BUILDING ON last month’s federal report that blasted Portland cops’ use of unconstitutional force against the mentally ill, the US Department of Justice and city officials last Friday, October 26, reached accord on a “watershed” set of reforms bearing big promises—but even bigger questions.

The agreement aims to expand civilian oversight of the police bureau, strengthen mental health treatment and training, tighten Taser and use-of-force policies, and speed up misconduct investigations.

“This is a watershed moment,” Mayor Sam Adams said. “We are fully embracing the responsibilities we have and the realities we face.”

But that landmark moment comes with a major price tag that Adams doesn’t yet know how he’ll pay: $3.5 million in annual costs for dozens of new positions—cheaper than in cities like New Orleans and Seattle, but a tough sum to absorb in a city facing budget cuts.

The deal also leaves much of the implementation to Portland’s next police commissioner. And advocates who have been tracking civil rights issues for years already are asking whether the deal actually addresses the problems laid out by the feds [“Saving Us from Ourselves,” News, Sept 20].

“It doesn’t solve my problem at all,” says Jason Renaud of the Mental Health Association of Portland, who wrote to the feds asking why the agreement doesn’t include stronger provisions for firing cops who use excessive force. “There are police officers on the streets who have killed my friends. And they’re likely to kill again.”

Some changes, however, will happen quickly. Portland City Council is set to approve the reforms at a 2 pm hearing this Thursday, November 1. Then, the council will immediately seek out applicants to serve as a new city compliance officer—someone charged with making sure the city delivers on its promises while also leading a 15-member community oversight board (of which five members would be nominated citywide).

That person will not serve as a monitor with court-bestowed powers, officials say. Rather, he or she will report quarterly to the feds and to the public on how well the city is holding up its end of the bargain.

The police bureau also must begin sifting through several changes in training, policy, and oversight, including:

• Creating an Addictions and Behavioral Health Unit that will have power over a restored Crisis Intervention Team of specially trained mental health officers and oversee an expansion of the bureau’s mobile crisis units.

• How to wrap up misconduct investigations, including appeals, within 180 days—far shorter than the current year-plus average. The police bureau’s Internal Affairs division and the city’s Independent Police Review division are both expected to nearly double their teams of investigators.

• Changing Taser policies to ban the use of multiple stun guns on the same person at the same time. Cops will be also banned from using consecutive Taser cycles on someone—a change long sought by advocates.

Another key element required a buy-in, not only from the feds and the cops, but also the city’s health care industry. The state’s Coordinated Care Organizations (CCOs), tasked with implementing federal health care reform in Oregon, have promised to add, by mid-2013, at least one center where cops can drop off people in crisis.

That’s sooner, Adams explained, than the CCOs otherwise would have moved. CCOs also will work with the city and Multnomah County to improve treatment in clinics and emergency rooms.

The city has at least five years to make the fixes. But skeptics, including Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch, worry the city will skirt some of the more substantive reforms through the use of loopholes.

He lamented that Police Review Board hearings, which greatly inform discipline decisions by the chief’s office, remain closed to the public. Discipline, or a lack thereof, in deadly force cases still can’t be appealed. And he cited a change that would ban any cop rapped for the use of force in a three-year period from training other officers.

“The police want to find ways to keep doing what they’re doing,” Handelman says. “Nobody ever gets found guilty of use of force. They are accused, but it’s rare someone gets found out of policy.”

Both mayoral candidates, Charlie Hales and Jefferson Smith, have indicated—Hales explicitly so—that they’ll keep Police Chief Mike Reese. Both also tell the Mercury they’ll be willing to make deep cuts at city hall while also looking to Multnomah County for help with funding.

But Smith appears more willing to play a bit rough if either the cops or the health care system refuse to fall in line. He says he’d hold up permits and zoning approvals for the CCOs if they didn’t work with the city.

“Since this is a federal agreement and the department of justice has also investigated our state mental health system,” Smith says, “the CCOs also have an incentive to live up to their end of the deal, lest they face greater scrutiny.”

And he also said he’d take action if, for example, the benchmarks for speedier misconduct probes aren’t met.

