Portland’s Resistance’s Criminal Justice Reform Platform for the City of Portland

Photo via by Kristian Fodenvencil

Portland’s Resistance believes our criminal justice system must end its failed focus on “tough on crime,” hyper-punitive measures, and instead maintain public safety in ways that respects people’s rights, supports people’s health, rehabilitates people, and fortifies people’s relationships to their families and communities. Law enforcement should minimize harm, de-escalate conflict, be de-militarized, cage humans reluctantly and sparingly, and end policies and tactics that result in racially disproportionate outcomes.

The following demands focus on changes that can and should be made by the City of Portland. These are an excerpt from our full criminal justice reform platform which also calls for changes at the county and state level.

END WAR ON POOR

End Broken Windows Policing

Stop Criminalizing the Houseless

END WAR ON DRUGS

Decriminalize Drug Possession

Expand LEAD Program

Create Supervised Injection Site

STOP CRIMINALIZING SEX WORK

STRENGTHEN SANCTUARY

POLICE REFORM

Adopt and Expand Harm Reduction Policing

Redirect Resources Toward Solving Violent Crimes

Increase Transparency of Police Encounters

Abolish PPB Gang Database

End Violent Policing of Protests

Withdraw from the Joint Terrorism Task Force

End Police Secondary Employment Program

I. END THE WAR ON POOR

Photo via Oregon Live

1. END BROKEN WINDOWS POLICING

Stop arresting or citing people for low-level “broken windows” types of offenses like jaywalking, spitting in public, and failing to cross the street at a right angle. For many of these offenses the public-order benefit is minuscule, nevertheless, for people arrested and cited, the arrest or citation can cause significant hardship. For example, these arrests can have massive, destructive immigration consequences, as President Trump’s policies make non-citizens arrested for even the most minor offenses a deportation priority. Additionally, there are mammoth racial disparities in enforcement of these laws. For example, in Portland, black people are charged at 27x the rate of white people for spitting, 8x the rate of white people for jaywalking, and 15x the rate of white people for failure to cross the street at a right-angle. Furthermore, stops for these petty offenses may lead to additional charges for disorderly conduct, interfering with a peace officer, and resisting arrest – incidents which would not have occurred but for the initial unnecessary stop. Decriminalizing “broken windows” offenses is increasingly urgent given recent revelations about the “routinized force” and shocking depravity that occurs at our local jail. One psychiatrist described what goes on there as “torturing very sick people.”

End “broken windows” policing by adopting following policies:

The Portland Police Bureau shall not use any funding or other resources to enforce “broken windows” offenses. The offenses should include, but not be limited to, the following:

Failure to Obey a Traffic Control Device (ORS 814.020), Improper Position Upon or Improperly Proceeding Along Highway (ORS 814.070), Must Use Crosswalks (City Code 16.70.210), Must Cross at Right Angle (City Code 16.70.220), Violation of Bicycle Equipment Requirements (ORS 815.280), Spitting in Public Places (City Code 8.36.080), and Failing to Obey a Police Officer (ORS 811.535) when these offenses are the only basis to stop a person.

Disorderly Conduct in the Second Degree (ORS 166.025), Interfering with a Peace Officer (ORS 162.247), Resisting Arrest (ORS 162.315), Interfering with Public Transportation (ORS 166.116), and Offensive Littering (ORS 164.805) when these offenses are the only basis for arrest.

2. STOP CRIMINALIZING THE HOUSELESS

Stop arresting or citing houseless people for offenses related to their poverty and houselessness and for doing things that a houseless person might reasonably do outside. For example, houseless people should not be arrested or cited for erecting a structure (i.e. camping) or public indecency (i.e. urinating in public). The city should cease engaging in periodic sweeps of houseless people, upsetting their lives and possessions, merely to displace them to a new location and begin the pattern again. (This is a particularly cruel policy in light of Portland’s self-declared “housing emergency.”) In all instances, police should treat houseless people as people, and not as an inconvenience, social problem, or lesser being worthy of contempt or disparagement. In rare situations where police seize or impound the property of houseless people, that property should be treated carefully and with respect; what might look like “junk” to an officer may be important to the houseless person. Finally, when interacting with houseless individuals, police officers should provide referrals to social services in appropriate circumstances.

Stop criminalizing the houseless by adopting the following policies:

The Portland Police Bureau shall not use any funds or other resources for arresting or citing houseless people for offenses related to their poverty and houselessness and for doing things that a houseless person might reasonably do outside.

