Last week, Mayor Tom Potter announced that he was letting the
embattled Drug-Free Zone policy expire in the wake of a report showing
that its enforcement was racially biased. Instead, he’s now moving
forward on a new plan that is anything but novel—expanding the
year-and-a-half-old Project 57, and giving a half million dollars for
more drug treatment.
Under the program, the city rents 57 jail beds in the Multnomah
County Detention Center, reserved—theoretically, at
least—for chronic offenders of crimes like drug possession and
distribution. Because of the overtaxed justice system, those suspected
offenders would otherwise be released immediately—or simply cited
on the street without ever getting booked. But if an arresting officer
decides that an arrest qualifies for Project 57 (P57), the suspect is
tossed in a cell for the night, until they see a judge the next
day.
The idea is that by disrupting a suspect’s life—even for the
night—they are less likely to be arrested for another similar
crime, and that by holding them until arraignment, they are more likely
to continue through the justice system or into treatment.
And the proponents of the program, especially City Commissioner
Randy Leonard, believe Project 57 works wonders. A quarterly report
released in June by the Project 57 Steering Committee claims that of
the suspects arrested under P57, 80 percent “have not been
re-apprehended on a P57-type charge.” The report also points out that
arrests for the types of crime that are targeted by P57 and the
Drug-Free Zones—drugs and prostitution—are falling faster
in the P57-targeted areas than they are in the city at large.
But not everyone is as excited as Leonard. Chris O’Connor, a public
defender who was a vocal critic of the DFZs, believes any expansion of
the Project 57 program should be watched carefully. Because officers
use their own discretion on which cases to assign to P57, many of the
same racial discrepancies could show up in P57 bookings.
“If there’s no standard formula for who gets booked under Project
57, you’re back to the Drug-Free Zone and Prostitution-Free Zone
problems,” O’Connor says.
That is, if an officer wants to make life difficult for an
arrestee—for whatever reason—all he or she has to do is
write “P57” at the top of the citation. Given the debacle of the
Drug-Free Zones, it’s in city council’s interest to monitor the
enforcement of the program.