This story is one in a two-part series on Portland's new Community Board for Police Oversight.

At the end of August, approaching four years since it was overwhelmingly approved in a ballot measure by Portland voters, U.S. District Judge Michael Simon approved a plan for the city’s new Community Board for Police Accountability. 

Judge Simon’s refusal to let the current Portland City Council select the nominating committee for the new board drew sharp criticism from several high-profile elected officials. Mayor Ted Wheeler compared Simon to Sen. Mitch McConnell and said he “owns the consequences of his delay.”

Other observers praised that aspect of Judge Simon’s ruling, arguing that the approaching election will give Portlanders a say in who they want on the accountability board and that Wheeler and the city had only themselves to blame for not acting with more urgency to get the board up and running sooner. 

But that issue aside, come next year, Portland will finally get its new police oversight board—a board empowered to investigate and discipline officers, subpoena witnesses, and recommend police bureau policy changes.

The question now is whether the plan approved by Judge Simon has set the board up for the kind of success in overhauling the city’s police accountability system that activists imagined when the ballot measure passed in 2020. 

Police accountability activists and their allies, a number of whom testified before Judge Simon in August, are skeptical. They point to the makeup of the board nominating committee, language barring board members who have demonstrated “bias” from serving, and a requirement that board members go on ride-alongs with police officers as potential red flags. 

Kip Silverman, co-chair of the settlement and policy subcommittee on the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing, said Simon’s decision on ride-alongs was a “miss”—a rule that could deter people who have had bad experiences with law enforcement from applying.

Juan Chavez, an attorney who represented the Mental Health Alliance at the court hearing, suggested that if the goal is ensuring board members get to know police officers, requiring coffee meetings would be a lower-barrier tactic than requiring ride-alongs.

The bias provision, along with the question of who will enforce it, is one of the main points of contention for police accountability activists—especially given that three members of the police bureau, despite any biases they might have, will automatically be on the nominating committee.  

The makeup of the nominating committee wasn’t included in the ballot measure’s description back in 2020. That kind of police presence on a board overseeing the police bureau, Chavez said, is exactly what voters rejected when they passed the ballot measure to create the police accountability board following the local and national reckoning around police violence in 2020. 

“To shoehorn in something the public didn’t want just to appease the police, that’s a poke in the eye—and it’s meant, I think, to communicate to the public that the police will get their way one way or the other,” Chavez said. 

The question about how to fairly identify bias in board members has been a major point of contention in Boulder, Colorado, where the city council voted to remove a member of the city’s Police Oversight Panel last year due to her police reform advocacy and participation in a lawsuit against the police chief aiming to overturn the city’s camping ban.  

The board member ultimately sued the city for violating her free speech and due process rights, but not before the city amended its ordinance on the oversight panel to remove language prohibiting the appointment to the panel of anyone who exhibits “real or perceived bias.”

Both Judge Simon and government attorneys argued that the city’s language, which makes it possible to remove board members for an “objective demonstration of bias,” is a high enough standard and that an independent monitor can help ensure its even-handed enforcement. 

But Chavez is worried that more than removing people from the board, the bias provision may have a chilling effect on people who might be deterred from serving because of concerns that they wouldn’t be able to meet the bias standard. 

“My great fear is that people who would otherwise be incredible advocates for the public on one of these boards wouldn’t even bother applying or [they might] think that this is a city that isn't accommodating to their needs or past traumas, or physical conditions, or experiences with the police,” Chavez said. “That’s a terrible message to send to the public.”

Chavez suggested the bias language could have more insidious effects as well, undercutting confidence in the board’s capacity to do its work. 

“I do feel very strongly that we’re getting off on the wrong foot if the public already has grave concerns about whether we can trust even the appointment process to the new board,” he said. 

Silverman expressed a similar fear, arguing that the way in which the city and the courts handled the final months of the process to finalize its plan for the board created a rift. The Portland Police Association briefly attempted to get a measure on the November ballot curtailing the board’s power before abandoning that effort in July. 

“The process was so very open and democratic and representative over multiple years to shape what the community wanted to see and then was subverted pretty much by City Council and the PPA,” he said. “As we’re trying to get towards a better situation between the Portland Police Bureau, the city, and the community, this fails, in my humble opinion, a trust factor.”

Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch, who has years of experience as a police accountability activist in Portland under his belt, said the legal weight of the ballot measure that created the accountability board makes this effort more substantial than those that have come before.

“It’s written into the city charter, which can only be changed by a vote of the people, that there's going to be community members on the board and they're going to adjudicate the cases of deadly force and other serious cases that are listed,” Handelman said. “That would be an extraordinary leap forward.”

Despite that, Handelman said, the city hasn’t shown that it’s committed to ensuring this board will have more teeth than previous efforts at community oversight. 

“They looked at it and said, ‘where are there loopholes where we can stick police back into this?’” Handelman said. “They’re doing everything they can to try to whittle away at the good that could be done by the way the charter reform was written.”

The role of city council members in appointing the nominating committee means that the November election of the new council will likely have an outsize role in determining the political bent of the board. For Chavez, it’s a critical moment for the long-term success of the project.

“If we’re not linking these community boards to actual action and consequence in the bureau, people will lose confidence in it very quickly—and we're back to square one,” Chavez said.