It’s not often that Portland’s police union and advocates for Portland’s homeless community agree.
But there’s an unavoidable similarity between the demands of the Portland Police Association (PPA)—underscored in a lengthy Facebook post penned Monday by PPA’s combustible president Daryl Turner—and the call to action of a Change.org petition being circulated by local proponents for affordable housing. Both groups agree that police officers shouldn’t be the first responders to calls regarding homeless individuals, and both agree that Mayor Ted Wheeler’s response to new data on homelessness-related arrests is misguided.
Both the PPA’s Facebook post and the online petition follow a jaw-dropping investigation published in the Oregonian on June 27. Reporters found that 52 percent of all Portland arrests in 2017 were of people who were experiencing homelessness. Only 3 percent of the city’s population fits that description.
This jarringly disproportionate finding sparked outrage in Portland’s homeless advocacy circles and civil rights organizations, prompting Wheeler to announce an investigation into the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) to determine if officers are unfairly profiling Portland’s houseless population.
“The real question here is, ‘Is there some sort of profiling or implicit bias?’” Wheeler told the Oregonian last week. “From my perspective, that’s the crux of the situation.”
Is it, though? Are officers responsible for arresting a high number of homeless people, or is it the responsibility of Wheeler—who serves as Portland’s police commissioner—to reevaluate the number of crimes that a houseless person can be charged with?
