- denis c. theriault
- Police Chief Mike Reese, left, sits beside Officer Todd Engstrom.
A citizen panel has backed off from its insistence that Chief Mike Reese punish an officer who pepper-sprayed two homeless campers during a sweep under the Morrison Bridge last fall—accepting a compromise offer after both the chief and the cop in question, Todd Engstrom, testified last night at a special hearing.
The unanimous decision by the Citizen Review Committee, which handles appeals in police misconduct cases, still enshrines a new finding in the case: Reese, after initially exonerating Engstrom over his use of pepper-spray, offered instead to change that decision to “unproven” and give Engstrom a debriefing.
That’s still short of the the “sustained” finding the CRC sought in a 6-1 vote this summer. And, more importantly, it keeps alive a curious streak for the police bureau and the city’s accountability mechanisms. If both the CRC and Reese had held firm instead of meeting in the middle, Engstrom’s case could have been the first in recent memory to head to the full Portland City Council for adjudication.
Engstrom, a veteran cop, had already been found out of policy for escalating the confrontation beneath the Morrison Bridge. He grabbed a dog that had been loose, inciting the crowd. He even admitted, in his statements to internal affairs, that doing so wasn’t the best idea. But even though his actions raised temperatures, he argued he still acted correctly when settling things back down.
The CRC’s reversal centered on a shifting understanding of what Engstrom was thinking when, in the midst of that chaos, he first sprayed camper Angel Lopez and then, when she came toward Lopez, Lopez’s girlfriend.
Engstrom, in investigative materials, had said he sprayed the girlfriend because he thought she was trying to “un-arrest” Lopez. In August, the CRC members seized on his statement that he never announced his intent to arrest Lopez—meaning his girlfriend couldn’t have known she faced hot oil in her face if she tried grabbing onto him. But last night, after hearing to Reese and Engstrom both explain what happened in person, they were swayed that may not have been the case.
Both Reese and Engstrom said there wasn’t enough time to give a warning and that cops don’t have to announce arrests before they make them. Both also said it should have been obvious that Lopez would be arrested after he was pepper-sprayed. Engstrom said that, along with the way Lopez’s girlfriend had grabbed at Lopez, led him to reasonably believe she wasn’t trying to comfort her boyfriend but haul him ot of custody.
“I’ve seen people attempt this ‘un-arrest’ technique,” he said. “They teach other people that.”
That recap, coupled with Reese’s lament that neither Lopez nor his girlfriend gave statements, swayed CRC members to accept the chief’s offer of an “unproven” in the case. The CRC, by city code, may challenge discipline findings only if they think a finding couldn’t be arrived at based on a reasonable person’s reading of the facts.
“He can’t know what’s in her mind,” CRC chair Rodney Paris said at one point. “I don’t know that I care too much about her state of mind.”
Interestingly, though, Engstrom also personally defended his use of pepper-spray in the first place.
In August, a CRC member had questioned why he and he alone had thought Lopez—who’d swatted another cops arm away—needed to be sprayed in the first place. Engstrom said he “perceived” a shove and said Lopez had been inciting the crowd and needed to be quieted.
Engstrom also made sure to point out that he wouldn’t use pepper spray lightly—given that he was the bureau’s lead pepper spray trainer for years, is certified (as we reported in August) to teach other cops how to teach the use of pepper spray, and actually chose the bureau’s current type of pepper spray.
“It’s a very good tool,” he said.
That might have seemed like a good explanation. But Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch flipped Engstrom’s argument when addressing the CRC before its vote.
“Pepper spray is used very infrequently,” he said. “This is an officer who trains other officers in how to use it—and is probably more likely to use it than is maybe necessary. And he’s being paid by a pepper spray company….”
“Is it necessary to use that level of force on somebody who wouldn’t get off the sidewalk?”
That actually gets into the other reason this hearing was notable. Reese started his remarks defending his administration’s work with homeless Portlanders—stung by insinuations that it reflected an arrest-heavy approach to nuisance crime associated with people living on the streets.
“When homeless people get a lot of charges, like disorderly conduct, at some point when they want to get into housing, those arrests can be barriers to housing and employment,” he said last night. “We try to be judicious when we arrest people.”
He also made sure to say: “We try not to arrest people for low-level offenses.”
His defense, however, glides over one of the reasons cops had approached the campsite and the two people the sprayed, Angel Lopez and his girlfriend, early last October.
According to documents provided by the DA’s office for another Mercury story this year, Lopez was among a handful of campers mistakenly targeted for sidewalk violations under an enforcement policy that was supposed to address crimes like littering and public intoxication. In response to the Mercury‘s questions about that policy, the Chronic Offender Pilot Project, prosecutors admitted it had been incorrectly applied to sidewalk infractions and quietly let it sunset.
Engstrom, in fact, had several encounters with Lopez, according to the DA’s records, regularly warning over sidewalk violations and then arresting him on suspicion of interfering with a police officer. Engstrom said as much during the hearing, calling Lopez the leader of a group of insurgent campers—before saying, later, that he and Lopez are still on cordial terms and that he tried, in recent months, to help Lopez and his girlfriend obtain ID cards.
“After this, we’ve talked several times,” Engstrom said. “I probably see him every other month or so.”
Engstrom, however, let slip some of what he really thinks about some of the people he encounters so frequently. His voice dripped with mild disdain when he described the cat-and-mouse game with campers downtown, over several days that October, that led to the clash under the Morrison Bridge—describing slowly the “garbage, food, and urine” that had to be cleaned up at the same time as arrests were made.