If a mentally ill man – armed with a weapon or just his fists, legs and deranged anger – had burst into the meeting hall where the Community Oversight Advisory Board recently gathered, there’s no doubt who would have been expected to deal with him.
The police.
Five Portland police officers are on the 20-member Community Oversight Advisory Board. Although the officers don’t have voting privileges – they are, after all, the ones being subjected to oversight – they attend the meetings. Usually a couple more cops are sitting in the audience. At the Nov. 12th meeting Chief Larry O’Dea was present for a while.
One of the audience regulars – Dan Handelman of Portland CopWatch – was also present. Would Handelman, a long-time critic of the police, try to negotiate with someone threatening violence? Or would he figure that’s what the cops are paid to do?
The Portland Police Bureau is under a federal court order to change how it interacts with the mentally ill, after an investigation found the department has engaged in excessive force. According to a settlement agreement last year, Portland has five years to meet various requirements, including changes in training, policies and oversight. This is where the Community Oversight Advisory Board comes in.
Other settlement agreements across the country have involved a court-appointed monitor or a member of the Justice Department to act as oversight. Not in Portland, Ore.
The state of Oregon and the city of Portland love task forces. Everybody gets to have a say (respectfully, of course). In reality, opinions are like you-know-what, and everybody’s got one.
“Fuck this!” declared Teressa Raiford, of Don’t Shoot Portland, when she thought the police had hijacked one of the first meetings with a presentation on their positive activities.
Shortly after that meeting, the chairman – retired state Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul DeMuniz – resigned citing alleged “health” issues. Smart move.
This task force has become a divisive force. There’s an air of tribalism to this board, where every presumed “protected class” or self-declared community within the community has to be represented because nobody else can possibly understand their needs, wants and rights.
Because there are so many members, it’s logistically difficult for the chair – even a former chief justice – to run the meetings. As it is, the member representing the deaf community needs two translators at each meeting, so that’s two more bodies at the table. How many deaf people live in Portland, and how often do they interact with police? Is it necessary to have a deaf person on the community board – or is this simply tokenism?
Media interest in the Community Oversight Advisory Board has dwindled. The earlier meetings attracted publicity and turnout. One of the better, recent stories about the board was by Emily Green in the Portland weekly, Street Roots, distributed by homeless vendors. That story looked at why some members of the police oversight board were quitting.
It quotes former member Sharon Maxwell, who is black, complaining that the board was set up to fail. With members like her, possibly so. I encountered Maxwell a couple of years ago at a meeting of Race Talks 2, sponsored by Portland Public Schools’ Office of Equity, where she sought to educate me on why the word “gangstah” was not negative. Her son has been in prison so it’s not surprising she would want to see it that way.
It could be that what bothered Maxwell was that the focus of the police oversight board was on the mentally ill – not blacks. At the June 25th meeting I attended, the board meeting was interrupted by a Black Lives Matter protest.
Perhaps Maxwell and some of the other members came on board thinking they were going to have the power to get back at the cops. As earlier news accounts noted, many of the members chosen for the oversight board were racial or sexual minorities who’d had previous encounters with police. That hardly makes for objectivity.
It didn’t help when Mayor Charlie Hales and City Commissioner Amanda Fritz lavished high expectations on board members. Fritz even told the Portland Tribune the board “would make Portland a safer place for people experiencing mental illnesses.”
Board members were given a huge ego stroke by attorney Jonas Geissler of the U.S. Department of Justice who called their process “innovative” and said they were playing a role that could change policing nationally.
Now there is growing discontent among board members because they are not even paid.
The latest meeting, held at Portland Community College’s Southeast Center Campus, was a prolonged, dreary affair punctuated by the smell of Ranch salad dressing. Held in the school’s Community Hall, the members and ancillary staff were situated around long tables that formed a square U, with the audience seated at the open end, and behind them a table of deviled eggs, veggies and wrap sandwiches. The presence of food, with the audience grazing along with the board members, lent a casual air to the proceedings.
Much of the meeting was taken up with what’s referred to in public-meeting jargon as housekeeping – questions about procedures, bylaws and unresolved issues.
Kathleen Saadat, who replaced DeMuniz as chair of the board, gave an elaborate apology for … what? It was hard to tell.
Saadat apologized for her behavior at the Nov. 9 accountability sub-committee meeting “not for what I did but how I did it. … It complicated things and made people feel disrespected.” She also apologized for an e-mail exchange that put at risk the requirements regarding public meeting laws.
The sub-committee meetings are poorly attended by the public and even members of the board. Her apology made little sense and was a distraction.
No sooner had she finished apologizing, then member Se-ah-dom Edmo read “Guidelines for Maintaining Common Ground.”
The guidelines for common ground included do’s and don’ts like “share the air” and “avoid putdowns (even humorous ones)” and “recognize the legitimacy of people’s feelings.”
