From The Oregonian, May 12, 2003

They gathered on Mother’s Day to pray and protest.

The prayers were for Kendra James, a 21-year-old mother of two shot dead by a Portland police officer May 5.

The prayers were sweet and compelling and full of heart.

The protests were forceful and filled with a deep concern for a community whose members said they are tired of a justice system that is anything but just.

“It appears that when it comes to people of color, it’s shoot first and get acquitted later,” said the Rev. Roy L. Tate of Christ Memorial Church of God in Christ, who led the vigil for James, an African American.

Several hundred people crowded around a guardrail on the North Skidmore Street crossing over Interstate 5 that was packed with flowers, messages, stuffed animals and photographs of a beaming James. She died there during a confrontation with three officers before dawn a week ago today.

Police say she jumped behind the wheel of a car they’d stopped for running a stop sign after the driver and another passenger had been removed. As two officers struggled to get James out of the car, she started the engine and tried to drive away, police said. At the time, there was a warrant out for her arrest because she had missed a court date.

As the officers wrestled with her, one tried shocking her with a taser gun, which failed. A third, Officer Scott McCollister, fired one shot from his 9 mm handgun, fatally hitting James in the side.

A police union leader has said McCollister feared for his life as the car moved toward him.

The shooting is under investigation.

To the half-dozen speakers who addressed the crowd, the result of that investigation is a foregone conclusion: justified use of force, another dead member of a minority community and no changes in police policies or attitude.

“We will no longer accept our sons and daughters being shot down in the name of justice,” said Pastor LeRoy Haynes Jr. of the Allen Temple. “Give us the strength. Lord, give us the power to change the system.”

Tate decried the use of grand juries, which he thinks always come down on the officers’ side.

“We’re here to tell the system that we are tired of the system,” he said. “The grand jury is a joke. It’s never indicted a police officer, it never has done justice for a person of color.”

He said he would ask Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk today to allow community members to observe the grand jury hearing so they could ensure that justice was being served. Grand jury proceedings are typically closed to the public.

There was talk of filing a wrongful death lawsuit against the city. People wondered aloud what they should do next. Several asked the same question.

“Why did they have to shoot her?” asked Kimela Green.

The participants sang: Tate led “Amazing Grace” and State Sen. Margaret Carter, D-Portland, led “We Shall Overcome.”

Carter also expressed frustration with police and the justice system.

“This is not just a black thing, it’s a community thing,” she said afterward. “The dignity and integrity that is given to the best of us should also be given to the least of us.”

From The Oregonian, Wednesday, May 7, 2003. This is the first Oregonian news story about the killing of Kendra James.

More than 36 hours after Portland Officer Scott McCollister shot and killed a 21-year-old woman who was attempting to drive away from a traffic stop, Portland police said Tuesday they did not know why he used deadly force but said it appeared the car had run over his foot.

McCollister, a 27-year-old North Precinct officer who joined the bureau in April 2001, has not been interviewed by homicide detectives. He did not receive medical attention at the scene or at Northeast Precinct, where he was taken after the shooting, said Sgt. Brian Schmautz, Portland Police Bureau spokesman.

Schmautz said detectives, who have interviewed two other officers who were at the scene and two men who were in the car that was pulled over, received “consistent information that McCollister had appeared to be injured.”

Asked what that meant, Schmautz said, “Nobody did an examination of him, but he was hobbling. It appeared he had sustained an injury to his foot.”

The investigation into the fatal shooting of Kendra Sarie James continued Tuesday with interviews and examination of evidence. Police released few other details of the shooting, other than the names of the officers involved, and identified the weapon McCollister fired as a 9 mm handgun.

James, police said, had slipped behind the driver’s seat of a rented 2002 Chevrolet Cavalier after the car was pulled over by North Precinct Officer Rick Bean, 23. Bean stopped the car on North Skidmore Street, on the Interstate 5 overpass, for a “minor traffic violation” about 2:40 a.m. Monday. Police have repeatedly refused to identify the alleged violation.

