While a teenage gunman shot three people at a street fair in Northeast Portland, less than a mile away a citizen oversight group was holding a town hall meeting on police reform.
It turns out the 16-year-old shooter and members of the police reform group have something in common: They all want respect.
The teenager was attending Last Thursday, a semi-organized arts festival held the last Thursday of each month from late spring to early fall on Alberta Street. At some point, somebody in the crowd looked at the young man in a way he didn’t like, and he pulled out a gun and started shooting.
He wounded two teenagers and an adult. All of this happened while members of a police reform board were holding a town hall meeting at the Cascade Campus of Portland Community College.
Rochelle Silver, a clinical psychologist and member of the board, wanted the first quarterly report on their progress to include a statement that the “community wants to feel respected by the police. … Respect is more than putting ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ in your sentence.”
Had she known about the shooting, and that police had labeled it gang-related, Silver and some of her fellow board members likely would have found the words “gang-related” to be racist and disrespectful. So would some of the handful of citizens who turned out to speak at this town hall.
“Cops are a gang,” Joe Walsh roared into a microphone. “They are the baddest gang in the neighborhood. They don’t answer to no one.”
Walsh, a City Hall activist, told the citizens’ group that they were going to fail.
“You have the police department sitting on your committee …,” he thundered. “Would you go to a bank robber and put him on a committee?”
Five of the 20 members of the police reform board are Portland police officers, however, they do not have voting privileges. For most of the almost three-hour meeting, the officers sat quietly. A few spoke but only briefly.
Police Capt. Vince Elmore said he agreed with Silver: “Youth tell us all the time they want to be respected.”
At the board’s first public hearing in April, police were sharply criticized for putting on what some called a PR show trying to demonstrate their efforts to reach out to the community.
There was none of that at this meeting. Here the non-police board members and people from the public dominated. They commented on Portland’s efforts so far to meet the requirements of a settlement agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the city. The agreement came after an investigation by the justice department found Portland police engaged in a practice of using excessive force against the mentally ill.
As part of the agreement, the City Council appointed this panel, formally called the Community Oversight Advisory Board (referred to as COAB) and hired Chicago-based consultants Rosenbaum & Watson to act as Compliance Officer and Community Liaison (referred to as COCL). The general public – busy with work and family – doesn’t know COAB from COCL.
The process started off wrapped in jargon (did you know that “parking lot” refers to future agenda items?). Rosenbaum & Watson hired former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul DeMuniz to work with the advisory board and chair its meetings.
DeMuniz resigned after the first meeting. Whatever his personal reasons for doing so, it was easy to understand why a former chief justice would not have wanted to subject himself to what the meetings have devolved into. Several members of the advisory board quickly turned the focus away from the mentally ill. The meetings turned into personal gripe sessions with board members and citizens complaining about problems they’ve had with the police, in some cases years ago.
Some of the gripes are undoubtedly justified, but unless each is objectively investigated it’s hard to tell if the complainant has a bias against police (especially if she’s a mother who thinks her son would never hurt anyone).
At the most recent meeting, DeMuniz’s replacement, Kathleen Saadat, formerly of Portland’s Office of Equity and Affirmative Action, tried to corral a handful of citizens who ignored her requests to limit their comments to four minutes.
After Walsh compared police to gangbangers and robbers, Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch took the microphone and launched into an attack against Rosenbaum & Watson’s first quarterly report, which noted that board members have been pressured by outside groups “to pursue an activist approach to police reform” instead of a collaborative partnership.
“Our organization is not going to be told how to organize or what strategy we can use …,” Handelman said. “We are going to push outside this room.”
When Saadat told him his time was up, Handelman told her he would continue because the agenda showed they were ahead of schedule. A few minutes later, she tried again.
“I’m going to call time on you,” she said.
“I have just one more,” Handelman replied, and off he went into a discussion of the broken window theory of policing (Portland Copwatch doesn’t support it).