“The question of a special [court-appointed] monitor,” Smith says, “might need to be revisited.”

Denis C. Theriault is the Portland Mercury's News Editor. He writes stories about City Hall and the Portland Police Bureau, focusing on issues like homelessness, police oversight, insider politics, and...

13 replies on “But Does It Have Teeth?”

  1. Eliminate the Portland Police Bureau and hire one fifth of them back as non-union. The savings will pay for the ombudsmen, and provide extra funds to benefit the poor.

    http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/30/13504614-one-of-most-dangerous-cities-in-us-plans-to-ditch-police-force?lite

    One of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. is getting rid of its police department.

    Amid what they call a “public safety crisis,” officials in Camden, N.J., plan to disband the city’s 141-year-old police department and replace it with a non-union division of the Camden County Police.

  3. The Rangers would be like British Bobbies. If worse comes to worse, they can call the County Deputy Sheriffs or State Police, who don’t do shit, anyway.

  4. Of course, victimless so-called, “crimes” like sleeping in the park or smoking grass, just wouldn’t need to be prosecuted. Even speeding is okay, as long as there isn’t a crash.

  5. There are waaaaaaaay toooo many frivolous, un-just laws on the books, created for the sole purpose of harassing harmless citizens, and extorting revenues to support abusive, cowardly bullies in blue. Get rid of the scared pack jackals, and stop enforcing the torment which is in contempt of Common Law. The savings to the tax payer would allow them to make more donations to charity.

  6. April 2005 everyone working in East Port Walmart knew my wife Joan Wagar was sleeping around with a cop named Eric Carlson and Walmart employees were trying to hide their affair from me.
    Shortly after I caught Eric Carlson and Joan Wagar in their affair in April 2005 Joan Wagar started poisoning me and East Port Walmart employees nicknamed my wife Mrs Dash and Joan Wagar was openly using that nickname around other people.
    A lot of people knew by May 2005 my wife was cheating on me with a cop and she was poisoning me.
    I was a active and regular plasma donor when Mrs Dash was poisoning me and everyone at Walmart was calling her by that nickname at East Port Walmart!

  7. The Portland police battered me at East Port Walmart in January 2005 while waiting for my wife to come out for her lunch break.
    I was not arrested or charged with anything but the police and Multnomah county sheriffs arrested two of our three daughters without a charge and demanded a week later at a hearing we give police signed waivers before they would release our daughters back to us, police blackmailed us to sign waivers saying police did nothing wrong!

    I was too injured to attend the hearing thus they did not get a waiver from me!

    A month and a half later several cops approached my wife at East Port Walmart and they befriended her, they wined and dined her and they even bought her expensive gifts and in her gratitude she began lying for them and she started having an affair with one of them, his name is Eric Carlson.

    My wife Joan Wagar partied with Eric Carlson and his bro’s for a month and then my wife Joan Wagar started recruiting family members to lie for them, why? because Eric Carlson the cop is almost a twin to me and police wanted to frame me for their crimes, and Joan Wagar wasted no time in recruiting her family into this.

    I discovered their big secret in April 2005 and I tried to warn a family member about it and after that my wife Joan Wagar started poisoning me.
    A couple weeks after I started getting ill my wife bragged to her daughters that her coworkers at East Port Walmart nicknamed her Dash, which stood for Mrs Dash, and Joan Wagar did not even care if I knew about the nickname because she knew I could not get help from police.

    I was a regular plasma donor I donated twice a week and when Joan Wagar admitted to her nickname to her daughters I stopped donating plasma!
    Joan Wagar’s lover Eric Carlson and his bro’s in law enforcement have been gang-stalking me since January 2005 and they spent a great deal of time setting me up for their crimes.

    They had a willing body double so they were having fun framing me as a pedophile and Joan Wagar had her daughters to lie for them so they just did not care at all if I knew or suspected.

    Portland police and Multnomah county sheriffs were destroying my reputation using flyers and they have two names for this, their official name for it is “Community Notifications” look it up, Google it, but their actual name for it that they use when they talk to their bro’s/fellow officers is “Pedofying”!

