[What follows is part two of a five-part series on the progress Portland has made on police reform over the past year. Read the rest here.—eds]
The beginning of last year’s protests coincided with City Council’s deliberations on the city budget, a vote that determines Portland Police Bureau’s (PPB) funding for the year. Of the nearly 800 people who signed up to testify on the city budget in June 2020, the majority of them echoed a request to cut the police bureau’s budget by $50 million. That request was the brainchild of two local social justice organizations, Unite Oregon and Imagine Black (previously the Portland African American Leadership Forum [PAALF]). The organizations envisioned that $50 million being reinvested into community programs to address systemic social issues which police are often called on to resolve.
Despite sustained pressure, City Council shaved a still-significant $15 million off of PPB’s proposed budget for the coming fiscal year, effectively ending three contentious PPB programs in the process: the Gun Violence Reduction Team (GVRT), the School Resource Officers (SRO) department, and PPB’s participation in TriMet’s transit police unit. The budget rerouted $4.8 million of PPB dollars to the Portland Street Response pilot, a program that sends trained mental health workers to respond to certain 911 calls instead of police. Wheeler said the budget reflected the call to “reimagine policing” heard by Portland activists.
“The reality is very clear, it’s unmistakable that many people in this community, they do not feel safe in the City of Portland,” said Wheeler at the time. “And that requires me, as the leader of this city, to fundamentally rethink what safety means in this community.”
Commissioners promised to continue slimming the police bureau later in the year, during the council’s fall budget monitoring process—an opportunity for commissioners to make minor adjustments to the budget passed earlier in the year. But by November, three out of five commissioners chose not to support an additional $18 million cut to the PPB, one that would have used police funding to support Portlanders financially burdened by COVID-19 and those living outside.