As it is, the turnout at this meeting did not match expectations. It was held in a venue that could accommodate almost 200, but only about 50 people showed up. Some of those were city employees, and some were alternate members of the advisory board and some were regular board members who arrived late.
A vocal minority of citizens seem to hate the Portland police, perhaps for good reason. The media publicity they receive makes their numbers appear larger. It raises this question, though: If the police are as detested by the general public as much as their detractors say, why then, do so many political candidates in the city of Portland still seek police endorsements?
Many of the advisory board members were appointed because they are affiliated with a particular group. They focus on their group’s slice of the big picture, but police have to work within a very large landscape. Any individual can have the need to call police. Yet police reform in Portland is taking on a sectarian approach.
“I come from the population of mentally ill… ,” one woman in the audience reminded the board. “We are actually the aggrieved party in the settlement.”
Laquida Landford, who works at Central City Concern and has volunteered for the Ban the Box movement to aid convicted felons, serves as an alternate member on the advisory board. Yes, police put their life on the line, she acknowledged, but added: “That’s the job you signed up for.”
A woman in the audience who said she represented “people who don’t read well” said she shut down when she tried to read the 95-plus page quarterly report.
“In the future, is there a way to make a three- to five-page report that is friendly to the public? … It is overwhelming to go in somewhere and ask that your voice be heard, and then you get reports like this.”
Former State Sen. Avel Gordly, an advisory board member, offered this critique of the language in the report: “I would like to see the word ‘minority issues’ changed where appropriate to ‘racial and ethnic populations.'”
She also said there was a need for “culturally competent response” and using “culturally specific mental health providers” when responding to people having mental health crises.
Gordly did not indicate how this would work in practical terms. If a member of your family is having a mental crisis, and you call 9-1-1, will you be expected to answer questions about your culture? And then will the dispatcher have to locate an available responder that matched that culture?
The juxtaposition of a black teenager shooting two teenagers and an adult at a street fair while a town hall meeting is under way on police reform may likely be lost on this bunch – the COCL and the COAB, as they call themselves.
At the end of the meeting they voted to recommend that the City Council hire DHM, a Portland firm to conduct a community survey of what people think of the police. Based on a report by advisory board member Jimi Johnson, DHM includes a “woman of color who brings a strong cultural competency lens to her work.”
There was an earlier alternative – Portland State University. Several board members objected to PSU conducting the survey. Why the mistrust of PSU? I heard one explanation a couple of weeks ago while attending a special viewing of “Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse,” a film produced by the Mental Health Association of Portland.
Bud Feuless, who is a member of the advisory board on police reform, also watched the film and participated in a discussion later. (Feuless said his role on the advisory board is representing the transgender and suicidal.)
He mentioned that PSU had conducted a previous survey on the police, and the approval ratings seemed too high.
Is it a foregone conclusion that this new community survey will tell this advisory board what it wants to hear about police? Looks like it.
What the community survey will not reveal is to what degree problems with the police are related to anti-social behavior on the part of some people who think they deserve special protection by identifying with a particular group.
It isn’t just the police who need reforming.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
What a coincidence. One of the shooters is the grandson of a “community activist”/city employee and the son of a federal felon convicted of Racketeering.
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2015/06/teen_indicted_with_attempted_m.html
Mr. Walsh is partially right. The cops are OUR gang. Our as in the law abiding citizens who want to just go about our lives and let others do what they want. But they are incredibly accountable. They’re licensed by the state (DPSST), supervised by locally elected officials (many of whom seem to hold the cops in contempt).
And the upshot is this community-wide contempt/hatred is translating into a surge in street crime aimed, like a .40 Hi-point at poor communities of color….
http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon1222hm.html
Thanks for the city-journal link. Heather Mac Donald is an outstanding writer and thinker. She offers facts that don’t receive as much attention, such as “In 2013, blacks made up 42 percent of all cop killers whose race was known, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population.”
