AFTER SEVERAL WEEKS researching the city’s $1.3 million per
year replacement program for the now defunct Drug-Free Zones (DFZs),
the Mercury has been unable to find a clear and consistent
written policy on the new program anywhere in Portland.
The DFZs sunset last September, after independent statistical
analysis showed African Americans were more likely to be excluded from
the zones than white people when they were arrested for drug offenses.
To fill a perceived gap left by the DFZs, City Commissioner Randy
Leonard secured $840,709 in the fall to expand the city’s five-year-old
Service Coordination Team (SCT). Plans are afoot to top that with an
additional $1.3 million of taxpayers’ money next year, if the proposed
budget is approved.
The SCT relies on a list of offenders—known as the
Neighborhood Livability Crime Enforcement Program (NLCEP)
list—who are then targeted for housing and drug treatment. The
NLCEP list first came to this newspaper’s attention in April, when an
analysis by local attorney Chris O’Connor showed that 214 of the 408
people on the list at the time, or 52 percent, were African American
[“Blacklisted,” News, April 24]. Following the publication of that
story, Portland Police Officer Jeff Myers, along with the NLCEP’s new
manager at the police bureau, Bill Sinnott, explained the program in
detail to the Mercury in an interview on May 6.
Myers and Sinnott said the list is assembled by conducting blind
data runs to find the top 30 arrestees in downtown, inner Northeast,
and inner Southeast Portland for the past three months, for crimes
typically associated with drug addiction: larcenies, motor vehicle
thefts, frauds and forgeries, drugs, disorderly conduct, and probation
violations. Those people are then discussed in private Monday meetings
at Central Precinct between SCT members, including the cops, probation
and parole officers, and service and treatment providers like Central
City Concern and Volunteers of America, all of whom have to sign
confidentiality agreements. People in the program also typically sign a
release saying their information can be exchanged between the SCT
parties, according to Central City Concern’s Ed Blackburn.
“We all work together and basically come up with get-well plans for
each of the people on our list,” says Sinnott. “And we meet every
Monday and discuss what’s been going on with our top offenders each
week. If they’ve been showing up for treatment, if they’ve been staying
in their room, if they’ve been behaving themselves, if someone’s seen
them out using drugs again. And based on what we find out there, the
group roundtables, ‘what are we going to do about them this week?'”
Yet despite the effort and considerable amount of money invested in
the program, the criteria for getting on and off the NLCEP list doesn’t
appear to be written down anywhere—nor is the program’s policy to
be found anywhere on the city’s website or in city council legislative
files. When asked for a written policy, Myers and Sinnott referred the
Mercury to Deputy District Attorney David Hannon, who referred
us in turn to Deputy City Attorney David Woboril, who in turn referred
us back to Myers and Sinnott. Woboril, however, resisted a
characterization of the program as “hazy.”
“Because people are not perhaps cooperating with you or giving you
information in the form you want, don’t characterize it as they don’t
have any good thinking on the subject,” Woboril said last Friday, May
16. “It’s a complex program. People see it differently. And yet there’s
been a lot of thought put into it, a lot of good-hearted, smart
thinking has gone into the program.”
Sinnott eventually admitted on Monday, May 19, that the policy isn’t
written down in any official document.
“This program has been officially in effect for about five months,”
he said. “And we do know what the policy is, it’s very clear to
everyone, but we don’t have it written in a directive or in [standard
operating procedure] format because we’re currently in the process of
doing that. One of the reasons it’s taking a while is we’re not only
trying to get consensus, but we’ve just been so busy that we’ve not had
a chance to put it in an official form like that yet. But it is
something that we’re working on.”
Sinnott set a target date to have a written policy by July 1. It’s a
step in the right direction, to increase the program’s transparency and
accountability.
“It’s sort of a smaller version of the larger issue our society is
facing, which is what happens when you have secret laws made up by
people who aren’t responsible to any public oversight,” says attorney
O’Connor, with Metropolitan Public Defenders, who has been an outspoken
critic of the new program from its inception.
“What’s important for the city is transparency, and having the
procedures, the practices, and the scope of the program written down so
that everyone can understand it is a really important thing for the
government to do,” says Andrea Meyer, legislative director for the
American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. “And to the degree that the
city is moving forward on that quickly, we are pleased.”
Meyer adds that she would like individuals who are on the list to be
given notice about the fact and its implications, and said ongoing
training is important to ensure confidential information isn’t
exposed.
The SCT has also appointed a six-member advisory board to oversee
the enforcement of the policy. The board had an introductory meeting on
Wednesday, May 7, and will be meeting twice a year, Sinnott says. (It’s
unclear if the meeting will be open.) Sinnott also plans to invite Jo
Ann Bowman of Oregon Action to join the committee, after she expressed
concern to the Mercury last week that the oversight board did
not have anyone from the mayor’s racial profiling committee on it.
The SCT will also employ an independent consultant to look at why
the numbers on the list appear weighted toward African Americans,
Sinnott says.
O’Connor describes the new advisory board as a “rubber stamp,” and
says true oversight needs to be public and established by city council,
independently of
the police bureau, to be truly effective. “But
then, if you’re overseeing a policy that doesn’t actually exist,” he
adds, “I guess it’s debatable whether it’s even worth doing in the
first place.”