More than 100 times each year, Portland police label someone a "criminal gang affiliate."

Without a conviction, without an arrest, police can add a flag in their database, putting the person on what amounts to a secret suspects list.

The Oregonian/OregonLive last month received a modified version of the controversial gang list, minus the names, along with letters appealing designations going back to 2012. The Portland Police Bureau tried to keep the records from being released until a reporter appealed to the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office.

The data, while limited in scope, makes possible the first independent look at gang designations in Portland since a federal lawsuit forced the city to enact restrictions on the practice two decades ago.

Critics charge that police use the list to boost surveillance of young men of color based mostly on the social networks they were born into. They say close monitoring of any teenager is likely to turn up some kind of bad behavior, and that disproportionate monitoring of black teens helps ensure they are prosecuted criminally at high rates.

Of the 359 "criminal gang affiliates" flagged in Portland's database as of August, 81 percent were part of a racial or ethnic minority, an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive shows. By far the largest block -- 64 percent -- was black, compared with just 7.5 percent of the city's population who are black or black and some other race.

C.J. Robbins, the program coordinator for Black Male Achievement, an organization that has been working to make changes to city policy on gang labels, said he suspected African Americans were overrepresented. But even he was surprised when presented with the data.

"It's shocking," Robbins said.

Portland's policy doesn't say you have to be a gang member to make the list. It uses the term "gang affiliation." But Capt. Mike Krantz, who led the police bureau's Gang Enforcement Team for three years before a recent promotion, said that in practice the words have the same meaning.

Letters from the list

The Oregonian/OregonLive explores what it's like to be on the list of people Portland police have labeled gang members -- and what it's like to try to get off it.

Read the full series.

Officers must cite clear and convincing evidence of connections to a criminal gang in the past three years. Police can add someone to the list if the person asserts gang membership, participates in a gang initiation ritual, commits a gang-related crime, or displays two or more observable signs of gang membership.

Police say gang designations keep patrol officers safer because when they run a driver's name, a gang flag signals they should use caution. Police also say tracking gang members is important to solving gang shootings, a crime for which finding witnesses is notoriously hard without good intelligence. Gang officers say the demographics of the list reflect the people involved in those shootings.

"We aren't making the situation, we're just responding to it," Krantz said.

The documents analyzed by The Oregonian/OregonLive include letters that people wrote to police to challenge a pending gang designation and memos in which Gang Enforcement Team supervisors summarized their conclusions after an appeal hearing.

The documents show:

People who challenge a gang designation are more likely than not to prevail. Since 2012, 21 of the 37 people who appealed their designations avoided being listed. The reversals followed a hearing in front of a gang team supervisor or subsequent appeal to a panel of community members.

Police rarely cite a gang-related crime to justify designating someone a gang member. Officers are more likely to rely on visible signs (gang tattoos, clothing or jewelry) or behavior (posing in photographs with people flashing gang signs; demonstrating knowledge of a gang's "history, leadership, activities or rituals").

Almost every time police label someone a gang member, they say the person admitted it. Police cited an admission or assertion in about 9 out of 10 cases. It was cited as the sole justification in about a quarter of all cases. Several people who challenged a gang designation said they only told police about long-ago gang ties. One man wrote on top of a hearing-request form, "I have not been around gangs for more than 17 years."

Lies can land people on the list. In three appeals since 2012, a gang supervisor agreed that the person had lied when claiming to be part of a gang. Two other people appealed successfully by saying someone else had impersonated them when contacted by the police.

The Oregonian/OregonLive did not have access to officers' write-ups of the evidence they used when deciding to name someone to the list. Portland officials wanted to charge $15,255.69 for those records.

Chances are, not everyone finds out they've been listed.

The bureau sends letters to anyone it proposes to designate a gang member. But the letters aren't sent by certified mail to establish someone received them.

Krantz said if you want to know if you're on Portland's gang list, you can present your ID at the police bureau's North Precinct office and an officer will tell you.

Leaders in Portland's African American community doubt the short-term gains that investigators get outweigh the resentment the list feeds.

Activists say eliminating or changing the list probably won't end racial profiling of black people in Portland. But they say police stigmatize an entire community by operating as though "gang member," "young black man" and "criminal" are interchangeable.

Keeping the list can solidify gang ties, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Dontae Blake, now 42, said that in the 1990s he considered being designated a gang member a badge of honor. "At least I was something," Blake said. "At least I was on some kind of list."

For people trying to separate themselves from a gang and move on, the label and the police scrutiny that comes with it can reinforce inertia.

That's something Anthony Washington, 42, has seen among Portlanders drawn into gangs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as he was.

"It makes it harder to get out of the quicksand," he said.

Learning to care for pit bulls helped Washington heal the trauma that he says pushed him toward gangs. He now introduces the next generation of boys who may be tempted by gang life to dogs in hopes they will get the same benefit.

Washington takes the boys to dog shows, where they might see their name on the winners' list.

Coming up: Origins of the list

-- Carli Brosseau

cbrosseau@oregonian.com

503-294-5121; @carlibrosseau