By Noelle Crombie
oregonlive.com
PORTLAND, Ore. — It will take years for the public to see an impact from the hiring of more than 200 police officers as proposed by the mayor, Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell said Tuesday.
New officers must be recruited and trained before they can work on their own, he said. At the same time, Lovell warned of a “retirement cliff” of Portland officers next year.
Lovell’s remarks came during a public safety forum hosted by the Portland Business Alliance. The event was titled: “Portland at a crossroads: Is crime the new normal?”
The organization had planned to hold the hourlong forum during a breakfast at the Hilton Portland Downtown, its first physical get-together since February 2020. The group abruptly moved the gathering online to Zoom with less than 24 hours’ notice, citing “circumstances related to returning to in-person events.”
Other speakers included Acting U.S. Attorney Scott Asphaug, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt and Robyn Burke, manager of Portland Street Response.
Mayor Ted Wheeler has said he will seek around $7 million to hire back 25 retired police officers, pay for body-worn cameras, hire a civilian police trainer and bolster recruitment to attract 200 more sworn officers and 100 unarmed public safety specialists in the next three years.
The bureau currently deploys fewer sworn officers — 789 — than at any point in the past in 30 years, according to the bureau and an analysis of records by The Oregonian/OregonLive, even though the city added more than 165,000 new residents over that period.
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Of the 789 who are on the force, only 352 are currently assigned to patrol the city’s three police precincts, which must staff three shifts a day, seven days a week.
“We didn’t get here overnight,” Lovell said. “We have been trending in this direction for some time. … It’s a yearslong process to get where we need to be.”
Lovell said he has “made a lot of adjustments” to address the rise in 911 calls for police. For instance, he said he’s reassigned officers to the patrol division.
Lovell noted that the number of homicides this year is twice what the city typically sees by this time of the year and added that car thefts and the thefts of car parts, catalytic converters in particular, have seen steep increases.
Shoplifting and burglaries, he said, are down this year.
The panel touched on a variety of topics, including resources for policing and prosecution, the evolution of the city’s Street Response program that sends a mental health worker and a paramedic to most daytime mental health crisis calls and factors driving this year’s record gun violence.
Schmidt also talked about the stress the pandemic has imposed on state courts. He said delays in trials have led to a backlog of cases and those long wait times make it difficult to resolve cases. He said the pace of trials has picked up in recent months.
“The prospect of trial is really the thing that helps to entice people to resolve their cases,” Schmidt said. “If you are never going to go to trial, you really have no incentive to plead your case or to agree to a plea bargain. The longer and longer you can wait and let that case languish in the system, the more opportunity or chance that evidence or witnesses or victims no longer want to be there.
“Without trial, there is no real incentive to resolve those cases,” he said.
Schmidt and Asphaug discussed what they each see as contributors to gun violence.
Asphaug cited “significant” staff reductions at the Police Bureau, retaliation among gang members and the decision to dissolve the police Gun Violence Reduction Team. He called the elimination of the team a “blow to law enforcement.”
The City Council dissolved the Gun Violence Reduction Team last year as part of a $15 million cut to the police budget, citing concerns about its disproportionate stops of people of color.
“Now with that absence we are seeing the increase in gun crimes,” Asphaug said. He applauded the city’s latest effort to form another team to try to stop gun violence before it happens.
He also said the city’s decision to place limits on traffic stops by Portland police emboldened gun-carrying “offenders” who otherwise may have been intercepted by police during a stop.
Earlier this year, city leaders announced that Portland police would no longer be directed to stop motorists for low-level infractions, such as equipment failures or expired plates, to reduce disproportionate stops of people of color.
And if police do stop drivers, officers must explain that the motorist can deny a request to search their cars.
The changes are intended to limit the potential for deadly encounters between police and people of color and allow police to focus on more serious violations that pose an immediate threat to public safety.
“If they know they aren’t going to be pulled over for traffic matters, they are going to carry their guns and as a result when they cross others or incidents happen, they have the gun on them and they are ready to use it,” Asphaug said.
He also cited “anarchistic crime” carried out by a “relatively small group of anarchists” who co-opted the Black Lives Matter movement to wreak havoc downtown. Their actions were meant to create fear of downtown and sow “distrust of civil society,” he said.
“Who wants to come downtown to shop or be in the downtown core when all of our buildings are boarded up?” he said. “But on the other hand for the business community, who wants to take the risk of taking those boards down if they know that the anarchists could show up?”
Schmidt disagreed that police staffing levels are driving violence in Portland. He said he’s talked to district attorneys from around the country, including those in conservative regions and in places that have boosted police funding, and all are seeing similar trends.
He blamed the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic and the disruption of schools and social programs.
He also cited a “flood of guns on our street right now.” Gun sales, he said, have spiked by 65% since 2020 and they’re making their way into “the hands of people that should not have them.”
“I think there is a tinderbox of effects of different things that the pandemic has laid bare,” he said.
He said government policies have deepened inequity and “hollowed out” communities of color, which are disproportionately affected by gun violence.
Schmidt regularly reviews defendants’ criminal histories, he said, and often finds that their parents may have been incarcerated or they themselves were victims of crime.
“It’s also incumbent upon us not to just ask how do we get back to the way things were,” he said, “but how do we learn the lessons of the past year, move forward and not repeat the mistakes of the past?”
John Maher, president of Oregonian Media Group, is volunteer chair of the Portland Business Alliance Board of Directors.
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