Eighteen Portland police reserve officers, including their commander, defected to the county sheriff’s office last summer when they couldn’t convince the bureau to provide them federal-mandated training given to all other bureau officers.

The volunteer officers – who complete a reserve academy, carry guns, wear the standard police uniform and can make arrests -- now back up Multnomah County deputies.

The switch came after Portland police in late November 2017 ordered the reserves off the street because their training didn’t meet the higher standard required by the city’s 2014 settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice over officers using excessive force against people with mental illness. It’s unclear why it took the Police Bureau until then to recognize that its reserve officers were out-of-compliance with the settlement agreement.

The bureau left the reserves in limbo for months without providing any new training program.

The U.S. Department of Justice also wasn’t informed that the reserve officers had been working without the necessary training until after the reserve unit disbanded, according to Kevin Sonoff, a spokesman for Oregon’s U.S. Attorney’s office.

“The Settlement Agreement does not require that the city volunteer when it believes it is not in compliance,’’ Sonoff said. “We do not know, in this situation, if the City believed it was not in compliance. That said, we have advised in our court-filed reports that the PPB Training Division should have an annual training plan that addresses all trainings.’’

The defection was first reported last week by Willamette Week.

The reserves needed to get up to speed on new use of force and deadly force policies, de-escalation tactics, crisis intervention and implicit bias instruction, among other training.

The bureau tanked an effective unit that helped out at a time when the bureau is struggling to fill vacancies and can’t hire recruits as fast as retirees head out the door, several former Portland reserves said. They stressed that the reserve officers have given thousands of hours to the bureau, and the only cost has been training and equipment.

“We asked for training all the time,’’ said Bob Ball, who was a Portland police reserve commander and now is a reserve for the Multnomah County Sheriffs Office. “Rather than doing the hard work and fixing it, they just chose to let it go. This was a failure of leadership from the Training Division head to the chief’s office to the mayor’s office.’’

The reserves often rode together in two-person patrol cars and assisted patrol officers on calls, usually providing backup or cover. They also helped at scenes of traffic collisions and staffed parade, Sunday Parkways and marathon routes.

Ball and former reserve Lt. Tim Bailey, who also went to the sheriff’s office, said they pressed for more training in meetings with then-Portland police Training Capt. Bob Day, who is now deputy chief, and then-Commander Steve Jones, who led the Professional Standards Division. Ball also met with staff from Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office.

“It really was very discouraging that the one thing that was always paramount to us, training, was the one thing that killed our program,’’ Bailey said. “Had we been incorporated into the training when the DOJ reforms were incorporated into training, this wouldn’t have happened.’’

Assistant Police Chief Chris Davis said the bureau estimated the reserve officers would need about 500 hours of additional training. Because many of the reserves hold full-time jobs elsewhere, the training likely would have had to occur every Saturday for at least a year, Davis said.

“The bottom line was to get them up to this level of training would have taken this huge investment,’’ said Assistant Police Chief Chris Davis. “We would have had to do most, if not all, of this catch-up reserve training on overtime.”

The training division had challenges figuring out how to fit in training for the police reserves while delivering the federal mandated training to the nearly 1,000 sworn officers on the force, and maintaining annual review training and an advanced academy for new police recruits, Davis said. It also was difficult to get reserves to attend training, he said.

Gary Moore, who served as a reserve officer for Portland police from 1996 until the summer of 2018, when he transferred to the sheriff’s office, said he responded to traffic crashes, shots-fired calls and made arrests for Portland police, usually working Friday night shifts. He also holds a full-time job as a service writer for an auto repair shop.

He said sometimes the Police Bureau would offer training at 8 a.m. on a weekday, when most reserves couldn’t attend. The unit offered to pay overtime to bureau instructors to train reserves at night or on weekends, Moore said.

Moore said he took a week off of work to get the needed 40 hours of crisis intervention training in Columbia County with other area officers only to learn that Portland wouldn’t accept the instruction under the new federal Justice Department standards.

Portland police policy requires the training division to annually update its training curriculum for all sworn officers, which includes reserves, who under state law are “peace officers,’’ although they’re not certified by the state Department of Public Safety Standards and Training.

The police reserves usually got training at their monthly Wednesday night meetings, and on some scheduled Saturdays, but bureau leaders were concerned the reserves’ lack of ongoing “practical applications’’ of the training created a liability for the bureau, according to bureau supervisors.

Police reserves said the training division lost records of the instruction they received, and on one occasion, bureau trainers stood reserves up at one of their scheduled firearms training and qualification sessions on a weeknight at the bureau’s training center.

Months after the unit was taken off the street, Ball wrote to Chief Danielle Outlaw in March 2018 that the reserve members were getting “restless’’ and starting to lose interest.

With no training plan in place, Ball spoke with Sheriff Mike Reese, a former Portland police chief, and Reese offered to adopt all the Portland reserves into the county office. The unit met with Reese one night at the Police Bureau’s North Precinct and then voted to leave Portland.

“When you go out and you work for nothing, the best thing is when you have a sergeant who tells you, ‘thank you.’ That’s what you’re working for,’’ Moore said.

While other Portland officers recognized their worth, Moore said he never got the same appreciation from the bureau’s “upper echelon.’’

Davis said he understands why the reserve officers decided to leave.

“I don’t have any ill will. I was sad to see them go,’’ Davis said. “When I found out about the training deficit, I knew we had a problem that we needed to correct. It certainly exposed the city to risk and didn’t frankly meet the community’s expectations.’’

Mayor Ted Wheeler, who serves as police commissioner, said he’s appreciative of the reserves’ volunteer service, but “it became apparent that the program was no longer feasible.’’ Reserve officers are only required to commit to 20 hours of monthly service, though he acknowledged many exceeded that.

“It was not reasonable to expect them to meet the onerous training and accountability systems applicable to full time’’ Portland police officers, nor was it reasonable to exempt them from those standards, said the mayor, in a statement issued by his spokeswoman Eileen Park.

Ball said Wheeler’s statement shows “he’s out of touch.’’

“It lacks a true understanding of the training we had and were willing to do,’’ Ball said.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian

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