Bean had taken the driver out of the car and was checking his identity when McCollister and North Precinct Officer Kenneth Reynolds III, 26, arrived. According to police, they saw James slide into the Chevrolet’s driver’s seat. Both officers, while standing on the driver’s side of the car, struggled with James to stop her from driving away. Reynolds fired a taser gun at her to subdue her. McCollister fired a single round from his 9 mm service pistol at James. Police have not said where McCollister stood when he fired or explained why he decided to use deadly force, other than saying it appeared McCollister’s foot was struck by the car.

“We won’t have a full, complete understanding until we interview him,” Schmautz said Tuesday. Under union guidelines, officers have the right to obtain a private attorney before being questioned by detectives.

The car traveled about 70 yards east in the eastbound lane of North Skidmore Street and came to a stop, blocked by two patrol cars.

James was taken by ambulance to Legacy Emanuel Hospital & Health Center, where she was pronounced dead from a single chest wound.

State law and Police Bureau policy states that officers can use deadly force “to protect themselves or others from what they reasonably believe to be an immediate threat of death or serious physical injury.”

Bureau policy also says an officer may shoot at a moving vehicle if, “in the totality of the situation, the additional risks are clearly outweighed by the need to use physical force.”

James’ parents said she probably was trying to get away from police. Records show that Multnomah County had a warrant for her arrest on charges of failure to appear in court and possession of a controlled substance. Her boyfriend, 41-year-old Darnell White, who was also in the car, was taken into custody on two arrest warrants at the pre-dawn traffic stop Monday but not booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center until shortly after 7 p.m.

White was arraigned Tuesday morning on charges of failure to appear in court on an April allegation of attempted possession of a controlled substance. He also was charged Monday with interfering with a peace officer. The charges were reduced to violations, but White was being held on a probation violation.

A second man who was in the car at the time of the traffic stop was interviewed by police but not held, Schmautz said. Police refused to identify him.

The three officers involved, who have been bureau employees for 2-1/2 years or less, are on paid administrative leave until the investigation is done. The results of the investigation, handled by the bureau, the East County Major Crime Team and Multnomah County district attorney’s office, will be presented to a grand jury for review.

Police Chief Mark Kroeker declined to comment on the shooting, citing the ongoing investigation. Schmautz said he was unable to release details, partly because the district attorney’s office “controls the grand jury process and investigation.”

His statement, though, fuels the concerns of members of [Portland] Copwatch, a police watchdog group, which has long argued for an independent citizens’ review, apart from the district attorney’s office, of police shootings.

“It would be very good to have that investigated sooner, rather than later, by the Citizen Review Committee,” said Dan Handelman, of Copwatch.

The City Council did not give the nine-member citizen committee the authority to investigate police shootings. Instead, it hired outside experts to do a review of 27 Portland police shootings that occurred between January 1997 and July 2000. That report is due in July.

Unsigned opinion editorial, The Oregonian, May 7, 2003

Critics said it would be a lapdog for the Portland Police Bureau. And it’s true that, in its first year of operations, the Independent Police Review Division hasn’t found the occasion to do much snarling. Nevertheless, we think the division has demonstrated that there’s a happy medium between being a poodle and being a pit bull.

The true test of the division, in some ways, will come late this summer, with the much-anticipated release of a report on 32 police-involved shootings and two deaths in custody between 1997 and mid-2000. The recommendations that emerge from that report, and the degree to which Portland police heed the advice, will establish whether citizens will truly get their money’s worth from the $589,000 division.

Police should be open to hearing some new ideas, in light of the police shooting this week that took the life of 21-year-old Kendra James. Police said she was shot after she resisted officers and tried to drive away in a car that had been stopped for a “routine” traffic violation. James’ family has expressed great skepticism about the actions of police, however, and early reports suggest they may have reason to do so.

Admittedly, many police shootings fall into the terrible crevasse that Merrick Bobb, director of the Los Angeles-based Police Assessment Resource Center, has described as “lawful but awful.” Bobb is coordinating Portland’s report on police shootings.

If life-and-death complaints are perhaps the most pressing to resolve, one of the most common complaints over the past year was a simple one — rude behavior. Across the nation, this is a frequent and typical complaint, according to Richard Rosenthal, the former prosecutor who heads the Portland division.

The division’s 168-page annual report, provided to the Portland City Council on Tuesday, sorted police complaints in just about every possible permutation, drawing rare praise from Mayor Vera Katz, who called it one of the best reports she’d ever seen. Commissioner Erik Sten, who hasn’t always been a fan of the police, said later that his general sense is that the division is “doing an excellent job.”

