PORTLAND, Ore. — Little has changed after a week and a half of Oregon’s recriminalization of hard drugs and the launch of Multnomah County's new deflection system, according to the president of Portland's police union.
It’s been a rocky couple of weeks: for one, the deflection center where Multnomah County planned to take people caught with drugs is not ready — and won’t open until sometime next month at the earliest — and without a place where police can take them, not much is different on the street.
As of Tuesday, the county said that there had been 21 "dispatches" for deflection, and 15 people who were eligible and accepted deflection. The six who did not go into deflection may not have rejected the offer, as the county said they may have been arrested when it was unavailable or had their possession charges dismissed in court.
“The biggest issue for law enforcement at this point is just understanding our role. This whole mobile deflection thing doesn't provide, you know, sea change,” said Aaron Schmautz, president of the Portland Police Association.
“And that’s the real issue," Schmautz continued, "is that law enforcement, the biggest things we get calls about is, ‘Hey, this person is on my doorstep.’ ‘Hey, this person is in public doing things they're not supposed to be doing.’ And so, a big part of this deflection center was to be able to move people, so the mobile thing doesn't really answer the biggest question that we've had."
“The mobile thing” refers to the county's process to send outreach workers to talk with people found with drugs; they will offer that person a chance at deflection, and in theory, get them into shelter and treatment. In reality, it often is not working that way.
First, the outreach teams are currently only available from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. Monday through Friday. And even when the team is available, they sometimes cannot get the person into treatment right away.
In an incident KGW witnessed last week, police waited 20 minutes for the outreach team after encountering someone who was eligible for deflection. The team then tried for half an hour to find a program where the person could start treatment right away but ultimately could only give him some phone numbers to call. Then everyone went their separate ways.
“And this is where this conversation has been so frustrating for me," Schmautz said. "You know, we forget about the caller — the caller is the person, you know ... We're in a service industry, and certainly we're serving everyone. We're serving the people who call, we're serving the people who stand there and watch, we’re serving the person who we're being called about.
“But it's like if you're in a customer service industry and the person is calling and asking for help and you see the police show up … they leave. … You're looking at your pocketbook and wondering what you just paid for. For many people, I think is very frustrating.”
A 'north star' solution
So what needs to be done, according to police?
“Well, 100% we need to be focused on ramping up available treatment beds, and we need to be focusing on people who are ready for treatment," Schmautz began. "There should be zero vacancies for willing participants and treatment. I think that's a big piece of it."
But he also pointed the finger at the combination of public resources, like the police, and resources like nonprofits that perhaps receive public funding but otherwise don't share a chain of command.
“There's no necessitated or required cooperation between the two," Schmautz said. "I would love to see legislation that directs our government to function well together. If we're spending tax dollars on nonprofits, there needs to be some kind of north star that we're working towards.
“I think we need to have a focus on sobriety. I think we need to have real, real kind of deep-dive conversations about what we're trying to accomplish — and maybe that sounds ethereal, but we don't ... you know, in the absence of a goal, your mission drifts. So law enforcement's role in all of this, we'll always just be making our streets safe. We're not well-situated to be a social service provider, where we might be a social service assistant.
“But you hear everyday people talk about people suffering from mental health issues and addiction issues. We need access through partnership and that needs to be mandated to the people who are accepting the money."
Taking a leaf from Portugal's book
Shmautz pointed to coordination he saw in his trip to Portugal a year ago, where elected officials, law enforcement officers and substance use treatment providers traveled to learn about the country’s 20-year-old drug decriminalization program, which loosely inspired Oregon's own controversial Measure 110.
In 2001, Portugal had decriminalized small amounts of all drugs. However, last year, the Washington Post reported that 22 years later, Portugal now struggles with drug users who openly flout the law and police who are losing motivation to issue tickets.
However, the godfather of Portugal's decriminalization system has pointed to a reduction in funding and a shift toward privatization — for example, paying nonprofits to provide outreach and social services instead of doing that within the government — as largely responsible for the country's backslide.
“That was the one big takeaway … is that their whole-of-government approach, it's all run through one government agency and all things … everything flows through it, the police work in deep partnership,” Shmautz explained.
“I mean, you look at Portland Street Response," he continued. "Many people who have active voices in our community don't want Portland Street Response to work with law enforcement at all, and this is a very good example of where, again, they're all city employees. We need to all be working towards the same goal. And when we have kind of weirdly adversarial relationships with different services, it fractures.
“The system in Portugal, they don't do that because they're all like, ‘Well, we're just trying to solve the same problems.’ I would just like to remind people when you hear the hyperbolic conversations around what law enforcement does, we do it because we're asked to, and so help us be better by partnering with us."