By Isabel Funk
oregonlive.com
PORTLAND, Ore. — A new report on Portland police staffing shared with the city earlier this month found that while dispatchers are answering calls faster, police officers are taking an average of 20 minutes to get to high priority ones and addressing that backlog would cost $37 million annually by 2035.
City council commissioned the report in February, asking for a detailed account of police recruitment goals and costs as a citywide budget crunch — and philosophical differences around appropriate police funding levels — have forced the council to examine every available dollar.
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The report found that with current staffing levels, about 80% of child abuse reports don’t get assigned to an investigator and the vast majority of property crimes also go uninvestigated.
“As immensely proud as I am of the Portland Police Bureau, I recognize that we are failing in many areas in the level of support we’re able to provide Portlanders,” Chief Bob Day said Friday.
Supporters of a ballot initiative to move funds from the lucrative voter-approved climate tax to pay for police officers said the report points to the underlying need.
“The only solution to Portland’s crisis in emergency police response times is for voters to approve the Enhanced Community Safety Initiative in November. This report proves it,” Juanita Swartwood, chief petitioner of the ballot initiative, said in a news release.
The finding that police would need an additional $37 million annually by 2035 is based on the assumption its “status quo” staffing level would grow from 816 sworn officers to 1,054, the report said.
It’s not clear that there’s an appetite in Portland for that. Councilors this year approved a budget that allowed major reductions to Police Bureau spending. Councilors tried, but failed, to fully restore the unarmed “public safety support specialist” program, for example.
Councilor Loretta Smith , at a Friday community event in her east Portland district, described the report as a “roadmap” for the future.
“This report gives us a clear-eyed look at what it will realistically take in terms of both time and taxpayer dollars to stabilize our public safety workforce,” she said.
The Police Bureau has 877 positions for sworn officers. But about 100 of those officers are still in training, making the bureau reliant on overtime to meet critical needs. That means the bureau has to maintain vacancies to afford to pay for overtime, the report said. Meanwhile, one out of every four trainees doesn’t make it through the expensive probationary period.
The report also found that while response times have doubled, overall calls for service have actually decreased. Though there’s no standard for police response times, the city adopted a goal of seven minutes this April.
Nick McDonald , one of the authors of the report, said the main takeaway is that “there isn’t a shortcut to getting out of this situation.”
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