Elliott Young

Young is a member of the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing and a professor of history at Lewis & Clark College.

More than seven years after the city of Portland committed to enacting dozens of police reforms in a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, the city still has work to do to satisfy the federal judge overseeing the case.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon refused to approve amendments to the agreement, citing the inadequacy of the new Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing, which is intended to provide community oversight of police. As a member of the committee, I have to agree with Judge Simon that there is a long way to go. But the issue is less failings with the committee than the fact that the agreement does not mandate any specific outcomes.

We can check off every paragraph of the agreement and conclude the city is in “substantial compliance,” yet policing on the street still seems as questionable as ever. The agreement is focused on having the city and the Portland Police Bureau do trainings and set up procedures for oversight. But there is not one paragraph that dictates benchmarks for the city to meet. In fact, Dennis Rosenbaum, the compliance officer overseeing the agreement for Portland, admitted at a public forum in September that outcomes were not part of his analysis.

The record on outcomes is mixed at best. The DOJ points to a 24% decrease in use-of-force incidents as evidence of success. However, Portland Police Bureau’s own data suggests no such thing. Since consistent data began being reported in September 2017 through September 2019, “applications of force” — which can be several strikes on the same person — have risen and declined, but there has been no significant reduction in the average over these two years.

The demographics of the people who have been subject to that force are disproportionately black, homeless and those in a mental health crisis. For the past two years, half of use-of-force incidents involved people who are homeless, even though they make up just 3% of the populace. People suffering from mental illness were subject to 15%, and black people accounted for 28% of such encounters with the police, again wildly disproportionate to their representation in the city. Over the past two years use-of-force against homeless people has spiked and fallen, but again there is no clear downward trendline.

It is important to remember that the settlement was created because Portland’s policing of people with mental illness was found by the DOJ to be unconstitutional. The fact that 60% of the people killed by police in Portland in 2019 were in a mental health crisis suggests that while the Portland Police Bureau has implemented training programs, it continues to kill a disproportionate number of people with mental illness.

The story from Portland police’s traffic stops data is equally disturbing. The latest data shows that black drivers and pedestrians are stopped by Portland Police officers at three times their rate in the general population. The disproportionate targeting of black people by police can be seen in every report issued since 2013.

The recent revelations about the involvement by Portland police with the unconstitutional racist harassment of Michael Fesser in West Linn suggests that the problem is much deeper than we may have been led to believe. If the police are supposed to have mechanisms in place for oversight and accountability, why did it take two years, and only after a successful civil lawsuit, for the Portland police to investigate this incident?

At the hearing in front of Judge Simon, Rev. LeRoy Haynes from the Albina Ministerial Alliance said it best: “We have made some substantial quantitative progress, but we are far from achieving the intent of the settlement agreement.’’ In our own statement to the court, the community-oversight committee concluded “there is a still a long way to go to fulfill the spirit of the agreement.”

To achieve real change in policing in the city, the DOJ and the city should establish benchmarks for substantive outcomes. Portlanders want nondiscriminatory policing and fewer violent interactions with the public, not just more trainings and public meetings.