“Say if I’m out on a call, I have my body camera on, and my body camera is recording the call,” said Daryl Turner, president of the Portland Police Association. “I go back to the precinct, I look at my body camera video to write my report, I get all the specifics I need. If I’ve viewed that to write my report, I can also view that prior to my internal affairs interview.”

Community members understandably find the new proposed policy outrageous. Giving cops the right to see the footage in advance of writing an incident report allows them to shape their story in a way that will make it much more difficult to identify lies and misrepresentations. They essentially get to shape their story to align with the available evidence whenever they want.

The police, of course, would have you believe there's nothing to see here. OPB reported that, “From Turner’s perspective, the fact that the city is agreeing to this isn’t that big a change. He said right now, officers can read over their written reports before talking to investigators.

Many outside of law enforcement disagree with Turner. From OPB:

“This is a 180 from what we do right now,” said Constantin Severe, who runs the city’s Independent Police Review division. He’s one of the people who interviews officers in misconduct cases. And he said reviewing body cam footage could taint an officer interview. “Officers are not allowed to review their video prior to an interview with IPR,” he said. “What we try to get down is what is an officer’s independent recollection of an event.”

The new contract hinders IPA's oversight even further, also. From Portland Mercury:

For Severe, a central problem with the draft policy is that it hamstrings the bureau from overseeing cops’ performance via video. The policy contains provisions that say supervisors and professional standards officers can’t look at video for a performance review or to discover policy violations, and that they may not “randomly” review recordings of any officer. “You’re not allowing the city to use this as a means of being proactive in looking at body-worn cameras and making sure these tools are measuring up,” Severe says. “Once you’re a year or two into using these body-worn cameras, how do they work? And are members using them appropriately? “I don’t really think this meets the public’s expectations.”

Hales' arrogance and brazen disrespect of anyone outside of himself and law enforcement seemingly knows no bounds. Not only did he leave out Wheeler, the City Council, and the community from contract discussions, he also left out Severe—despite the fact that the contract directly affects his office. From OPB:

He’s concerned that Hales didn’t vet the new labor deal with his office. “That the city would tie IPR without our feedback or consultation at all, I think it’s objectionable and it’s frankly abhorrent,” he said. Hales acknowledges he didn’t talk to IPR leaders during the negotiations. But he said that’s their fault. “They never walked down the hall. They never asked to be included,” he said. “Until it became a big political football in the last week or so.”

In other words: Yes, I was dishonorable and sneaky, but it’s not my fault because no one stopped me.

Also problematic about the body camera policy is who it conspicuously leaves out:

Under the policy, gang cops, transit cops, patrol officers, and others are all specifically required to wear body cameras. Left out? Cops working on the Special Emergency Reaction Team (SERT), Portland’s version of SWAT. That’s a problem for oversight advocates. Portland Copwatch’s Dan Handelman says the omission makes no sense, since such officers are “most likely as a unit to use implements of deadly force.” The ACLU of Oregon has argued the same thing. […] But Turner argues the rule makes sense, since the city doesn’t want to give up SERT’s tactical secrets. “They are highly trained individuals,” Turner said. “We wouldn’t want those things to be on camera.” […]

The Portland Mercury also notes that "the draft policy might also leave out the police bureau’s Crisis Negotiation Team, which sometimes joins the SERT in responding to highly charged scenarios. The policy’s wording is unclear."

Hales is constantly trying to provide even more protection to Portland law enforcement, despite their history of misconduct and racism.

In what is one of the most bizarre, embarrassing, and unethical stories of the year, Hales protected former Police Chief Larry O'Dea after O'Dea got drunk on a hunting trip and accidentally shot his friend in the back. From our coverage:

O'Dea was on a hunting trip in April when he pulled a Dick Cheney and shot his friend, 54-year-old Robert Dempsey, in the lower back. […] Also with the two was retired Portland Police Sgt. Steve Buchtel, a former firearms training instructor. Remarkably, O'Dea and Portland Mayor Charlie Hales managed to keep the whole incident under wraps for more than a month. Originally, the Harney County Sheriff's office had been told that the gunshot was self-inflicted—even though the 54-year-old victim was shot in the back. […]

O'Dea told the mayor what happened four days after the incident—yet neither bothered to correct the false information that had been given to the sheriff’s office. Ultimately, it wasn't until Willamette Week received a tip about the shooting that O'Dea and Hales came clean.

O'Dea just brazenly lied about what happened to local law enforcement. From The Oregonian:

O'Dea told the Harney County deputy that his friend may have accidentally shot himself while putting his pistol in his shoulder holster while they were shooting ground squirrels, sheriff's reports show. The deputy reported smelling alcohol on O'Dea's breath, his report said. O'Dea had told the deputy he didn't have his rifle in his hand at the time, but was reaching for a drink out of a cooler and heard his friend scream. But O'Dea sometime later called Dempsey to apologize for shooting him.

O'Dea later resigned.

