“I know people are exasperated because you’ve been working on this
for decades,” said City Commissioner Amanda Fritz to an audience of 40
at a Northeast Portland church last weekend. “But with your continued
participation—despite having been through this over and over
again—this might just be the round where you get what you
want.”
Fritz was addressing a skeptical, predominantly African American
audience on Saturday, February 21, at a meeting organized by Oregon
Action to discuss racial profiling by Portland’s police. The meeting
took place at the end of a week in which Police Chief Rosie Sizer
released the police bureau’s plan to address the issue—a plan
that’s over two years late.
Originally promised by Sizer no later than January 2007, the new
plan contains big wins for racial justice advocates. For example: The
police bureau is now aiming to increase the number of minority and
female officers hired in 2009 by 10 percent. Also, officers will be
required to give out business cards whenever they stop a driver or
pedestrian—a measure that aims to reduce allegations of
harassment. In addition, Sizer wants her officers to continue building
better relationships with the people they serve, through a new subgroup
of the city’s human relations committee.
This subcommittee had its second meeting on Wednesday, February 18,
to finalize its mission statement and discuss the recruitment of new
members. Also last week, the city’s Independent Police Review released
a report on “bias-based policing” written by its Citizen Review
Committee (CRC), which pushed the police bureau to improve its
“customer service ethic” in minority communities.
Yet despite the flurry of city attention given to racial profiling
last week, many of those present at Fritz’s community meeting felt the
city has been playing a “shell game” on the issue since the election of
a new council last November.
“I think many of us are tired of the constant rhetoric, and the
constant creation of committees,” said one community member, who
preferred to remain anonymous.
“My concern now is that there seems to be a fragmentation of the
effort,” said Jo Ann Bowman, executive director of Oregon Action, after
hearing Fritz speak. “You’ve got one commissioner [Fritz] who’s in
charge of human relations, another commissioner in charge of the police
bureau [Dan Saltzman], and then the police chief, and then the mayor.
You’ve got a lot of powers-that-be that have a stake in this, but
there’s no one forum that shapes the direction of that effort.”
Bowman served on former Mayor Tom Potter’s racial profiling
committee from January 2007 until it was disbanded, late last year. She
feels that without the committee to push the effort forward, there
isn’t enough pressure on city council to take responsibility for
solving the problem.
Or as Fritz put it at the community meeting: “I’m not in charge of
the police bureau, I’m in charge of the office of human relations.
“We have a five-member council, which ultimately means it’s
difficult to know who’s responsible for what,” she continued.
Bowman is also disappointed that Sizer’s plan continues to resist
identifying individual officers—even though anecdotal evidence
suggests that some bad apple officers may be contributing more to the
problem of racial profiling than most of their coworkers.
“A reviewer noted that five of the 30 cases he reviewed named the
same officer,” says the CRC report on the handling of complaints about
bias-based policing.
There were no representatives of the police bureau present at the
meeting, and Chief Sizer declined comment for this article.
Perhaps most frustrating of all for community members like Veronica
Clark and Jarrod Akles, who were at the meeting with Fritz, is that
despite the city’s efforts they continue to experience profiling.
Akles, who is African American, and Clark, who is white, told the
audience they were profiled together by a cop at a MAX stop on February
3. The officer allegedly detained the pair without probable cause for
several minutes, saying it looked like they were carrying out a “drug
transaction.”
“I was digging in my briefcase to give [Clark] some money and her
homework,” said Akles. “When he realized we had done nothing wrong, the
officer should have given us his card and moved on, but he kept trying
to get an emotional reaction from me, to get me to do something
criminal so that he could justify the stop.”
A week earlier, Akles told the Mercury, he was stopped by
another officer in East Portland and given a ticket for jaywalking. The
officer allegedly told him that because he was wearing a red jacket, he
“fit the profile for the neighborhood.”
Funny how you never hear complaints that police unfairly target and “profile” males.
Well, it’s because victims of crimes tend to describe their assailants as male rather than female.
Same goes for victims of crimes as it refers to black males. Crime victims, who’d have no incentive to finger the wrong person because of color (i.e., it makes sense to actually describe the person who assaulted you, because it’s more likely they won’t have an alibi), describe their assailants as black in proportions way beyond blacks’ percentage of the population.
So why is this cause for outrage? Or why is no one outraged that police are more likely to stop males in general?
Well lets get one thing straight: ALL PIGS ARE LOW-DOWN. Always have been, always will be. Pigs are universally known for being low-down [in general] & often racist & sexist. PPB is no exception to that.
Very typical & predictable how Chief Rosie Sizer was too damned cowardly to so-much as provide a brief comment for this artical. The fact that NO reps from PPB are willing to attend these meetings proves just how cowardly they all are, & how they all refuse to be held accountable for their actions.
