The man found driving April Fletcher’s stolen 2013 Honda Accord had nothing to worry about when Salem, Ore., police pulled him over for a traffic stop.
Brandon Nelson had no license, no insurance, no title to the car. But he had political apathy in his favor.
It has been more than a year since Fletcher’s car was stolen from her East Portland neighborhood. She still doesn’t have a car, which can be difficult at times. She is a veteran who needs to make visits to the Veterans Hospital on the west side of town.
The only measure of justice she feels she has received was last month when the Citizen Review Committee (CRC), which handles police complaints, voted 5-4 to agree with her that a Portland officer erred in not taking her stolen car report.
Fletcher’s story reflects what is happening in Oregon where residents – especially those residing in Portland’s less lovely neighborhoods – are pawns in criminal justice reform. Fletcher’s case was compounded by the Department of Motor Vehicles’ convoluted paperwork.
While the police and DMV came in for criticism at the CRC, the one person who escaped blame was the car thief.
When Fletcher bought the Honda Accord in July 2018, the original owner could not find the car title so they both went to DMV. The DMV gave Fletcher an application for title and registration. She gave the DMV the bill of sale, and the DMV told the seller to apply for a replacement title.
When her car was stolen a couple of weeks later, Fletcher still did not have the title. Because the DMV had asked the seller to file for a replacement title, that negated Fletcher’s request for the title. She had to start over again with DMV, but by then the car was stolen, and the license tags were close to expiring.
Fletcher said the officer would not take a stolen vehicle report from her because she did not have legal proof that she was the owner.
Eventually, Salem police would pull over Nelson behind the wheel of Fletcher’s car in a traffic stop. Her car would end up in a Salem tow yard. By the time the car was traced to her, it had racked up a $1,900 lien.
If it had been reported stolen, Fletcher said she would have been notified and retrieved her car before it ran up such a hefty lien. She forfeited the vehicle.
“Who has $1900?” she said to me.
I’ll tell you who has $1900: People like former state Rep. Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland). She was House Majority Leader in the Oregon state legislature in 2018 when Fletcher’s car was stolen.
At that point, Portland had become one of the worst cities in the nation for car theft. Prosecutors pointed to a decision in 2014 by the Oregon Court of Appeals.
Chief Appellate Judge Erika Hadlock essentially said that it wasn’t enough to catch someone in a stolen car. The driver had to admit to stealing it. If the driver simply said, “My buddy (fill in the blank with any name) told me I could use the car. I didn’t know it was stolen,” that was good enough with the Oregon Court of Appeals. Case dismissed.
The court even ruled that the presence of burglary tools, such as bolt cutters and altered keys, weren’t enough evidence to prove a defendant knowingly stole a car.
Criminals aren’t stupid. They quickly learned the words they needed to say: I didn’t know the car was stolen. Vehicle theft skyrocketed, especially in Portland and Gresham.
Police and prosecutors appealed to state politicians to fix the loophole. In 2017 – a year before Fletcher’s car was stolen – state Rep. Jeff Barker (D-Aloha), a retired law enforcement officer, authored such a bill and watched it die in committee. The proposed law would have changed the standard of proof to prosecute a car thief; the presence of burglary tools or altered keys, for example, would have been allowed into evidence.
Where was House Majority Leader Williamson, who lives in Portland, when this bill was allowed to die under her watch in 2017 and again in 2018? She had other priorities.
Williamson, an attorney married to an attorney, used to represent criminal offenders and worked for the Western Prison Project (now called by the deceptively renamed Partnership for Safety and Justice).
By 2018, the year Fletcher’s car was stolen, Willamette Week, an alternative weekly in Portland, detailed how the same thieves were stealing car after car without fear of prosecution. (See “Car Jack City.”)
But Willamette Week tossed Williamson a giant bone, allowing her to cast herself as someone who cared about victims. Referring to her as “Democrats’ leading authority on criminal justice issues,” the story said Williamson would listen to proposed law changes in 2019.
