Police Commissioner Dan Saltzman has responded to the Grand Jury’s letter about the Aaron Campbell shooting, released yesterday. He wants to review police interactions with people in mental health crisis, and specifically, wants to ask city council for money in the spring budget to fund mental health workers to respond to mental health crisis calls in tandem:
Dear Grand Jury members,
Thank you for your letter regarding the Portland police’s shooting of Aaron Campbell and for your support for a transcript of your proceedings to be made public.
Your letter raises significant concerns which I share about the performance and training of the Portland Police Bureau in regard to Aaron Campbell’s death. I want to ensure you that I am taking immediate action so that the Portland Police bureau learns and improves its service to our community as a result of this tragic death.
To this end, I have directed Chief Sizer—utilizing outside experts—to conduct a full and complete evaluation of the police bureau’s tactical training with high-risk and mentally ill individuals. This review will address communication issues that you identified, and also go further to look at how our officers are trained to handle these delicate situations. The police bureau needs to make the best decisions it can to deal with a high-risk individual in mental crisis.
Further, I am directing that the bureau immediately undertake the development of a program to partner mental health workers and police officers to respond to crisis calls in tandem. This program development will be overseen by mental health experts and advisers, and I will be asking Council to support a budget request for this program. I believe the implementation of this collaborative approach to police interaction with individuals in crisis can save lives.
Thank you again for your service on the grand jury and for your thoughtful letter and suggestions.
Sincerely,
Dan Saltzman.
Download a pdf of the letter here.
The budget request could be tricky, of course. Council already wants to pull $20million from Saltzman’s Bureau of Environmental Services to fund the city’s bike master plan, which was passed unanimously yesterday. Let’s hope Mayor Sam Adams—who has remained disengaged on this process—emerges committed to allocating money to this cause as well.
While I very much support this…
The problem HERE, the reason this made the news at all, is a trigger happy cop with a communication problem. If Mr Campbell hadn’t been killed, if the K-9 unit had taken the him down and he’d been hauled off to MJC, we never would have heard about it.
I send an email to Sizer and Saltman every month, reminding them that the community does not forget. Tonight’s?
Dear Commissioner Saltzman,
It’s an interesting idea you have, to bring mental health specialists to the scene of any relevant confrontations.
I think it will cost a lot of money and time to implement this.
I have an idea: how about teaching your officers, who will be there already with no further cost of money or time, to be humane? How about they stop using deadly force? If they weren’t so indoctrinated in the Us Against Them mentality, if they could see people in trouble — or even CRIMINALS — as fellow humans, maybe they would stop choking, shooting, or beating these people to death.
How ’bout you try that.
Two bad ideas served to evade responsibility and accountability.
A. Asking for another outside consultant accepts current leadership is incapable of understanding the problem.
B. We have Crisis Intervention Team training, now unfunded, and Project Respond, substantially unfunded, and a dozen local agencies with integrated MH and CD professionals embedded with various parts of the police and criminal justice infrastructure, all already underfunded. Adding more layers is stupid; pimping a crisis. Fund and manage what you have got.