Portland’s mayor has selected the National Police Foundation to investigate whether Portland police have acted with bias before and during demonstrations involving right-wing and anti-fascist protesters.

Mayor Ted Wheeler, after consulting with former FBI agent Michael German, picked the foundation for a $200,000 contract to do the independent inquiry. The money comes from the Police Bureau’s budget.

Work is expected to start this week, according to the mayor’s office.

The foundation, according to its website, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the policing profession.

The mayor, who serves as the city’s police commissioner, earlier this year called for the investigation after the release of hundreds of text messages and emails between the bureau’s crowd control liaison, Lt. Jeff Niiya, and Joey Gibson, leader of the right-wing Patriot Prayer group.

The communications sparked outrage among some community members, who said the lieutenant’s friendly banter with Gibson was evidence that officers have protected right-wing protesters over counter-demonstrators, such as antifa. The mayor called the texts “disturbing’’ and said they crossed the boundaries of acceptable police work.

The city didn’t seek requests for proposals to do the investigation.

That "would have been much more involved and lengthier,” said Eileen Park, the mayor’s spokeswoman. "Given the public interest, the mayor wanted to move forward with the process as expeditiously as possible.”

Instead, the mayor reached out to the city attorney’s office to help identify the best experts to do the investigation. Tracy Reeve, the city attorney, spoke with several other city attorneys in Seattle, Minneapolis, and Charlottesville about their experiences with similar evaluations.

" Based on the information gathered, we concluded that overall the Police Foundation’s proposed team and work plan best met the city’s needs,'' Reeve said. The city attorney is finalizing the contract with the foundation.

The mayor shared the choice with other city councilors and they raised no concerns, she said.

The foundation has done similar work in the past and had the strongest team, Park said. The organization, for example, did assessments of the police response to August 2014 demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown and the 2017 white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The California-based Police Assessment Resource Center was the only other agency considered, according to the mayor’s office.

In a prior interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, German suggested an investigation should examine all police intelligence that Portland officers get on protesters from the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the state Department of Justice’s Oregon Terrorism Information Threat Assessment Network Fusion Center. The center monitors public safety threats, collects data and shares information with federal, state and local law enforcement.

It should examine videos of demonstrations, police reports, arrests, police communications with demonstrators and whether those are shared with supervisors, he said. German also recommended that it look into allegations that police worked with Patriot Prayer’s so-called “security” to help make arrests, as alleged during one protest.

While Niiya’s texts and email exchanges created an outcry, some outside policing experts and Niiya’s union president said they showed the lieutenant was simply following police policy on crowd control communications. He was helping the bureau get information about Patriot Prayer, they said, and sharing it with his command staff and the mayor’s senior adviser, as text messages showed. Other texts showed Niiya reaching out to counter-protesters, but many of them were reluctant to communicate with him and expressed distrust of police.

Rallies and marches by Gibson and his group have repeatedly devolved into bloody brawls between Patriot Prayer followers and counter-protesters.

A separate internal Police Bureau investigation is underway into Niiya’s communications with Gibson. Niiya has been restricted from communicating with Gibson or serving as a crowd control liaison for the bureau while the internal inquiry is underway. On April 18, Niiya was reassigned to serve as an inspector in the bureau’s Professional Standards Division.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian

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