What the black criminal class has going in its favor is the media — especially the New York Times and NPR, both powerful messengers, who automatically link race and the police. It’s a calculated distortion when they reduce a story to: unarmed black man shot by police.
Unarmed men can be dangerous (any female ought to know that). The first cop killing I covered as a young reporter was the death of Sgt. Gary Wolfley in Rialto, Calif. He was killed by an unarmed black man who wrestled his gun from him. Police know this is a risk. The worst thing that can happen to a cop isn’t being killed in the line of duty — it’s being killed with your own weapon. The officer’s death is then dissected on the assumption that he must have done something wrong.
If you bring this up, the rejoinder is often, “That’s what they signed up for when they became cops.”
Well, what do thugs sign up for?
I was just listening to a recorded C-Span discussion interview by Sheryl Attkisson and Kirstin Powers.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?326034-1/words-kirsten-powers
What Powers describes is shrill and quasi-violent derailment of rational discussion on college and university campuses as well as other intellectual venues.
This entitled derangement has been at a crisis point for a least a decade.
The many varieties of anti-intellectual corruption that pervade American life are impossible to number. However, some of the damage is measurable (black crime and general public school failure and etc.) and some not so easily measured (the mattress girl’s having brought her burden on the commencement stage and having been a senatorial guest in the national legislature.
The legitimization of grievance fraud reaches its apex w/Sharpton as presidential wise-man. A young Sharpton or Gillibrand would see the Portland meeting you describe as a real professional opportunity.
While working as a park ranger in Portland two rangers with whom I was a friend and co-worker were attacked by a mentally ill man with a hunting knife. He stood 6 foot or so and ranged about 180.
They’d walked past him several times over the prior year, but this day he leapt up and charged fast intending to do real business with his knife. The female ranger had been a police officer and was nearly killed as she reached for her pistol. Of course as a ranger she was unarmed. She found herself in her back gripping the wrists of a very strong, much larger lunatic male.
He co-ranger that day was a rangy and game Aussie who first hooked his finger in the man’s eye socket. It all ended when he flung the man over a cliff, but not before the crazy man reached out and snatched the ranger’s arm, taking him with him.
Both ended up on the same floor of the hospital for several weeks.
It happened fast. Think of a large and powerful man charging at you from 20/30 feet. Charging with a knife. If you could you’d shoot him and deal with the press in the afternoon and for the rest of your life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfi3Ndh3n-g
It seems germane so I’ll mention a glimpse of white privilege I witnessed this weekend.
This weekend I was at the Columbia Park Pool above New Columbia Villa, a housing project that has perhaps the highest black concentration in Portland.
I had my 9 year old nephew with me because he loves swimming. Four white adult males other than myself were in the pool, too. That’s all of the adults. Each had his own son(s) or daughter(s) with him and was either giving swimming lessons or playing with the child. This went on for over an hour before any mothers, daughters, or people of color appeared.
That’s the very embodiment of white privilege right there.
Larry:
Thanks for the links.
“Entitled derangement” is a nice turn of phrase.
The lack of political diversity on college campuses is disturbing. Years ago a friend of mine had a conversation with then-University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer about the intellectual cowardice found in academia. Frohnmayer privately acknowledged to my friend that some of the most closed-minded individuals can be found on college faculties.
About the “Shoot-Don’t Shoot” video: Those police training scenarios were used in the 90s when I was a reporter and received a lot of publicity back then. At the time, I thought it was unfair to use the test on civilians since police are supposed to be specially trained. But the training scenarios are a good reminder that cops are not supernatural. How are they supposed to know when someone behaving in a belligerent or suspicious manner isn’t dangerous? The media distort matters when they insist on acting as if unarmed men are harmless. They aren’t (as your park ranger colleagues know).
Let’s see if the Rev. Jarrett Maupin spreads the word among his followers about how they need to comply in confrontations with the police.
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