From OPB.com, November 30, 2006

Portland city commissioners approved funding Wednesday to train police officers to deal more sensitively with mentally ill people. The $250,000 is a fraction of the city money available thanks to higher-than-expected tax collections.

The training became a city council priority after a mentally ill man died in police custody this fall.

Steve Weiss is an advocate for the disabled. He says the training may be meant to avoid another death like James Chasse‘s, but he says police should use the techniques for anyone they think is behaving erratically.

Steve Weiss: “Crisis intervention training techniques must also be utilized for all those suspected to be on drugs or drunk. To put it another way: If drugs or alcohol had been found in James Chasse junior’s system, would that have justified what happened to him after he was arrested? We don’t think so.”

The council vote on the nearly $11 million supplemental budget included a bureaucratic shuffle of more than 120 employees. Supportive commissioners say it will improve how the city serves Portland’s water customers.

From the Portland Mercury, November 26, 2006

The official police investigative reports into the in-custody death of James Philip Chasse Jr. on September 17 appear to have ignored—or at least heavily re-interpreted—the direct testimony of several independent witnesses.

The police investigation found that Chasse was killed because Officer Christopher Humphreys “accidentally fell” on him, as Sergeant Kyle Nice and Sheriff Deputy Brett Burton ran to catch up. But several witnesses—in separate transcripts of their statements released on November 9, alongside the cops’ official investigation—said the cops “leapt” on or “tackled” Chasse. (The Multnomah County Grand Jury, on October 17, did not find the officers criminally liable for his death.)

The collected documents, which weighed several pounds, were not made available in electronic form, and were only being given out in bundles last week to media that had requested them weeks in advance. The cops defended the eight-week delay between Chasse’s death and the release of the documents, saying they wanted to be fair in releasing the investigation to all media simultaneously. They also said it took a while to ensure all medical information was expunged, as required under federal law.

The witness statements paint a vivid picture of what happened on September 17.

“As soon as the guy was down, he basically leapt, leaped on him,” said witness Justin Soltani of one of the officers, in a phone interview with detectives on September 24. But Detective Jon Rhodes‘ separate investigative report said, “Soltani believed the officer fell on the subject he was chasing, stating, ‘The officer was half twisted on him,’” making no reference to Soltani’s description of the officer who “leapt.”

Another witness told the investigator a similar story. Rhodes’ question was, “Can you tell what the catalyst for him going to the ground is? Was it a push, was it a trip or, or could you tell, did they just all of a sudden kinda all go down?” Diane Loghry said, in a telephone interview with Rhodes on September 21: “He went down because three guys were on top of him.” But Rhodes’ report of Loghry’s testimony waters down the account to “she saw officers take the subject to the ground.”

“I saw them throw him down to the ground,” witness Jamie Marquez told the police on September 24. “It was like a… a football tackle, like you know, a… a nose guard tackling into the quarterback, kinda just throwin’ him to the ground.”

Detective Lynn Courtney‘s write-up of Marquez’s testimony, however, only says he “observed three police officers chasing Chasse and watched them tackle him to the ground at that intersection.”

Witness Randall Stuart told the police on September 21 that “the three men in uniform were able to gain on him enough to leap upon… I think it’s fair to say everybody leapt upon him.” Courtney’s report, once again, tempers the testimony, writing that Stuart saw “the three pursuing officers jump on the individual, causing them all to fall to the ground.”

Another red flag raised in the investigative report is the testimony of another witness, Constance Doolan, which indicates that one of the officers lied to her about Chasse’s historic use of drugs. Doolan says an officer on the scene told her Chasse had “14 former convictions for crack cocaine,” and how he and his colleagues “found a vial of crack cocaine” on Chasse that afternoon.

Chasse had no drugs on him or in his bloodstream, according to the autopsy and police reports. But the investigating officers do not appear to have asked Doolan which officer told her this, or for a description of him to try to ascertain who he was. From the investigation’s transcripts, their only response to her story about an officer’s apparent fabrication was, “Um-hm.”

Chasse’s lawyer, Tom Steenson, says the cops have not “had the common courtesy” yet to send him a copy of the investigation and witness transcripts they have released to the media. He does say, however, that what the transcripts appear to reveal is not surprising.

“If the detectives are summarizing witnesses’ statements in this way, it is consistent with the approach of the city and police bureau so far,” he says. “Consistently, from the moment this matter became public, the police bureau and the city have put out information that is false and not accurate in terms of what witnesses saw.”

“The detective’s summaries are not designed to reinterpret or summarize the witnesses’ statements,” says the Portland Police Bureau’s Public Information Officer Brian Schmautz. “There is no attempt to change, delude, or decrease what is said, nor any intent of subterfuge. If you’re suggesting the detectives are attempting to be sneaky, that is why we have released the transcripts—for the sake of transparency.”