Why wasn’t Williamson listening in 2017 and 2018? She was busy laying the groundwork to eventually gut the voter-approved Measure 11, which called for minimum-mandatory sentences for violent crimes like rape, assault and manslaughter. She was busy conjuring a new definition of aggravated murder to effectively end Oregon’s death penalty approved by voters. She was busy preparing for a future legislative bill that would make it easier for violent juveniles to avoid adult court, where the details of their crimes would be made public.
All those bills eventually passed in 2019, allowing Williamson to gloat about her progressive victories in criminal justice reform.
Oh, yeah, and by the way the legislature finally approved a bill to close Oregon’s “vehicle-theft loophole.”
Too late to help victims like Fletcher. Politicians who want to cut sentencing for violent felons don’t care about the people who are preyed on by thieves. If Williamson’s car is stolen, it’s a given that she will have excellent insurance and can readily afford to buy a new one. (She probably also can afford a later model of automobile with superior security features.)
Had the vehicle-theft loophole been eliminated two years earlier, the thief who stole Fletcher’s car might have thought twice if there had been a reasonable chance he could face some actual punishment.
More importantly, though, had the vehicle-theft loophole been closed, the officer who responded to Fletcher’s stolen car might have taken the case seriously. As it is, he probably knew nothing was going to happen to the thief. Nothing did.
It’s understandable why Fletcher filed the complaint against the officer. She was dealing with him one-on-one. Politicians like Jennifer Williamson can remain at a safe, anonymous distance from crime victims. So can Court of Appeals judges. Cops cannot. They are present. They are visible. Victims want their help.
“I don’t want to get the officer in trouble,” Fletcher said. “I want my car paid for. I don’t want this to happen to someone else. … People don’t realize the outcome of losing a car and how it affects everybody — their job, their children.”
Because the Citizen Review Committee sided with her, there might be a change in police policy and procedure. The case will be referred back to the Independent Police Review, the body that takes an initial look at citizen complaints. It previously exonerated the officer. If the matter isn’t settled, the case will move to the City Council.
Fletcher’s case was different from many that come before the CRC. She was a crime victim. More typical was the case that followed at this month’s meeting: A man named Ryan Scott Davis alleged that a police officer used excessive force, injured him and denied him medical care.
Davis has a lengthy criminal history including violent crime. At the time of the arrest in question he was armed with a gun and stealing cars.
The CRC continued his case for further investigation.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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You do know people file false reports on other people? I’m sure it didn’t happen, but that’s why there are policies in place and why officers ask for verification. I feel sorry for this woman. If she’s going to the VA hospital, I’d guess she’s got some health problems. She needs reliable transportation.
The courts and politicians don’t care about crime victims unless there’s a photo possibility to take advantage of. She deserves some kind of recompense. Anything involving the DMV
What I intended to say was anything involving the DMV is a potential screw up. The officer’s supervisor might’ve been able to intervene on her behalf. Personally I’m not a fan of the CRC. It’s the DMV that needs more oversight.
Portland Police Commander Tashia Hager, who was at the CRC meeting, explained that there is a problem with people filing false reports and using the police to get back at others. That was not Ms. Fletcher’s case. Her car really was stolen.
CRC member Andrea Chiller suggested that since filing a false police report is a crime, anyone who did so would be subject to arrest and prosecution. That, she said, was a better way to discourage people from making false police reports instead of refusing to take a report.
True, but the threat of arrest and prosecution only works if there is likely to be an arrest and prosecution. Under the concept of justice reinvestment, Oregon DA’s are punished for sending people to prison and rewarded if they don’t. Go over to http://www.OregonDAforthePeople.com and see what progressives want in a DA.
CRC members pored over the fine print on the city’s policy regarding stolen cars. The fact that they had such a long, circuitous discussion underscores how complicated this case was. Several members also believed, like you, that the officer should have called his sergeant for direction. Others believed the officer was correct when he told Fletcher it wouldn’t do any good; his supervisor would tell him to follow policy, and her paperwork didn’t prove ownership under the policy.
It’s not surprising the vote was 5-4. Everyone seemed sympathetic to Fletcher, though. Having her car stolen was a crime.
It is even much worse than described here. Politicians like Jennifer Williamson believes criminals are the real victims of police,prosecutors, the courts, etc. She is destroying our system in her zealotry for criminals, all the while trying to deceive the very people she is supposed to be serving.