The Portland Police Department has an extensive history of brutal and racist policing. Ready for this? One Police captain, Mark Kruger, has a documented decades-long history of behavior that clearly implies he’s a Nazi sympathizer.

The Oregonian reported that, between 1999 and 2001, Kruger nailed "memorial plaques of five Nazi soldiers to a tree on the east side of Rocky Butte Park sometime between 1999 and 2001. Kruger was a Portland officer at the time, but wasn't on duty when he erected the plaques as a shrine he called 'Ehrenbaum' or 'Honor Tree.’"

In 2010 when these accusations came to light, Kruger wasn’t fired. Instead, he got a two-week suspension and was reprimanded in a letter by the department. Bizarrely, Kruger sued the police department for slander—and WON. From a 2014 article in The Oregonian:

"[T]he city has agreed to pay Portland police Capt. Mark Kruger back for the 80-hour suspension without pay he received in 2010 after police internal affairs found he brought “discredit and disgrace upon the Bureau.' Kruger, through his attorney, argued that the city and the police bureau's Director of Services Mike Kuykendall slandered him in a series of text messages. Kuykendall repeatedly referred to Kruger as a Nazi in an exchange of texts with Lt. Kristy Galvan.[…] Kuykendall wrote in one that Kruger hasn't liked a book since he read "Mein Kamph,'' misspelling the name of Adolf Hitler's manifesto. [...] Under the settlement, […] The 2010 disciplinary letter, in which Reese had cited Kruger for bringing "discredit and disgrace upon the Bureau and the City,'' will be removed from Kruger's Police Bureau and human resources file.

Yes. The police paid him thousands of dollars to apologize for punishing him and retracted their criticisms of his behavior. His Nazi sympathizing behavior. This wasn’t even Kruger’s only Nazi incident. He was also accused by a former friend of driving around, "listening to Hitler speeches and yelling racist and homophobic statements at people" at various points during the 1980s, according to a 2014 article in Willamette Weekly.

Kruger "admitted to wearing Nazi uniforms, explaining that he is a history buff, but denie[d] ever engaging in racist activities or holding Nazi beliefs." But another former friend corroborated the accusers original statements—and provided video. He said that "he and Kruger spray-painted Nazi graffiti such as "Heil Hitler" and "SS Rules" on Rocky Butte. The graffiti, some of which appears on an old video documenting the spray-painting activities, remains there today."

Even Nazi sympathies aside, Kruger has been accused of some pretty awful stuff. In the early 2000s he pepper sprayed two different women, one protestor and one news camerawoman, on two separate occasions for no reason at all. The latter time it was caught on tape. Both times witnesses reported that he laughed as the women screamed in pain. And, in 2003, The Oregonian got a photo of him grabbing a protestor by the face and shoving her into a police van because she cursed at him.

Kruger's not the only police officer accused of racism and brutality. The entire department has a reputation for misconduct and prejudice. In fact, the Portland Police Department was even subject to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice regarding their unnecessary use of force. The Nation reports that "Portland is roughly 6 percent African-American, while just over 3 percent of the police force is. About 14 percent of the people pulled over in traffic stops are African-American, as are a quarter of people shot or shot at by police."

The police have a long history of using disproportionate force against people of color and the mentally ill. The Nation recalls the numerous stories, including "the schizophrenic who was beaten to death by officers; the suicidal young black man who was shot in the back after concerned relatives called the police; another young man in a mental health crisis who was shot to death after cops pulled him over for driving “like a gangster.”

The latter story is one covered just last month, as Cody Berne, one of the cops who shot and killed Keaton Otis in 2010, was recently hired to be a prosecutor in the Portland District Attorney's office.

Speaking of the prosecutor's office, District Attorney Rod Underhill also runs an office characterized by severity and oppression:

Berne’s hiring is even more proof that Underhill has only pretended to be a progressive prosecutor interested in reform. In actuality, he’s fallen into the same old patterns of over-criminalization, excessive prosecution, and cronyism. He has said he wants to fix wrongful convictions, but he lobbied against the state's post-conviction DNA testing bill. He's bragged about his progressive juvenile offender policies, but his county has the highest rate of juveniles charged as adults in the state—most of whom are black and Latino. Earlier this year, he charged four 15- and 16-year-old boys with six counts each of felony armed robbery, after another student said they tried to take his money in the hallway between classes. (The boys walked away empty-handed and said they were joking around.) Each boy was charged as an adult, and each armed robbery conviction would have meant a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison. […] Underhill has also charged people for nuisance crimes, such as illegal camping—essentially homelessness—and littering. In 2014, he charged a woman for "offensive littering" because she spit on the ground in front of a cop.

Portland law enforcement has gotten away with too much for too long. And now Mayor Charlie Hales is disgracing his already scuffed legacy even further by pushing a police contract that doesn’t hold them accountable for their behavior. Whether the contract will pass as it currently stands is unclear. But one thing is obvious: he hasn’t earned the right, and neither have they.