Regarding Jarrod Akles’ account, i’ve had an almost identical experience. In Sept. 2007 i was stopped by 3 bike pigs after crossing W Burnside. This, after they were already tailing me for a block (i reckon they would’ve followed my Black ass all over downtown determend to “catch” me on something, anything.) Only real difference b/t mine & Akles’ case is that, i was dressed in BLACK, not red clothes. According to this, i was [apparently] part of some criminal “anarchist” gang bend on “causing chaos” (their exact words) through-out the city. I was cited for “jay-walking” too, & on this bases Multnomah Co. EXTORTED $75 from me in March 2008.
But that’s alright though, because i paid ’em alright… in pennies. It took the clerks in the collections/extortions room at the courthouse 2 1/2 hours to count every single one, too. Mr.Jarrod Akles, if it comes down to you having to pay for crossing a goddamn street, i strongly urge YOU to do the same thing! Pennies are LEGAL FEDERAL TENDER, so they MUST accept pennies as payment.
I completely agree with Ramblow.
The experience Akles and Clark give has nothing to do with racial profiling. First of all, if the officer is investigating what he/she believes to be a drug transaction, no probable cause is needed to detain or stop them. Only reasonable suspicion is needed. Given there is a high level of vice activity along the MAX lines, it is not unreasonable to think that two people handing things back and forth, including money, may be a drug transaction. If you want to bring race into this example then I will tell you that the majority of street level drug dealers are black. This is a fact. If race did play a part in the officer’s decision to investigate what he/she saw then it was not the only factor. Police can’t stop people “for no reason” and they can’t and don’t stop people just because of their skin color. There is always something else. If black people want to blame someone for being stopped by the police, maybe they should look within their own community at the people who are out committing the crimes in much higher numbers than their percentage of the population.
Addressing an issue where there is none, as this “racial profiling effort” seems to do, does nothing to address the issue of the high percentage of crime committed by blacks. It instead shifts blame to the police for doing pro-active police work. This is going to create a police department much like the fire department. You will see fewer and fewer police on the street because they will be sitting at a precinct waiting for a call instead of driving around talking to people in the community, helping people solve problems, and addressing crime and livibility issues. Criminals will be free to roam the streets without the fear of being stopped by police. When you are the victim of a crime, it’ll take longer for police to get there because they are no longer just around the corner watching the drug house so many people have complained about. I am an example of this kind of officer. I used to do pro-active police work. I used to make arrests of drug dealers, pimps, car prowlers, burglars, etc. A lot of times I would recover stolen property for victims of these crimes or I would get information on where I cold find the property. Most of the time when I arrested a white person for any of these things they made no attempts to shift blame. They would often tell me they were out committing crimes for one reason or another and they would sometimes even thank me for stopping them. More often than not when I would stop and/or arrest a member of a minority community, particularly a member of the black community, I would be accused of being racist followed by several angry racist insults, “Peckerwood”, “Cracker” and “Faggot” were all very common. So, I’m the racist? Given my experience I see it the other way around.
Some of these people involved in criminal activity tried to shift the blame even further by filing formal complaints, accusing me a stopping them only because they were a certain race. This prompted IA investigations, all of which found the complainants to have no credibility. After several of these experiences I decided it was no longer in my best interest to do police work beyond what is expected. I no longer stop people. I take my calls and that’s it. All because of this. I now see it as just a job. I can’t afford to put myself in positions where I may be accused of this garbage. I get paid the same whether or not I’m out catching criminals who have made victims of honest, hard working people. Whether or not I catch the guy who is on his way to steal your car or rob the convenience store down the street. Whether or not I’m out looking for the gang bangers who just shot up the house down the street. According to my department the only thing I’m required to do is take the calls I’m given over the radio. Until they stop pandering to people like Jo Ann Bowman that is all I will do.
>>> Cop
Clearly not a “cop”, but definately a racist.
A few years ago, 2006, in the Rap Sheet, a Portland Police Bureau newsletter, a police officer responded in an editorial what he thought about racial profiling. He simply said, we don’t profile, it’s just blacks and hispanics commit all the crime.
This myopic view is shared by many officers, including “Cop” above. Do you seriously think that if two white guys in suits were exchanging business cards on the MAX they would be stopped? No way. Akles was stopped because he was black and looked like a drug dealer, to the racist officer.
btw Cop, the scenario you described is not reasonable suspicion, no Judge in Multnomah County would find those facts to be r/s. Your colleague assumed it was a crack deal because of race, maybe because the way the guy was dressed. You need a bit more than that for r/s.
Of course, PPB can continue to engage in “mere conversation” and terrorize innocent minorities as a whole to root out the few offenders they do blindly find…I’m sure they don’t mind.