As far as the allegations of lying about Chasse’s drug use are concerned, while it is rare for officers to be fired for use of force, they have been sacked for lying. In May and June of 1999, the bureau fired Officers Kenneth Ellison and Donald Warren, after one denied reversing into a light pole in a parking lot, and the other called in sick when he was not.

“Usually officers don’t get fired for use of force, but for lying, cheating, or stealing,” says Portland Copwatch activist Dan Handelman. Of Doolan’s testimony, he says: “This is just one witness statement, but if it happened, then it’s pretty outrageous.”

“The police have repeatedly attempted to suggest that drugs were involved,” says Steenson, who is still considering the possibility of a civil lawsuit with the Chasse family, “and that somehow, suspicion of drug use would justify what they did.”

“I cannot explain that comment,” says Schmautz. “There is no information that any of these officers had had contact with Chasse, so why would someone say that? Either it is somehow a misinterpretation of what was said, or it is wrong.”

Published in The Oregonian – November 21, 2006. The author is David Anderson, at the time a detective sergeant in the Portland Police Bureau’s East Precinct. Not available elsewhere online.

This op ed is reproduced here as it was an initial response by the PPB to public criticism of individual officers and the Bureau after the brutal beating death of James Chasse.

Will 2007 be the year community policing died in the city of Portland? If 2006 is any indication, it’s a distinct possibility.

This has been a year of constant attacks in the media on law enforcement in this city. Sandwiched between coverage of flu pandemics, rainstorms and lost hikers were a stream of negative stories about local police. Coupled with a severe decline in police resources, this barrage of attacks has made it increasingly difficult to be a police officer in Portland and may well usher in the end of the community policing successes of the past decade.

Through the years, Portland has become more tolerant of crime and more permissive. Significant and influential segments of this city really don’t care for police officers. They’re viewed as brutal, under-trained knuckle-draggers who engage in racial profiling as a matter of routine. In this view, police officers are not motivated by an altruistic desire to help others and improve the community, but by dark motives that need to be exposed and corrected.

Several times this year members of the Portland City Council have engaged in open dialogue in support of this negative view of its own law enforcement professionals. But this negative depiction is completely contrary to any open-minded analysis of fact.

Crime in Portland is down 20 percent to 30 percent from two years ago. On the east side of town, burglary and other property crimes have dropped almost 60 percent in the past two years. The scourge of meth-related crimes in the city also has declined dramatically –admittedly with the help of extensive coverage of the epidemic by The Oregonian and local TV. But this drop in crime was not solely a result of news coverage. It required police officers who care about the community, who want to be proactive and connect with local neighborhood associations, business owners and citizens.

This reduction in crime has come at a time of incredible economic and population growth in Portland, while the number of police officers has not kept pace with that growth –with the full knowledge of the mayor and City Council.

In 1996, the Portland Police Bureau’s East Precinct was authorized to have a staff of 110 sworn officers to patrol the area mostly east of 82nd Avenue. According to city planners, in the past 10 years at least 10,000 living units were permitted and built in East Precinct. This infill increased the population of the precinct by a minimum of 24,000 people. These new residents created a commensurate demand on law enforcement resources, as they did on other social infrastructure such as water, sewers, streets and 9-1-1 calls for assistance. But police staffing levels have not kept pace with this growth. The number of sworn officers at East Precinct is 90 –20 fewer than in 1996. That is approximately 60 fewer officers than nationally accepted ratios show are required to meet basic community needs.

These factors affect the application and implementation of community policing. The average police officer has been asked to do more with less in this city for a decade. At the same time we have been faced with a constant negative background noise from the media. We are asked to take on more responsibility while being second-guessed and criticized at every step.

I’ve begun to notice that some of the finest of Portland’s finest are beginning to wonder if being a police officer in this city is worth it. And 2007 very well could be the year inscribed on the bottom of the tombstone belonging to community policing. With the help of the media, we could begin to restore the symbiotic relationship between law enforcement and the community that used to exist.

From The Oregonian, November 20, 2006

SERIES: MENTAL HEALTH: A SYSTEM UNDER STREETS (Second of two parts)

The fraying of Oregon’s mental health safety net in the past few years has forced more chronically ill people into crisis situations that play out in hospital emergency rooms, courts and jails.

It also intensifies an already heated debate over civil commitment, the use of a court order to keep a mentally ill person in the hospital against his or her will for up to 180 days.

Civil commitment laws, designed as a buffer between the mental health system and the criminal justice system, date to the 19th century. But their tone has changed sharply over the years.

