internal Affairs did 22 investigations stemming from complaints made by employees of the Portland Police Bureau against a co-worker in 2015. Unlike complaints by the community, most of these were sustained.

Officers in complaints

The report doesn't include any officers by name, unfortunately. 30 officers had between three and five complaints filed against them, including two officers who were each named in five separate complaints. Most officers had a single complaint.

You can take a look at the full report here. We'll be going through the stats more in-depth soon, but if you notice anything you think we should highlight, feel free to email doug@portlandmercury.com