    Police and county sheriffs are fond of gang-stalking their targets and destroying their reputations so no one will care that their target is a victim.
    Portland police and Multnomah county sheriffs were pedofying me while my wife Joan Wagar was having an affair with a Portland police officer and they gave my wife permission to poison me to death.

    Eric Carlson brags to his bro’s that they pedofy people all the time and he brags it gets people killed off!
    Police are using flyers to destroy their targets reputations and they can do whatever they want to their targets and there is no one that cares.

  9. Soon, the economy will dictate that governments constrict. The police will be out of work and become poor. They are the criminal type and will resort to theft and mugging. This in order to make ends meet, and to convince the public to make financial sacrifice to re-establish the police force. The trouble for them with that, is that the people are armed. Most police officers, when they were kids, were the bullies who used to threaten the other kids and take their milk money. The police are a small minority; in more ways than one. It used to be that a police officer had to be a man, with a height of at least six feet tall. Nowadays, cultural socialism requires equal opportunity for shot guys and fat assed dykes who have inferiority complexes, and feel the need to prove how tough they are. Of course, they still are actually afraid. That’s why they like police work. They never do anything without back up and weapons, but bullies are cowards and when you stand up to them, they always back down. When the police lose their jobs, the people will not tolerate those bullies any longer.

  10. The coming age of austerity
    Pat Buchanan on federal spending: ‘There is nothing left in the till to do big things’
    Published: 6 hours ago
    by Patrick J. Buchanan

    “Are the good times really over for good?” asked Merle Haggard in his 1982 lament.

    Then, the good times weren’t over. In fact, they were coming back, with the Reagan recovery, the renewal of the American spirit and the end of a Cold War that had consumed so much of our lives.

    Yet whoever wins today, it is hard to be sanguine about the future.

    The demographic and economic realities do not permit it.

    Consider. Between 1946 and 1964, 79 million babies were born – the largest, best-educated and most successful generation in our history. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both born in 1946, were in that first class of baby boomers.

    The problem.

    Assume that 75 million of these 79 million boomers survive to age 66. This means that from this year through 2030, an average of nearly 4 million boomers will be retiring every year. This translates into some 11,000 boomers becoming eligible for Medicare and Social Security every single day for the next 18 years.

    Add in immigrants in that same age category and the fact that baby boomers live longer than the Greatest Generation or Silent Generation seniors, and you have an immense and unavoidable increase coming in expenditures for our largest entitlement programs.

    Benefits will have to be curbed or cut and payroll taxes will have to rise, especially for Medicare, to make good on our promises to seniors.

    As for the rest of our federal budget of nearly $4 trillion, we have run four consecutive deficits of over $1 trillion. To bring that budget to balance, freezes would have to be imposed and cuts made in spending for defense and other social programs.

    From California to Wisconsin to New York, we see the process at work at the state level. Government salaries are frozen, government payrolls are cut, government pensions and programs are scaled back.

    California and Illinois are on the precipice of default. Cities like Detroit, Birmingham, Stockton and San Bernardino are already there.

    As for national defense, how long can we afford to spend more than the 10 other top nations combined? How long can we continue to defend scores of nations half a world away? How many more trillion-dollar wars like Iraq and Afghanistan can we fight on borrowed money?

    Moreover, the day of the great national enterprises is over.

    FDR had his New Deal and World War II, Ike his federal highway system, Kennedy his space program, LBJ his Great Society, Reagan his military buildup and tax cuts, Bush his two wars and tax cuts, Obama his Obamacare.

    But there is nothing left in the till to do big things. One sees only deficits and debt all the way to the horizon.

    Europe has arrived at where we are headed. In the south of the old continent – Spain, Italy and Greece – the new austerity has begun to imperil the social order. In the north, the disposition to be taxed to pay for other nations’ social safety nets is disappearing.

    With government in the U.S. at all levels consuming 40 percent of gross domestic product, and taxes 30 percent, taxes will have to rise and government spending be controlled or cut. The alternative is to destroy the debt by depreciating the dollars in which it is denominated – i.e., by Fed-induced inflation.

