PORTLAND, Ore. — Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt is running for re-election in November, facing a challenge from a veteran prosecutor within his office. Schmidt's the top law enforcement official in Oregon's most populous county, which means his approach to crime can make a big difference.
It's been a rollercoaster term for Schmidt: He was elected in a landslide in May 2020, just before the murder of George Floyd ignited a nationwide reckoning with racial justice and police brutality. Schmidt, who ran on a criminal justice reform platform, appeared well-suited for the time and place.
But over the following months, Portland grappled with a hundred-plus successive nights of protests, riots and battles between law enforcement and demonstrators; the COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions; rampant homelessness and substance use; and a rise in certain types of crime, particularly homicides and gun violence.
The Story spoke with Schmidt's challenger, Senior Deputy District Attorney Nathan Vasquez, in late November. He accused Schmidt of wrecking the office's relationship with Portland police and cutting back on the number of cases prosecuted. Overall, he suggested, Schmidt is out of his league because he only briefly worked as a prosecuting attorney years before becoming the county DA.
But since Vasquez had his say on the matter, it's now time to get Schmidt's side of the story.
Crime and perceptions of public safety
Schmidt's been accused of being soft on crime, something he says is untrue. Sitting down with Schmidt for an interview, The Story's Pat Dooris asked Schmidt for his opinion on how the county is doing in terms of making people feel safe.
Mike Schmidt: Well, clearly, you know, we're hearing from people that they don't feel safe. And so, I think that that's a real challenge for us. I think a lot of people have a lot of love for this city, a lot of faith and a lot of hope, and they see things that they see signs of improvement. But we certainly haven't gotten to the place where people are feeling safe. We have a lot of work to do.
Pat Dooris: Do you feel any of that's your responsibility — or your fault, I guess, more sharply?
MS: Well, I think it's my responsibility, certainly ... you know, as we talk about and I try to get the word out — and I appreciate being interviewed here with you because it's about getting the word out. What's the work that we're doing? I talked to every single grand jury that comes through the courthouse and at the end of it, these are seven community members who sit and they hear cases for a month — and almost to a person, they say, "I had no idea all this was going on. You guys are doing all kinds of cases, police officers are doing fantastic work. We never hear about this." So I think where my responsibility lies in terms of people feeling safe is to be communicative and try to get the word out. That work is going on, collaboration is happening and we're getting results.
PD: So, the city, the county is safe, but people just don't realize it because of the messaging?
MS: Well, I think there's certainly messaging in terms of letting people know the good work that's happening and letting people know things are happening. But we have real challenges, especially over the pandemic. We saw gun violence really increase; homicides in the city spiked. It's great that in 2023, we're seeing all categories of crime across Portland, receding homicides down a significant amount, 20-25% (or) something, that auto theft is similarly down that same amount.
So we're making progress, but there are real challenges that we're facing. We continue to not have defense attorneys being appointed to cases, which makes our ability as prosecutors to hold people accountable challenging. So, it's both: it's letting people know the good work that's happening, and the progress being made there and the real challenges that we face.
RELATED: Despite drop in homicides in Portland in 2023, families of victims say there are still too many
Relationships with police
Dooris wanted to know if those challenges include Schmidt's relationship with police. In 2020, Schmidt's office declined to prosecute 90% of protest-related cases brought by the Portland Police Bureau, namely non-violent cases and particularly charges for "interfering with a police officer."
Prosecutors also filed an assault charge against an officer for violence during a protest. The officer and the victim eventually came to a compromise that involved the officer publicly apologizing.
PD: How's your relationship with the police?
MS: I think the relationship is good. It certainly ... We started off on a challenging note coming in (with) the protests like I did — you know, (I) didn't have kind of the runway that would have been great to have in a high stress, high tense situation like that. But since then, you know one of my favorite meetings every single month is meeting with the chief in his office at 7 a.m. on the ... 15th floor of the Central Precinct. And we get together. There's no agenda. The U.S. Attorney's Office is there. His staff is there. I bring my first assistant and we just sit around and we talk through our issues. We talk about the challenges facing our community, we spitball on ways that we can work together and collaborate, and we've been doing that for three years — and that's how you get partnerships like our Auto Theft Task Force and our Retail Theft Task Force and the street racing mission that I went on New Year's Eve.