Police shall provide houseless people with referrals to social services.

The city shall expand facilities available to the houseless (restrooms, laundry, showers, etc.) with no or minimal restrictions.

The city shall fund one public defender position to assist people who are at risk of being evicted and to assist the houseless in their interactions with the police. (For example, assisting the houseless get their property returned after the police have seized it).

II. END WAR ON DRUGS

1. DECRIMINALIZE DRUG POSSESSION

Stop arresting or citing people for mere drug possession. Drug use and drug addiction are health issues; involvement with the criminal justice system destabilizes people’s lives and often makes it more difficult for people to usefully address those issues. Furthermore, in Portland, drug possession laws are enforced in ways that have wildly disparate racial impacts. For example, though studies suggest black people and white people use cocaine at roughly equal rates, in Portland, black people are arrested for low-level cocaine offenses at 30 times the rate of white people. Note that Portland’s new Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program (LEAD), discussed further below, is not, by itself, a sufficient response to the needless involvement of the criminal justice system with people who police encounter possessing drugs. If police witness people possessing drugs, any referral for services should be instead of arrest rather than subsequent to it. Furthermore, the city should cease all arrests and citations for drug residue. If police encounter people with residue, either ignore it or seize the residue/paraphernalia. No other police involvement is necessary.

Decriminalize drug possession by adopting the following policy:

The Portland Police Bureau shall not use any funding or other resources for arresting or citing people for simply possessing drugs (including drug residue).

2. EXPAND LEAD PROGRAM

Expand the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program so that no one who possesses drugs for personal use or for low-level sale to support their habit goes to jail.

City and Multnomah County leaders recently launched the LEAD program in Portland, but the devil will be in the details regarding how it is implemented, and there are already indications that it will divert too few people. The list of reasons people can be excluded from LEAD is needlessly over-broad (see page 4). Most critically, any person arrested outside of downtown Portland (including Old Town/Chinatown) or the Lloyd District is not eligible for LEAD. Additionally, people are excluded from LEAD if they are arrested for a commercial drug offense. People are also excluded from LEAD if they having a pending case eligible for, or in, a Multnomah County Speciality Court. Furthermore, people are excluded from LEAD if they are on post-prison supervision, parole, formal probation or misdemeanor bench probation for a person offense. Given the significant categories of people excluded, one might wonder whether LEAD is intended more for public relations than to step back from the disastrous War on Drugs.

Expand the LEAD program by adopting the following policies:

End the geographic limitations, and allow individuals arrested anywhere within the city limits of Portland to participate in the LEAD program.

Allow individuals to participate in the LEAD program who have been arrested for delivery of a controlled substance when they have less than 5 grams of heroin, less than 10 grams of cocaine, and less than 10 grams of methamphetamine in their possession at the time of arrest.

Allow individuals to participate in LEAD if they having a pending case eligible for, or in, a Multnomah County Speciality Court.

Allow individuals to participate in the LEAD program who are on post-prison supervision, parole, formal probation or misdemeanor bench probation for a person offense.

3. CREATE SUPERVISED INJECTION SITE

Open a supervised-injection site in Portland (or, more broadly, a supervised drug-use site) – a place where people can use drugs without fear of arrest and in the presence of medical staff who can administer care in the event of an overdose. The site would be administered by health officials with the understanding that drug possession within the site and the surrounding area would not be cited by law enforcement. Vancouver, Canada has created such a site, and it has engaged in thousands of overdose-interventions, likely saving hundreds or even thousands of lives and untold human potential. Seattle’s City Council recently voted to create such a site to address similar public health challenges. In addition, the site could offer drug treatment to those interested in receiving such treatment; indeed, evidence suggests that supervised-injection sites increase the number of drug users who seek treatment.

III. STOP CRIMINALIZING SEX WORK

Stop arresting adults for prostitution, solicitation, patronizing a prostitute, and other similar crimes. Currently, Portland Police Bureau engages in repeated stings and arrests hundreds of people a year for seeking to engage in sex with a consenting adult, often exploiting public concern about sex trafficking to build support for these efforts. These are needless arrests for consensual activity that both parties seek and that injures neither. Furthermore, the criminalization of these activities – not the activities themselves – makes participants less secure, as the criminalization makes it more complicated for participants to engage in background checks and to report any violence that may occur. In addition, there are dramatic racial disparities in Portland’s enforcement of laws related to sex work. For example, a 2017 analysis by the Portland Tribune revealed that in Portland, black people are four times more likely to be charged with prostitution-related offenses than white people. PPB’s recent focus on “demand-side” arrests of patrons of adult, consensual sex workers does nothing to cure these problems and does nothing to combat true sex trafficking.