    But you can only rob your creditors once. After that, they never trust you again.

    There is another social development rarely discussed.

    The workers who are replacing retiring baby boomers in the labor force are increasingly minorities.

    Black folks and Hispanics alone account now for 30 percent of the population – and rising rapidly.

    Yet these two minorities have high-school dropout rates of up to 50 percent in many cities, and many who do graduate have math, reading and science scores at seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade levels.

    Can their contributions to an advanced economy be as great as were those of baby boomers of the ’60s and ’70s, whose SAT scores were among the highest we ever recorded? U.S. scores in global competition have been plummeting toward Third World levels.

    Everyone talks about how we are going to raise test scores. But, despite record and rising investments in education per student, no one in decades has found a way to do this consistently.

    Moreover, while boomers were almost all born into families where mother and father were married and living together, Hispanics have a 53 percent illegitimacy rate, African-Americans a 73 percent rate.

    Among the white poor and working class, the illegitimacy rate is now 40 percent – almost twice as high as it was in black America when Pat Moynihan wrote his 1965 report on the crisis of the black family.

    And between the illegitimacy rate and the drug-use rate, dropout rate, crime rate and incarceration rate, the correlation is absolute.

    Some of us are often accused of always “crying wolf.”

    But it is worth noting that one day the wolf came.

    http://www.wnd.com/2012/11/the-coming-age-of-austerity/
    WND.com

  12. Decision 2012 and the Economy
    By JR Nyquist11/05/2012

    It is a fact of history, which cannot be denied, that government is dangerous to liberty as well as to prosperity. Even the checks and balances of our political system do not always restrain the hand of naked government appropriation. Even the U.S. Constitution appears, at moments, utterly helpless to prevent the negation of property rights, or the passage of arbitrary laws. And now that the United States is on the brink of yet another major election, some of us tremble at the prospects. Since all the traditional understandings of the Constitution are being eroded away, and government intervention into the financial sector has become pervasive, we cannot suppose that the system has much time left.

    In his book, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote, “All those in political power, all governments, all kings, and all republican authorities have always looked askance at private property. There is an inherent tendency in all governmental power to recognize no restraints on its operation and to extend the sphere of its dominion as much as possible.” And we must admit that the United States government, under both major parties, has continued to move in the direction of violating property rights. Many of the crises occurring today were caused or exacerbated by government intervention – from the bubble in the housing market to the debt crisis. But how is government held accountable? In fact, at every turn, the government gains more power from the crisis as market freedom is increasingly infringed upon. The official justification is that the economy has gone haywire and something must be done to prevent a total collapse.

    In truth, the government has gone haywire and the economic mayhem we see today is a reflection of this. It is a reflection of too much regulation, of too much taxation, and too much intervention. “If only private property did not stand in the way!” Mises wrote sarcastically of the interventionist mindset.

    What are the evils associated with private property? Simply, that private property signifies a sanctuary in which the individual is free from the control of government officials. Here a man’s home is sacrosanct. His business is sacrosanct. His economic relations are sacrosanct. And here is the chief obstacle to absolute power. How irksome to those who would hold nothing inviolable, whose arrogance would like to control everyone and everything; and who fervently believe, without the least humility, that they know best. With such people about, private property must inevitably find itself maligned. And so it is.

    The election of 2012 is sometimes presented as a contest between two divergent ideas of government. On the one hand, there is the supposed Party of Capitalism. On the other side, there is the Party of Socialism. Perhaps the truth is better explained as follows: Both parties are pandering to an increasingly entitled and narcissistic population. Both parties field candidates who promise benefits to voters – benefits bought and paid for by borrowing money, or by debasing the currency, or by taxing us into a new Dark Ages. Don’t worry, if everything collapses the government will save you. But the government has been causing the collapse, and cannot save itself. Should the currency inflate away, our nuclear deterrent would fail, our social system could collapse. What would the government do then? And how would the government pay for doing it?

    http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/jr-nyquist/decision-2012-and-economy

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