PORTLAND, Oregon — Three and half years ago, a large majority of Portland voters approved a ballot initiative calling for an overhaul of the city's police oversight system, and the city council approved a final version of the plan late last year.
The new system won't take effect until next year, but in the meantime, the Portland police union wants to ask voters to roll back a key piece of it: the civilian oversight board's ability to directly impose corrective action if it determines that an officer violated policy. The current system's two civilian oversight bodies don't have that power.
The police union argues that the oversight structure is biased against the police department, and discipline decisions should ultimately rest with the chief of police. Advocates say the union's proposal would undermine the point of the overhaul, which was to give citizens, not police, the final say.
The 2020 initiative
In July 2020, two months after the murder of George Floyd and in the midst of a series of social justice protests that rocked Portland, the city council voted to put a resolution on the ballot that would replace the city's existing police oversight system with a new Independent Police Accountability and Oversight Board. The ballot measure went on to pass with 82% support.
The first step was to create a committee to develop a full plan for the new oversight system. It had about 20 members, and there were requirements for who could be on it. It had to have five people who were members of over-policed communities, five from organizations that provided support to those over-policed communities, five who represented community justice organizations and five who represented small businesses.
That first committee spent several months researching and hammering out a new system for police accountability, producing a 505-page report last summer that outlined the structure of the program and the necessary city code changes to make it official. The city council approved the plan in November, though not without making amendments that drew criticism from some of the committee members.
Still, the core provision about the oversight board's disciplinary power made it into the final version, and that's where the Portland Police Association has focused most of its criticism. The union funded a poll in December that showed a large share of Portland voters might be open to reconsidering that issue.
The new system
The new oversight program will have a budget equal to 5% of the Portland Police Bureau budget in any given year, and it will be run by a director who will in turn be hired by a 33-member board. Each board member, along with five alternates, will be appointed by the city council and serve a three-year term.
The new board has its own membership requirements, with the updated city code stating that the board "shall ensure a diverse membership, particularly of community members who have experienced systemic racism and those who have experienced mental illness, addiction or alcoholism."
Would-be members also have to live, work, play, attend school or worship within the city of Portland for 12 months before being eligible to be appointed. They will get free mental health care if needed, to help with reviewing potentially traumatic and emotional videos, reports and records.
And while the proposed board is described as a volunteer body, each member would be paid hourly for their time, adding up to around $5,300 a year on average, which organizers said will help reduce the barriers to volunteering, since some people would not be able to afford it otherwise.
And there's one final membership rule: the proposed city code states that people "currently or formerly employed by a law enforcement agency are ineligible for service."
New police union initiatives
The Portland Police Association does not love the final product, and the discipline power and no-police membership rule have drawn the strongest objections. The union argues that the board is stacked against them, and that the board should send discipline recommendations to the chief of police rather than making final decisions.
"The real concern we have is structure," said police union leader Aaron Schmautz. "When you have baked into the cake, 'we want to find people who have historical distrust of law enforcement and have them be the arbiter' — it's gonna lead to more debate, as opposed to having a robust civilian oversight panel that then is, provides the outcome of an investigation to the chief. The chief, who is responsive to the elected officials and who has experience in law enforcement, understands the laws and the rules and the regulations, makes that decision."
The cities of Seattle, Tacoma, New York and San Francisco all have police accountability boards, but none have the power to enforce discipline — they recommend it to the police chief or a police commission that oversees police.
The union is going to try to get two initiatives onto the November ballot this year, one of which would remove the oversight board's direct discipline power. The other would require the city to increase and maintain the number of sworn police officers in patrol services, create and maintain 24-hour drug detox drop-off and treatment centers and increase and maintain street response services.
"A lot of people in our community have felt that they have not been able to speak to their concerns, to what they want — how they want to be served by law enforcement," Schmautz said. "Because there's just a handful of voices that tend to drown out the majority of Portlanders. And again, (the 2020) ballot measure was high-level, just 'Do you want a citizen-run accountability measure?' There wasn't a lot of discussion about what currently existed."
Initiatives face opposition
The Story reached out to Jason Renaud, who works in the mental health field and spent a year on the committee that developed the new system, to run the union argument by him and get his take. He said the union's alternative proposal would feature police officers "both as judge and jury," and wouldn't provide the level of accountability that the community wants. He was also dismissive of concerns about the membership being stacked against police.
"That's the point of the police accountability board, is to bring citizens, community members who are impartial, who are independent, who are knowledgeable to make those decisions about misconduct," he said.
The ACLU of Oregon opposes both initiatives and is suing to try to stop one of them from getting onto the ballot. The organization's executive director, Sandy Chung, criticized them as a police union power play.
"The problem is the city of Portland has utterly failed to keep Portland police (accountable) when they break a rule, when they break the law or harm or kill people," she said. "So this is why 82% of voters voted for the creation of this oversight board and made sure that it had all the necessary things — all of the things stated by experts needed for it to be effective."
The board can't just hand out discipline measures indiscriminately, she said, adding that the investigation are more like jury proceedings, where the board will be tasked with receiving complaints and engaging in a defined process to collect information and make determinations about what happened.
The ACLU of is arguing that the union's second initiative would the Oregon Constitution, which requires that ballot initiatives be about only one thing.
"We believe what we've asked for in our legal challenges is simply that the court make sure that the title for the ballot measure is as accurate as possible," Chung said. "Because we believe if the title is accurate, Portland voters will reject this measure."