Some tension was evident between the managers of the division, however, and the nine-member Citizen Review Committee, set up to hear complaints. Clearly, some in the group are straining at the administrative leash. And yet even these signs of friction seemed to prove critics wrong in imagining that the Independent Police Review Division could never be independent.

We agree with Sten that some friction is inevitable, maybe even healthy. Many citizens will naturally continue to look at the division as offering them a chance to vent. But Rosenthal and Auditor Gary Blackmer, who oversees the division, are more interested in being quietly influential than they are in barking for the sake of barking.

One year isn’t really long enough to judge whether their approach — their hope to be a different sort of police watchdog — is yielding real results. But so far, so good.

By Robert Landauer – editorial columnist for The Oregonian, May 6, 2003. Not available elsewhere online.

Any darn-fool manager can make an agency look good when taxes flood in like high tide at full moon. When the tax tide ebbs, though, it takes brains, skill and grit to perform like a star.

As one who has often flayed Multnomah County’s mental -health programs, I have to confess: The county’s delivery of care to poor mentally ill residents is a virtuoso turnaround performance in our deep recession.

Let’s set the scene: The news here for several years reported uncoordinated mental -health services, impossibly large caseloads, a controversial closing of the crisis triage center and a plague of suicides among mental -health clients. The county jail was the Portland area’s largest mental -illness treatment center. Services were cruelly fragmented. They weren’t a system because the gears of interrelated health, mental health, courts, jail, housing, employment, alcohol/drug and Social Security components didn’t mesh.

Bev Stein, county chairwoman four years ago, launched a study that triggered an extensive reform process. Diane Linn, her successor as county chairwoman, staked her political reputation on carrying on with a large but unsettling reorganization despite budget woes.

Begin with a few numbers: About 70,000 low-income county residents were eligible until recently for the Oregon Health Plan; 13,000 received mental health services. State budget cuts have ended 20,000 people’s eligibility. The county has had to cut its mental -health patient load down to about 9,000 people. Some patients’ mental illnesses flare up several times a year, so the 9,000 patients account for a caseload of 2,600 mental -health interactions with the county each month.

Next, recognize that early help stops most mental disturbances before they become public as well as personal crises: jailings and hospitalizations; loss of jobs, housing and benefits; drug/alcohol abuse; personal isolation; and criminal victimization.

Now, accept as auditor-certified truth that treating mental -illness upheavals early is hugely less expensive and far kinder than coping with late-stage crises in hospitals and jails, then trying to build secure support systems for patients leaving confinement.

So, what has changed?

The total days per month that the county’s low-income mentally ill patients are in acute-care hospital beds is the indicator of choice. The better the community-based supports, the more surely early interventions will shrink the need for hospital care.

In April 2002, the county paid for 805 mental-health hospital days. The total climbed to 919 hospital days in May and peaked at 1,054 in June. At an average $700 a day, the peak-month bill was $737,800 — close to $9 million a year if that trend weren’t reversed.

But as reforms have gained traction over the past year, a chart showing mental -health bed days looks like a fairly steep ski slope viewed from the top. Bed days have fallen almost steadily, to 445, or $311,500, in March. That is almost 60 percent less than the peak-month bill — money that more usefully can be shifted to prevention.

Some heavyweight new or expanded services aiding this about-face are the 24-hour crisis line offering brief counseling and information about where to go for help; a 24-hour crisis walk-in clinic and a child and family after-hours walk-in clinic; and Project Respond, which has become a countywide culturally competent child/family/adult mobile outreach service.

One of the most striking advances is that county workers now know where every mental -health patient is hospitalized and begin coordinating supportive, stabilizing services for them right away. This is progress that few of us in 2000 thought possible this soon.

“For the first time, I feel like we have a system worth fighting for,” says Commissioner Lisa Naito, a hard worker on mental -health issues in the county’s criminal justice system.

But it is a fact, not a threat, that the county can’t maintain programs and extend reforms that keep mentally ill people out of hospitals and jails unless voters support Measure 26-48 in the May 20 mail election.

“For us dealing with mental health, Measure 26-48 is about saving money,” says Linn, the county chair.