This was followed by more motions, some seconded, (in one case, “thirded”) some not seconded, some passing, some not regarding the definition of ratings in the quarterly report, whether a subcommittee without a quorum can make recommendations and whether the board should continue to file quarterly reports or move to semi-annual reports.
The third and last hour was devoted to a presentation by members of the Portland Police Bureau Behavioral Health Unit on how it trains for crisis intervention, and how it works with licensed mental health clinicians. By the time it concluded, the meeting was winding down, and there were 10 minutes left for questions.
Amidst this drawn-out affair a legitimate issue was raised by a couple of board members as well as audience regulars, Handelman of CopWatch and JoAnn Hardesty of the NAACP. They questioned a state medical examiner’s ruling earlier this month that a distraught man who was shot by police died by suicide.
Why wasn’t Michael Gregory Johnson’s death classified as a homicide since he was shot by another person, they asked.
The issue was not explored, and it’s too bad. It’s hard to have a credible discussion, however, if you have a history of denouncing the cops (as Handelman and Hardesty have), or if you’ve laid down so many ground rules about the appropriate way to communicate that almost anything you say can be construed by someone as being hurtful.
The phrase “suicide by cop” has been around for more than two decades. The first time I used it as a reporter in the mid-1990’s, I remember a cop pointing out to me that cops do kill themselves and, properly speaking, that would be “a suicide by cop.” He suggested that perhaps a better term when someone who wants to die and threatens a cop into shooting him would be “police-assisted suicide.”
That this issue even exists says something about what cops have to deal with. It’s the consequence of closing state mental institutions. Those closures weren’t made by police; they were the result of decades of political decisions by Republicans and Democrats, in some cases encouraged by mental health professionals.
Actually, we’re all living with those decisions – not just the cops. Yet too much of the work involving the mentally ill is protected by privacy laws. That’s unfortunate because it allows the “mental health professionals” to parcel out only what they want the public to know. What don’t they want people to know?
A few things: how much attention and money can be spent on just one crazy person with negligible results; how little mental health professionals actually know about the mentally ill; how smart and calculating some of the mentally ill are.
This past summer a brief glimpse into this world was on display in a public hearing on Oregon’s north coast. It involved a woman diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic with Borderline Personality Disorder. She has been provided housing, along with a staff of mental health professionals stationed nearby to assist her 24/7. (The monthly cost exceeds $20,000. A group home for one?)
This woman has Hepatitis C, a contagious blood-borne illness, and likes to go into public restrooms and cut herself. When this happens, the mental health professionals call emergency personnel and police.
Imagine if a woman like this showed up at the Community Oversight Advisory Board. If she didn’t like the way the proceedings were going, she could whip out a cutting implement and go to work on a vein. Who in the meeting room would reach out to her?
Perhaps Dr. Rochelle Silver, a clinical psychologist, who has previously worked at Dammasch State Hospital and Oregon State Hospital. As a member of the oversight board she has counseled police to be more respectful to the mentally ill.
Her expertise may not be very helpful in the context of today’s policing. It’s one thing to work with the mentally in a controlled environment like a mental hospital; it’s another to deal with them in public where there are also bystanders and witnesses who may need protection.
Dammasch, like many state mental hospitals, has closed and been demolished. The drugs that psychiatric professionals in the 1960s and 1970s thought were going to cure mental illness didn’t work miracles after all. Even worse, substance abuse among the non-mentally ill has become epidemic. We now have self-induced mental illness.
Having a police department under siege won’t help public safety.
The one group that is not represented among the voting members of the Community Oversight Advisory Board is just ordinary Portlanders, trying to live and work peacefully, hoping they’ll never need the cops but want them available if needed. These everyday folks have been superseded by the noisier and better organized anti-cop contingent.
As it is, we are approaching a time when police won’t even be able to profile the mentally ill as “mentally ill.”
How insane is that?
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/07/portland_police_officer_ignore.html
Solution just make sure all the police at the meeting are officially off duty.
Thanks, Tom. I had forgotten about that caper. I could see something like that also happening with the San Francisco Police Department but rarely with the kind of kick-ass cops I dealt with in San Bernardino (many of whom never seemed to go off-duty, which is a different kind of problem).
It may be that the weirdest thing about Portland is its police department. I would not want to be a cop here.
I recently rewatched “Prince of the City,” a great movie based on a true story about police corruption in New York. By the end of the film, there’s nobody left to root for.
This commission is a disaster. Kathleen needs to resign. She can’t run the meetings. Her civil rights credentials aren’t what’s needed. There are too many blacks on the commission and they’re concerned about blacks. Shoot me for saying so. I don’t care. My beautiful smart son was diagnosed with mental illness his freshman year in college. He’s OK on his meds except he doesn’t like his meds. The cops can’t make him take his meds. Nobody can except when he was in a facility in Washington state. He’s not on the streets now but I worry when I’m no longer around, he will be. You’re too kind to PPB. A very strange police dept. It’s like they’re independent contractors. They need to speak out and demand facilities. The mentally ill do not belong on the streets. They need medical attention and a place to stay safely inside a building with people who can firmly handle them should the need arise.