So it's all about ... communication and collaboration, and I think that despite starting off on kind of a rocky, you know, we're making inroads. And when you look at our prosecution rates, which are higher than they've been the last seven or eight years — you don't do that by yourself. That's not one-sided, "Oh, look at me." That's a partnership. That's collaboration. That means that police officers and prosecutors are working together, gathering the evidence we need, and we're able to make the cases.
Prosecution rates
Schmidt's challenger, Vasquez, has said that the DA's office under Schmidt is only prosecuting about 6,000 cases a year, about half the number that they prosecuted prior to Schmidt's tenure. But Schmidt said that this isn't accurate.
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MS: Yeah. Well, we can get those numbers, but what I've seen in terms of felony cases being referred to our office, we saw a slight dip during the pandemic — during 2020, 21, 22 — slight, but not massive. And our prosecution rate to those also similarly had a slight dip during COVID, and now are higher than they've been since well before my predecessor was in office.
Misdemeanors is where we've seen the big decline in terms of cases being referred to our office. There are reasons for that. In fact, we looked into the different issues in terms of that. One of the big ones was (that) ballot Measure 110 decriminalized about 2,000 to 2,500 cases that would be coming to our office on an annual basis. So that's just work that doesn't exist anymore. Those aren't misdemeanors anymore, so of course, they're not coming to our office. What we're seeing is a rebound in misdemeanor referrals to our office and a higher prosecution rate. So last year, we prosecuted in 2023 around 4,700 misdemeanors, almost 5,000 misdemeanor cases and about 5,000 felony cases — so that's about 10,000 cases, you know, give or take some of the math there.
Checking the numbers
Following up with the Multnomah County DA's office, they reported that the office issued 8,384 total cases in 2023 — less than Schmidt estimated, but more than Vasquez said.
The office reports that law enforcement referred 12,772 total cases to them and 72% were issued, which was a 7-year high.
"Issued" means that the case is officially filed and moving through the system, although it's perhaps not synonymous with cases prosecuted.
The DA's office noted that 1,051 cases are still pending, and another 3,337 were dismissed because they did not have enough evidence.
On qualifications
Dooris told Schmidt that their interview would have a two-part focus: First, on how he thinks he's done as DA so far, and second, on his qualifications to run for re-election. Vasquez has criticized Schmidt as lacking in experience, which he claims is hurting the community.
PD: Just getting sort of more on to the campaign side, how many major felony cases have you tried?
MS: Have I tried? Well, I think, you know ... I was in the office, I started as a deputy district attorney in 2007. I started as an intern. I prosecuted in the office until 2013. The majority of my time was spent in Unit A, which is our property crimes unit, so that's where a lot of my trial experience came from was in property crimes. I also left the office; I worked in the Legislature; I worked and ran a state agency for six years where I got to travel internationally and look at other systems and see how they do things differently. So I have both — I have a perspective of being a frontline attorney trying cases, and I also have what it takes to run an agency, which is a different level of experience most people don't have.
PD: Which leads to the second question: Your opponent (is a) career veteran prosecutor handling the biggest cases. Don't you think it makes a difference on whether the person leading the office has that sort of experience?
MS: Well, I think there are a lot of different types of experience that really matter. You know, that's his case to be made about why he wants to argue that he's better. But I'll tell you the district attorney before me and the district attorney before him weren't trying cases. We hire attorneys. We run a 250-260 person law firm. Only about a third of the staff are attorneys, we have to deal with everything from HR budget, IT administrative staff ... and really the job of the district attorney is outward-facing. It's building relationships; it's building coalitions.
Since I've been the district attorney, the office has grown; our budget has increased almost 20%. When I took over as the district attorney, we had 75 attorneys. Today, we have 88. That reverses over a decade's worth of trends of our office being cut and having our resources dwindle.
So how am I able to do that? Because I'm outward-facing; I have relationships. If you look at the folks supporting me on the campaign side and my end-users, I got most of the elected officials in our community are supporting me. And that's not just to say, "Oh, look, they're supporting me." That's how you get things done. That's how a leader leads in office because I need those folks when I want grant funding from Salem, when I want the county commission to increase our attorney capacity. We had an outside audit of our office that says we need 110 prosecuting attorneys to handle the workload that we're given in Multnomah County. So we're up to 88. That's great news. We still have a long way to go, but you need somebody who has that outward-facing experience, that administrative experience, I think that's absolutely crucial and the relationships to get it done.