Enforcement in this area of adult, consensual sex is a dramatic misallocation of resources that could and should instead be directed towards addressing actual sexual exploitation and violence. The same PPB that arrests hundreds for engaging in adult, consensual sex fails to adequately investigate or make an arrest in hundreds of actual rapes and has a massive backlog of untested rape kits – a backlog that PPB says likely contains the evidence to solve over 500 sex crimes.

The PPB should stop cynically stoking fears of sex trafficking to justify the arrest of adults who are engaged in consensual sex, and stop misleading the public by labelling as “sex trafficking,” stings in which arrests are exclusively or near-exclusively for adult, consensual sex. Instead, PPB should redirect resources from the misleadingly named “Sex Trafficking Unit” into promptly testing all rape kits and solving more rapes.

In addition, PPB should treat those engaged in sex work with compassion instead of as criminals, including treating the rare juvenile (or adult) trafficking victims as victims, not criminals.

Stop criminalizing sex work by adopting the following policies:

The Portland Police Bureau shall not use any funds or other resources for arresting or citing adults (both sex workers and clients) seeking to engage in consensual sex or who have engaged in consensual sex.

The term sex trafficking shall not be used to describe adults (both sex workers and clients) seeking to engage in consensual sex or who have engaged in consensual sex.

Direct the Portland Police Bureau’s Sex Trafficking Unit resources away from criminalizing adult consensual sex and towards rape investigations and other violent and abusive crimes.

Treat trafficking victims as victims and not criminals, and ensure that they have access to/referral to trauma-informed services to help prevent revictimization.

IV. STRENGTHEN SANCTUARY

Given the repeated violations of the state statute, Governor Brown’s Executive Order, and the Mayor’s regulations regarding disentanglement of our local law enforcement with federal immigration officers, it has become clear that sanctuary in Portland for non-citizens needs to be strengthened.

Strengthen sanctuary in Portland by adopting the following policies:

All communications between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and city employees shall be channeled through the mayor’s office. By doing this we can be assured that city employees are abiding by local laws as well as the US Constitution and we can make real the protections of our sanctuary city and state.

Policing of low-level “broken windows” offenses shall be dramatically curtailed so that non-citizens will be less vulnerable to ICE.

Failure to comply with the the City’s sanctuary policies should result in expedited and severe disciplinary action.

Mayor Wheeler should make a statement in support of Oregon House Bill 3095. This bill will reduce the maximum term of imprisonment for a Class A misdemeanor crime from one year to 364 days. A similar bill was passed in Washington state to reduce the immigration consequences of a misdemeanor conviction that has a suspended sentence of 365 days.

Strengthen City Council Sanctuary resolution to include clause calling for end to broken windows policing and removing clause that calls for adherence to federal statutes 8 U.S.C. §§ 1373 and 1644 that explicitly contradict ORS 181.20 and are unconstitutional. Instead, Portland should follow the lead of San Francisco and ask the courts to declare these federal statutes unconstitutional.

V. POLICE REFORM

In the event that various proposed police reform policies are subject to the Portland Police Association’s (PPA) collective bargaining agreement and the Mayor and City Council are not free to determine the policy, the city should pass resolutions recommending the reforms as city goals part of any future bargaining and noting for the public record that they do not believe they have the power to implement such a policy at the current time because of labor agreements with the PPA. These public interest changes should be prioritized in negotiations and promoted institutionally in hiring decisions, onboarding, ongoing training, promotions and discretionary benefits, performance evaluations, and disciplinary actions:

ADOPT AND EXPAND HARM REDUCTION POLICING

Photo via Oregon Live

Police should enter all interactions between police and the public using a harm-reduction model. Police should consider the costs of their intervention in people’s lives — including the costs to both the arrestee and to society-writ-large in trauma, jail time, money, court-dates, etc. Also, when they act, police should consider: Might their behavior escalate a situation? Might it destabilize or disrupt the lives of people whose lives are already difficult, complicated, delicate and trauma-infused? Might their behavior create harm to third parties? Are there less aggressive and less intrusive strategies they might use to address a situation? Does the situation require their involvement at all?

Adopt and expand harm reduction policing by enacting the following policies:

PPB shall enter all interactions with the public using a harm-reduction model.