The police as “independent contractors.” Interesting observation. The impression I have is that working for Portland police would require you to constantly check your back for knives.
It is too bad that the police union (like teachers’ unions, which are equally powerful) don’t use their influence better. They are primarily concerned with protecting pay, benefits and job security — and not trying to work for substantive policy changes, like pushing for the return of mental institutions, which served a useful and humane purpose.
Mentally ill people like your son do not belong in a homeless camp or a homeless shelter or perhaps not even his own apartment (James Chasse had his own room and visits from a social worker; it didn’t keep him safe).
Like you say, a mental facility can be the best place for some of the mentally ill. A mental facility can be a home, too. However, groups such as the ACLU and NAMI have succeeded in establishing civil rights for the mentally ill, and now some of their success stories are living on the streets.
Believe we just bumped into one another at the Oregonlive comments around TNC. I wrote something but nothing I hadn’t said better here earlier.
Jeez, that is one censorious comments section. I have never written anything there that I would not have published under my name or that has transgressed their rules, but they delete my comments more often than not.
Handelman, Raiford, and especially Hardesty are not helpful to the community. Generally, what they are good at is elevating themselves and their interests and to the degree that they can, steering the beast that they create and/or feed.
It is clearly no longer a rational time. Adult behavior, rational solutions and informed thinking are gone and I suspect not coming back in my lifetime.
Your pointing out the group that is not represented, ordinary Portlanders, is vital. However, increasingly the ordinary Portlander is an immigrant from some other urban center and deeply sympathetic to those valiant social justice warriors now occupying university and college admin offices locally and nationwide. Indeed, many are those SJWs.
This is in part because of the economy (ESCO just lost 270 odd, I think. Many of them high school educated blue collar folks who could afford to raise a family and own a home here). And it is in part due to the policy of this city to drive out blue collar work/light industry.
The fix for much of what you discuss above is the rebuilding of a mental health system that does confine many that now roam the street.
It is difficult to come up with solutions that are not comparatively draconian (relative to now).
The emphasis on diversity has resulted in a police force that looks less able to physically manage many situations. Moreover, I do not believe most of the social scientists, community activists, and whatnot that I see or have met have experience in managing dangerous or potentially dangerous people. Two friends were jumped by a mentally ill man with a knife and more or less my size in Forest Park a couple years ago. City policy had let this clearly mentally ill man reside in the parkland. He went from a somnolent passivity that allowed them to walk by on patrol for two or three months to 6 feet and 200 pounds of adult male slasher faster than you can snap your fingers. Extensive hospitalization was required for one of my friends and the nutter. It could have been much, much worse.
Many vid clips are on the internet of helpless and hapless teachers trying to restore order in a classroom and failing badly.The young teacher in Massachusetts who was raped and murdered by a mentally ill student who did “unspeakable things” to her body was clearly not expecting that management situation to go out of control. You can be certain,too that a good chance exists that should she have expressed anxiety about what turned out to be a murderous nutter her white privilege would’ve been put under question. Doubtless she would have received the benefits of counseling.
I went out of town for the holiday, and while having breakfast in a restaurant with some friends, I offered my theory that a new word will enter the lexicon: Obamacrime.
It isn’t just that Obama visited a federal prison and encouraged the early release of inmates. It’s that he and his associates have helped turn our standards upside down, and a couple of years from now we will start to see the results. The men and women who occupy the editorial board of the New York Times and who have cheered on these changes won’t feel these results. Neither will our friends at NPR. The folks living in the inner city or in the shabbier suburbs will pay the price. “Violent crime” will have to be redefined so crime data will support political narratives. Burglary will no longer be a felony (it’s practically treated like a misdemeanor now).
Anyway, when I explained this to my friends, one of them held her hands over her ears and start singing, “La-la-la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-a-thing …”
My friend is a well-educated world-traveler who voted for Obama because she thought it would help black Americans feel more connected to America. (I voted for him because he wasn’t as bad as the other guy.) She cannot be labeled liberal or conservative. But she absolutely did not want to hear anything that could remotely be construed as racist (particularly uttered in a public place).
It’s going to take a passage of time and another generation to come along and look at us and realize how phony the times are that we are living in. All this talk about “having a conversation.” What kind of conversation can you have when the dialogue has to be politically pre-approved?
Your comment, “The emphasis on diversity has resulted in a police force that looks less able to physically manage many situations” reminded me of columnist Leonard Pitts’ call for police to be better educated.
Well, the cop who unjustifiably killed a 12-year-old boy in a Cleveland park had a degree in sociology and criminology. This man was unfit to be a cop and had been dismissed from another department because he easily freaked out at the firing range. In this case, a degree in sociology and criminology turned out to be a false, but politically-approved, standard.
I think about some of the cops I’ve known — older, gruffer guys who were brawlers in their high school days. I don’t think they would have been so quick to reach for their gun. But they were also irreverent and plain spoken, making them unacceptable by today’s standards.
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