Thanks for the comment, John. As you well know, you are one of Williamson’s least favorite District Attorneys. She can’t stand DAs who actually believe their job is to prosecute criminal offenders on behalf of real victims.
Last week when I attended Oregon Humanities’ Think & Drink on Democracy and the Courts, one of the speakers — Oregon Supreme Court Justice Adrienne Nelson — noted, “If you don’t have rule of law, you have chaos.”
We are losing our rule of law, thanks to politicians like Williamson.
I wonder if this woman had a zip code problem. In another neighborhood it might’ve been handled different. East Portland has alot of property crime.
It’s not that police don’t care. They’re more sympathetic to victims than politicians. Some Residents in certain neighborhoods know how to get attention of the right people.
I went out and visited Fletcher’s neighborhood, Hazelwood, after she told me how crime had increased when a new Central City Concern apartment house went up. I may write about it in a future essay. Hazelwood is an example of how the city of Portland’s zeal to help with the “housing crisis” has made some neighborhoods less livable for the law-abiding.
Most of the people in Fletcher’s neighborhood are not criminals. They live where they can afford to live and try to make the best of it. But it doesn’t take too many thieves, burglars or gunshots to hurt a neighborhood.
Who did she vote for?
This crap will continue to happen to us in Portland until we change city hall
That’s an excellent question. I didn’t ask her that point-blank, but I did talk to her about how a Court of Appeals decision had enabled car thieves to thrive, and how key members of the legislature took their time in trying to fix that loophole. She didn’t know any of that.
A lot of Oregonians, especially Portlanders, are uninformed. Part of it is the diminished news media. Another part is the lack of political diversity. In Portland, there’s isn’t much choice. You get to choose among progressive candidates.
Williamson is now running for Secretary of State, and she has seized on “Proven Progressive” as her motto. Obviously she hopes the heavily populated Portland metro area will deliver the state to her.
The unanswered (unasked?) questions here as to whether or not the officer erred is did Fletcher provide contact information for the seller/registered owner and did the officer follow up? If Fletcher did, the officer could have relatively easily checked out her claim and the report could have been taken, albeit delayed due to the extra hurdle. If Fletcher was unable to provide seller information, that is somewhat problematic, but still, the officer could have contacted the registered owner. I’m not sure why this was a 5-4 vote. If the officer made no effort to contact the seller, the officer was in the wrong; if the officer did and the seller refused to respond, then the officer is in the right.
The hearing on this issue went on for at least an hour, and that question did come up. The answer was confusing. Fletcher said the officer did not talk about contacting the seller, but she didn’t urge him to do so. She was focused on the DMV receipt, which turned out not to prove ownership — at least not to the officer and the four Citizen Review Committee members who agreed Fletcher’s complaint was not sustained.
As Commander Hager said, the DMV receipt showed a transaction of replacement title but didn’t prove that Fletcher owned the vehicle yet. In a proper document, Hager said she would have expected to see something from the DMV printed with the agency’s seal. What Fletcher had was just a copy of a receipt.
The five CRC members who sustained the complaint thought it was clear that the DMV document showed a process of transfer of title. The divided vote is an indication of how unclear this was.
As I wrote earlier, though, the one entity who escaped criticism was the thief. Oh, and yes, the appellate judges and the state legislators — one in particular.
Thus spake Journalismtha:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1226073504568795143
I dunno, man. I mean It’s crazy times. Little comic relief from the organization that has give schools in all 50 states the 1619 Project.
Yes, and the organization that thinks Mary Poppins wore blackface will probably win a Pulitzer for that 1619 Project. On a more positive note, there was criticism recently when a South Korean company bought New Seasons. Ultimately, as more foreign owners move in, they will probably shrug off America’s fixation on racist history. It’s not their history.
The coming primacy of Asians and Asian Americans when combined with the fact of Hispanics rising dominance and I predict its going to get dire and real for a few hustlers of color.
As T.L. Jones said in The Fugitive: I don’t care.
Not just Asians and Hispanics, but some of America’s black intellectuals are daring to stand up to The New York Times. This is truly encouraging news:
https://quillette.com/2020/02/17/sorry-new-york-times-but-america-began-in-1776/