PORTLAND, Ore. — As the election season nears, the city of Portland and the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) are preparing for the potential of more violence and political unrest.
"Nobody anywhere in this country saw what Portland saw in 2020," said Aaron Schmautz, the president of the Portland Police Association (PPA).
"Just how out of control it was ... the whole city was going down," recalled Matt Pell, who works downtown.
"I hope that we don't ever see what we saw in 2020 again, but we need to have the tools and people ready to navigate what may come," Schmautz said.
Part of those tools is creating a new team trained to respond to violent protests. The bureau will be looking for 40 existing officers to volunteer. They will do extra crowd control training and get a 6% pay raise, which will cost the bureau an additional $380,000 per year. Some officers are already expressing interest in signing up, PPB told KGW.
"The pay piece of it is just the start," Schmautz said. "The next piece of the conversation is politically, how do we make sure that our officers have clear direction from our government?"
That clear direction, he said, was missing four years ago when a Portland police officer was indicted on a fourth-degree misdemeanor assault charge after hitting a photographer in the head with his baton during a 2020 protest. That charge was dismissed, and he publicly apologized.
"Coming out of 2020, several things happened. A lot of people were hurt so they needed compensation, so they sued, so the city has now paid out over a million dollars to protestors they injured. At that time, the DOJ got involved and ordered that the city do audits,” said Juan Chavez with the Oregon Justice Resource Center.
That audit found the bureau needed more training on things like de-escalation techniques and finding alternative uses of force, along with a designated crowd control unit, among other things.
"The use of sticks and the use of batons or just the physical fighting between officers — that is the last things that we want," Schmautz said.
Portland City Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to approve the unit.
Meanwhile, the community braces for what could come in the months ahead.
"I would expect there's protests on both sides; there's a lot to think about. This election season will be very interesting," Pell said.
On Wednesday, Portland City Council voted unanimously on an agreement with the police union that will underpin the crowd control unit, pledging to pay officers the 6% premium pay for being part of the unit. The first round of officer training is expected to begin in April or May down in Salem.