End the mandatory booking policy for “non-person” misdemeanor offenses. Those should primarily be addressed via citations — as they once were in Portland — not arrest.

2. REDIRECT RESOURCES TOWARD SOLVING VIOLENT CRIMES

PPB should redirect resources towards apprehending people who commit violent crime, especially murders, rapes, and shootings. Currently, PPB spends vast resources on minor offenses that have little effect on public safety even as PPB fails to apprehend individuals who commit many of the city’s most violent offenses. This is a dramatic misallocation of resources and a fundamental misunderstanding of what public safety entails. In 2014, for example, the last year for which PPB released a statistical report, people reported 238 rapes to PPB, but PPB made just 36 rape arrests (a rate of just 15%). These statistics are no aberration. The year before, people reported 228 rapes to PPB, and PPB made just 32 rape arrests. Similarly, while much smaller in number, it is not unusual for PPB to leave willful homicides unsolved. More broadly, recent statistical reports suggest that in Portland, less than one-third of violent crimes (defined as homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) end in an arrest. PPB’s priority should be to apprehend people who have committed the most serious, violent crimes. Until PPB does a far better job apprehending those people, PPB’s policing of low-level offenses should be dramatically curtailed.

Redirect resources toward violent crime by adopting the following policy:

The Portland Police Bureau shall dramatically curtail the policing of low-level offenses and redirect these resources towards apprehending people who commit the most serious, violent crimes.

3. INCREASE TRANSPARENCY OF POLICE ENCOUNTERS

Essential to combatting unequal treatment in our criminal justice system is having the complete data about who police officers are interacting with and why. While PPB collects crime data and compiles monthly statistics which are made available to public, this data is limited to the case number, report date, neighborhood, classification of “crime against” (property, person, society), offense category, and offense type. Improved data collection and transparency policies are essential to community involvement in determining and prioritizing police reforms. PPB should adopt the best practices for collecting data of police encounters, such as those put forth by the Center for Popular Democracy and PolicyLink. Enhanced police transparency should not come at the expense of citizen privacy, so new these new policies must be enacted with safeguards to protect the identity and sensitive information of individuals interacting with the police.

Increase transparency of police encounters by adopting the following policies:

PPB shall collect data on both pedestrian/bicycle stops and traffic stops, as well as when the police are called to a location. This data shall include the type of offense reported, frisks, searches and whether contraband was found, use of force, and deaths.

PPB shall collect data on age, race/ethnicity, sex, and gender of individuals in police interactions as well as the date, time, location where the interaction took place.

PPB shall collect data on the outcome of each police encounter. This data shall include whether a citation was issued or an arrest was made, and whether there was a subsequent prosecution.

PPB shall identify individual officers involved in each encounter.

PPB shall make the collected data on arrests easily accessible to the public by publishing it on the PPB website in a machine-readable format no less than monthly. PPB shall protect the privacy of the individuals involved in police encounters when sharing police data. PPB policies will err on the side of public transparency.

4. ABOLISH PPB GANG DATABASE

Abolish Portland Police Bureau’s “gang-affiliate” database/list and disband its “Gang Enforcement Team.” It is racist – it targets young black and Latino people based on their peer groups and social networks. While many white Portlanders engage in similar behavior, 64% of the people in the database are black and 81% are racial minorities. It employs a form of guilt-by- association. One can get placed in the “gang” database for the clothing or jewelry one wears, having a tattoo, or knowing and hanging out in school with people who are allegedly engaged in gang activity. It is implemented recklessly. When those in the database challenge their designation as a gang-affiliate, they are more likely than not to prevail and show that they do not belong there. Furthermore, the gang database frequently traps people in their past and ignores the fact that people change; an old tattoo or long-past participation in a gang initiation does not mean one is currently (or has ever been) engaged in illegal or even gang-related activities. For those placed in the database – either “correctly” or incorrectly – the result can be a life of ongoing police harassment. It is also perpetuates racist notions about who commits crime in Portland. For example, Portland homicides are more commonly a result of domestic violence than gang activity.

PPB should stop shamefully trying to avoid public accountability for this racist program by stonewalling press efforts to obtain information about it, especially given the racist origins of the list and PPB’s history of using this program in an illegal manner. More fundamentally, the program should be disbanded. Its usefulness is suspect – as resources have been cut and as the number of people in the database has plummeted more than 87% (from 2800 alleged gang members to 359), the number of “gang-related” homicides has also plummeted. PPB should redirect the resources to solving homicides and shootings. If it remains concerned about violent, gang-related activity, the city should adopt and expand programs that use a community-based approach like Cure Violence/Violence Interrupters. These non-law-enforcement-centered approaches to gang violence have been shown to be extraordinarily effective at addressing gang-related violence.

