By Maxine Bernstein
oregonlive.com
PORTLAND, Ore. — Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell wants to dedicate a patrol team of uniformed officers to respond to shootings and work closely with an on-call investigative team to stem the city’s significant increase in gun violence.
Lovell’s two-part strategy also calls for more community oversight of the patrol team and its tactics.
His plan would bring back many of the functions of the former Gun Violence Reduction Team, eliminated after the City Council in June defunded it over concerns about its disproportionate stops and searches of people of color.
Mayor Ted Wheeler, who serves as police commissioner, hasn’t embraced the plan publicly, though he has said he’s open to all ideas.
Asked this week if he’s going to bring back the Gun Violence Reduction Team, Wheeler responded emphatically: “GVRT is gone. It is dead. It is kaput.”
But then he added: “What will replace it will have more prevention focus. It will have more community engagement focus and it will have support of the community, and there will be more reporting back to the community in terms of the data that we’ll be providing.”
[READ: 8 reasons patrol is a powerful presence]
The Oregonian/OregonLive obtained a copy of Lovell’s plan, presented to Wheeler on Dec. 23 with estimates of $2.4 million in additional funding to support it through this fiscal year that ends June 30 and $4.8 million for next fiscal year.
Lovell has proposed convening a community group to develop parameters for the patrol team that are “consistent with community expectations and eliminates disparate impacts on historically marginalized communities.”
Lovell would get monthly reports on all the team’s investigative stops and searches.
Wheeler said he’s working with police, as well as county public health and probation officers, the county sheriff’s office and district attorney, Gresham police, state and federal prosecutors to come up with regional strategies focused on community “collaboration and inclusion.”
“The early conversations around this have been very promising,” he said. “It won’t be easy to formulate specific strategies. It will take some time. There will be additional resources required.”
The mayor and the city’s four other commissioners at a council work session last week all listed public safety and reduced gun violence among their top priorities.
Police supervisors, as well as other local, county and federal law enforcement officials, privately have voiced frustration with the lack of direction from City Hall.
Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who pushed for the disbanding of the Gun Violence Reduction Team, is opposed to any recreation of the team.
She’s committed to finding other innovative ways to address the violence including greater funding for mentorship programs and support services, according to a memo shared by her policy director with fellow commissioners last week.
Hardesty contends the specialized gun violence unit didn’t reduce shootings and that its dissolution hasn’t been a factor in the increase in gun violence. She pointed to the doubling of shootings during June 2020, when there were 62 and the team was still in place, compared to 31 in the same month in 2019.
She also has noted increases in shootings in three of the first four months of 2020 over the same months in 2019. There were 51 in January 2020, compared to 33 the same month in 2019; 38 in February 2020, up from 31 in 2019; and 48 in April 2020, up from 26 in 2019.
The team was disbanded by July 1.
Starting that month, shootings rose to record levels: 103 in July, 122 in August and 119 in September before dropping to 88, 98 and 99 during the last three months of the year.
Portland recorded 55 homicides last year, the most in 26 years. Forty-one of the people died in shootings. About half of those killed were people of color.
Hardesty has favored additional funding for the city’s Office of Violence Prevention to provide more outreach services to people or families at risk and has floated an approach similar to one in Richmond, Virginia, called “Operation Peacemaker.” That program provides individual mentors to those believed to be responsible for most of the city’s gun crimes, with 24-hour case management, behavioral therapy and internship and substance abuse treatment opportunities.
State Sen. Lew Frederick, D-Portland, said at a recent Portland community meeting that the gun violence crisis needs immediate attention.
On a recent night, two cars drove by his Irvington neighborhood street firing about 20 shots each, and his wife ended up picking up casings off their street, he said.
“We need to have people understand that we are all tired of this,” Frederick said. “This is not something that is a video game that people are dealing with. We have people being hurt. We have families being destroyed, devastated by things like this.”
The focus must be on removing guns while also dealing with housing, education, health care and jobs, he said.
Since the Gun Violence Reduction Team was eliminated, the Police Bureau added six officers and a sergeant to the detective assault unit, yet those officers don’t respond to the scenes of shootings. They instead investigate after the fact, which creates a delay in tracking down leads, police said.
Under the chief’s latest proposal, those six officers and sergeant could be the investigators on call — going out to shooting scenes when someone is wounded to initiate immediate investigations, help process evidence at the scene, talk to witnesses and follow leads.
Lovell suggested creating a separate patrol team of at least six uniformed officers ready to respond 24 hours a day, seven days a week to shootings, act on criminal intelligence, identify suspects and work to develop relationships with residents to encourage information sharing and connect at-risk youths to services.
With a more focused patrol team, people will be less likely to carry guns “due to the risk of being caught and prosecuted,” he wrote in his plan.
“Added investigative capacity is likely to improve the speed of investigations,” support prosecutions in shooting cases and offer “some relief to our currently over-taxed investigative resources,” Lovell wrote.
The chief also called for people identified at greatest risk of causing or falling victim to violence to be referred to the city’s Office of Violence Prevention for wrap-around support services and interventions.
Monthly shooting review meetings should continue between police, county probation officers and state and federal prosecutors, Lovell added.
The chief nor the mayor have publicly discussed the plan. The mayor is set to meet with local, county and federal law enforcement on Wednesday for further talks. It’s unclear what steps will follow.
So far this year, there have been 78 shootings in the city. Twenty-two people have been shot and wounded, and five people have been killed from gunfire, according to police.
(c)2021 The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.)