Painted with a billboard-sized target
Most Portlanders are probably familiar with the billboards by now — the ones that heavily feature Mike Schmidt. They're paid for by backers of the group "People for Portland," which tries to use public pressure in order to get elected officials to take action in areas where the group feels they are lacking.
One of the most visible billboards talks about Portland being a "Schmidt show."
PD: The billboards downtown ... a very personal attack on you and your leadership role and the way that you're running your office. What's your (take)?
MS: Well, you know, since day one of taking this office, I had to deal with Donald Trump calling me out in a speech on a runway saying, you know, "The district attorney from Portland, Mike Schmidt," so I've been dealing with these kind of right-wing attacks, this disinformation and misinformation. You look at the billboards, and it says all about the crime, everything else that — well, crime is going down across the board.
So it's scare tactics. It's also, quite honestly, I think Portlanders in general are just where ... this is the home of Portlandia, the four-way stop, the infinite four-way stop where everyone's waving the other person, "Go." We're nice people; we're kind people. These are kind of petty. They don't have solutions. So I mean, imagine spending all that money and not proposing any solutions, just doing character attacks and some stuff as juvenile as using somebody's last name. I think it's kind of beneath ... (I think it) turns a lot of people off.
I think when I'm talking to folks out on the campaign trail, what I'm hearing from people is that we're here because we care about this community. We love this community. I think we're getting over the people who want to trash this community and divide us. ... Other people have said this, "Don't bet against Portland." This is a hopeful place and people want solutions, and they want people who are going to be positive and digging in and not just trying to cut people down and using their name.
On Measure 110
Mike Schmidt has overall been a proponent of Measure 110, the voter-approved initiative that decriminalized drugs and put funding toward treatment programs. But Vasquez and Schmidt seem to be in agreement that it's not working as-is.
MS: We need some changes, no doubt about it. First and foremost, I think that the legislature needs to do something about people using drugs on our streets.
PD: "Do something" — you mean, make it illegal?
MS: Make it illegal ... Right now, it's a violation. So it's a ticket, right? A ticket. So yeah, my proposal — and we put together a memo for the legislature that we have shared with our legislative folks here in Multnomah County and the chairs, Jason Kropf out of Bend and Kate Lieber, the Senate majority leader. And so we've shared that memo with them — it says that we should criminalize open use on our streets. But we shouldn't do it in a piecemeal, city-by-city way. The legislature really needs to take that action, because if you do it city-by-city, it becomes kind of a patchwork quilt of different approaches. You want the legislature to do that statewide.
I think that we want to tighten up laws against drug dealers. There have been some adverse case law out of the Court of Appeals in terms of our ability to prosecute people for dealing drugs. And so nothing to do with ballot Measure 110. But that's an area where I think we can tighten up our law. And so we've proposed that.
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PD: And that has to do with ... do you actually see them dealing and how much do they have in their pockets, and that kind of thing?
MS: Precisely, we used to call that "Boyd delivery," which is the name of the case law that it was based on. The Court of Appeals said that that no longer counts, that you need to actually see somebody doing the delivery. So our proposal is to create the new crime of possession with the intent to deliver, so we no longer have to have the fiction of the dealing thing happened.
Treatment — we absolutely need to see lots more treatment come online. I've been very pleased that I get to go out to ribbon-cutting ceremonies of some new facilities coming online. There is a fentanyl detox center in eastern Multnomah County. It's right on the border of Clackamas, Multnomah County, that has opened up recently. Seventeen beds. And they predict they're going to be able to get through hundreds of people every year.
But we need tons more of that. We have drug courts here in Multnomah County, and one of the frustrations that we have is that people are on waiting lists — especially this time of year where housing in the cold gets (to be) more of a scarce resource — that are on waiting lists to get into that treatment for four, six, eight weeks, sometimes up to 12 weeks, that we're just waiting. And a lot of times, they're waiting in our jail. That's not a good use of our jail resources. It's not a good use of their time, and obviously, we need more treatment.
Also, we propose that we like to see follow-up when somebody overdoses, that there ought to be a team of individuals that follow up with them. Other communities have done this. They have put together these teams of professionals, not necessarily police officers, but health professionals that get the person's information when they resuscitate them, and then they can follow up with them within 24 hours. That's kind of one of those "golden moments," people have called it, where you hit that moment in your life where you might be ready for a change, an inflection point, and other communities have had great success in getting people connected to treatment with that resource.