Abolish the PPB gang database by adopting the following policies:

Abolish the Portland Police Bureau’s “gang-affiliate” database/list and disband its “Gang Enforcement Team.” Redirect the resources that were used for gang specific law enforcement to solving all homicides and shootings.

If the city remains concerned about violent, gang related activity, the city should adopt a non-carceral approach to gang violence.

Until the gang-database is dismantled, adopt meaningful appeal process with an independent attorney to assist in the process of challenging the designation.

5. END VIOLENT POLICING OF PROTESTS

Photo via Zachary Senn

PPB should dramatically rethink why and how it polices protests. Protests serve many important public purposes. They can be ways for people to register dissent to prevailing norms, to call attention to hidden-truths and normalized wrongs, to feel solidarity and forge connections, and to stimulate and inspire political action. They are also a vehicle for social progress; through protest, unpopular groups and radical ideas may find broader acceptance. The American protest tradition includes once-reviled and “extremist” groups like civil rights workers defying Jim Crow laws, labor activists fighting to unionize, suffragettes seeking the right to vote, LGBTQ activists demanding access to AIDS drugs, slavery abolitionists, and angry colonists seeking liberation from Great Britain. At the same time, protests – including unplanned and un-permitted ones – often may cause disruptions and inconvenience to other city-dwellers. That inconvenience is similar to the inconvenience the city experiences when other large public activities occur, like professional sporting events or the Rose Festival.

PPB needs to stop seeing protest primarily as an inconvenience – or worse, as a challenge or threat to their hegemony. Rather than ignoring or diffusing situations, too often PPB instigates and escalates. Even prior to any physical intervention, PPB’s use of warrior costumes and military-style equipment communicates a hostility to Portland citizens and their constitutional rights. PPB’s indiscriminate, violent responses to protests needlessly injures people – which is morally wrong and in the long run will cost the city huge sums of money in lawsuits. PPB actions are inconsistent with best practices, social-psychological research, and empirical evidence regarding crowd management which all suggest that militarized policing can inflame situations that might otherwise end peacefully. Furthermore, while we do not endorse or condone the destruction of private property, in the rare instances where such destruction occurs, PPB should to treat vandalism as the acts of individual people and not as something to be imputed onto protesters generally.

End the violent policing of protests by adopting the ACLU of Oregon’s policy recommendations regarding the policing of protests, as expressed in their February 15, 2017 letter to the mayor and police chief. Most importantly:

End the use of military tactics and equipment against protesters. This is our city, not a war zone. We are Portlanders, not enemy combatants.

Eliminate or greatly curtail the use of aggressive tactics such as containment, dispersal, and mass or selective arrests.

Revise the ambiguous and broad use of the term “peace and order” and similar language in the definitions and throughout directives on the policing of protests. These subjective and culturally-centric judgements are used as a pretext to harass lawful free speech.

Clarify in policy and practice that that the lack of a permit does not make a protest unlawful.

Stop illegal profiling of protesters and organizers in determination of whether a protest potentially poses a threat to the public health, safety, and welfare.

Under no circumstances should force be used by the police bureau against peaceful protesters.

6. WITHDRAWAL FROM THE JOINT TERRORISM TASK FORCE

Portland should reverse the closely divided City Council decision to rejoin the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Cities like San Francisco are ending their involvement in the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Joint Terrorism Task Force officers across the country have illegally surveilled and harassed activists while demonstrating no benefit to the communities they are supposed to be serving. Under the Trump administration this FBI department will be another avenue for federal values, that don’t match our local values, to be enforced.

7. END POLICE SECONDARY EMPLOYMENT PROGRAM

Rescind PPB directive 0210.70 regarding Secondary Employment. This directive allows for police employment contracts between the City of Portland and local businesses. For example, Target has hired Portland police officers to work as private security under a secondary employment contract. Recently, there have appeared to be PPB officers working as private security in uniform at the Apple Store and Nordstrom Rack in downtown Portland. Police should serve the community and not be able to be bought by those who have money. These types of cozy arrangements perpetuate the ideas that justice can be purchased and that there are two systems of criminal justice in our community, one for those with money, and one for everyone else. We believe in a criminal justice system committed to serving everyone equally and secondary employment programs degrade that ideal.