This month's (main) National Geographic magazine did its issue on race and justice- or rather lack there of. This one statistic has super irked me. Not not only is Multnomah's CRC completely ineffective at disciplining police for innapropriate conduct, excessive force and other illegal conduct, so is Chicago's Citizen Review Committee. 99% of complaints that go through Chicago's CRC are dismissed. This made me realize that there are likely hundreds of CRCs throughout the country that have a 97+ percentage dismissal rate of complaints against the police. Its unbelievable that people in hundreds of cities across the country attempt to make complaints about police only to have their complaints dismissed 97% percent of the time or more. Talk about an act of redundancy and futileness on behalf of thousands of people across the US. Something has to change.

This is a difference between federal and state law. Oregon law is generally defendant friendly.

In federal law, unmirandized or compelled statements are only unconstitutional if admitted in court. If, in a federal case, a officer compells a statement suggesting the person is holding drugs, the statement may not be entered in court.

However, in Oregon, the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine applies. So, if the police compell a statement as to where a body is, such as by not providing miranda warnings, the body itself is excluded from evidence as fruit of the unconstitutionally coerced statement.

Correction to "If, in a federal case, a officer compells a statement suggesting the person is holding drugs, the statement may not be entered in court."

It should read "If, in a federal case, an officer compells a statement suggesting the person is holding drugs, the statement may not be entered in court. However, the drugs the officer found as a result of the unconstituitonal statement are valid and legal evidence for trial."

Slight correction from the article:

"citizen-led police oversight board can do about it."

There was the COAB (forget what the acronym stands for exactly) but it consisted of two groups: city appointed non-paid volunteers and hired consultants from Chicago whose job was to suggest/recommend improvements for Multnomah police. It was commonly referred to as "a police oversight board". Whereas the CRC consists of all non-paid volunteers who, in theory, are supposed to unbiasedly listen to complaints from people harassed, hurt or violated by Multnomah police. As far as I know, the CRC is usually not referred to as a "board".

@Smartgirl, "Multnomah police"? ...a word of advice. When you want to snarkily claim knowledge on a nuanced topic, you should probably be able to at least somewhat accurately name the primary entity to which you are referring.