Oregon law allows involuntary hospitalization only for mentally ill people who pose an immediate danger to themselves or others. But defining “dangerous” is tricky, said Dr. Neil Falk, a psychiatrist and medical director for crisis services at Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare, the largest provider of mental health care in Multnomah County. “That’s a very subjective term.”

Civil commitment of a person who refuses treatment poses a clash between two lofty principles: the right of an individual to be left alone and the societal need to protect people from harm, even from themselves. Lately, the outcome has tilted toward the individual.

“There are a lot of tough issues in mental health, but that one is the most contentious,” said Lee Carty, spokeswoman for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C. The controversy reflects a mental health system that is increasingly crisis-driven, she said.

“In the 1960s, we decided to empty the state hospitals,” said Phil Chadsey, an attorney who works with Oregon’s chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “Basically, we put many of the mentally ill on the streets because we didn’t fund outpatient services for them. It’s a long, sad story.”

A recent high-profile case in Portland raises questions about how police deal with people who are mentally ill. James P. Chasse Jr., 42, a man with schizophrenia, died Sept. 17 in police custody. The officers who confronted Chasse said they did not realize he was mentally ill.

In the aftermath, Portland Mayor Tom Potter and Police Chief Rosie Sizer vowed to give all officers training in dealing with the mentally ill. With recent cutbacks in mental health coverage and services, including critical cuts in the past three years, police increasingly find themselves on those front lines.

People see others on the street who are mentally ill and not doing well, and they wonder why the courts don’t step in, said Mike Morris, a policy manager for the state Mental Health and Addiction Services division. But civil commitment means taking away someone’s liberty even though that person hasn’t committed a crime. “That’s why it’s a tough standard.”

“It’s always a balancing act,” said Dr. Joseph Bloom, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University. Bloom recently studied trends in civil commitment over the past 20 years in Oregon and concluded that it’s becoming something of a legal endangered species.

A civil commitment typically begins when doctors or police bring a patient in crisis to a hospital for an emergency “hold” of up to five days. A county investigator looks into whether the person should be released or given a civil commitment hearing before a judge –who can order a psychiatric hospital stay of up to 180 days.

The number of holds in Oregon doubled between 1983 and 2003. But the commitment rate is half what it was 20 years ago, Bloom said.

In other words, fewer people placed on hold are moving to the next stage: a commitment hearing. Theoretically, that might be because they stabilize their lives with no need to stay in a hospital.

Unfortunately, that’s not what usually happens, Bloom said.

“When you decrease civil commitments, as we have, you get more people in jail,” he said. “We’ve directed a lot of mentally ill people either into the criminal justice system or onto the streets.”

Between 10 percent and 15 percent of people jailed nationwide have a severe mental illness, according to a U.S. Justice Department guide for police published in May. A recent state report in Oregon found estimated that 20 percent of all jail and prison inmates have a mental illness.

“The jails are considered the biggest psychiatric holding areas,” said Circuit Judge Lewis Lawrence, who hears most civil commitment cases in Multnomah County.

Fate decided in Room 220

No one commands, “All rise,” when Lawrence enters Courtroom 220 in the Multnomah County Courthouse. He wears a white shirt and tie –no black judicial robe –and presides from an ordinary chair across an oval conference table from the patient.

It’s here in Room 220 that some of the county’s most vexing medical-legal-social interactions play out, in hearings that decide whether someone with a mental disorder should be civilly committed. The informality of the setting is aimed at making the proceedings less intimidating, Lawrence said.

An Oregon Court of Appeals ruling last month shows how hard it is to hospitalize a person against his will, even one who is delusional.

The appeals court overturned the involuntary commitment of a 29-year-old man with schizophrenia, Thomas R. Olsen. Olsen, who reported seeing leprechauns, had been hospitalized repeatedly. He had heard voices since he was 11 years old.

A county investigator concluded that Olsen was “totally unable to assist in any discharge planning or realistic discussion of his future,” could not identify his medicines and had not arranged for outpatient care or a place to live.

But at his commitment hearing, Olsen asked to be released, saying he could take care of himself.

Two psychological examiners found Olsen delusional and potentially dangerous to himself. Judge Lawrence agreed and ordered him committed for 180 days.

Olsen appealed, and the Court of Appeals backed him.

“Delusional or eccentric behavior –even behavior that may be inherently risky –is not necessarily sufficient to warrant commitment,” concluded Judge Jack Landau, writing for the court. Civil commitment is “not intended to be used as a ‘paternalistic vehicle’ to ‘save people from themselves,’ ” he said.

Civil commitment “should not be a dumping ground for a failed mental health system,” said Lance Perdue, Olsen’s lawyer. “The courts are making a statement: You can’t just have people locked up because they can’t get services.”

“There’s a real struggle going on right now,” Lawrence said, adding that the Olsen case typifies an intensifying dispute. When he started hearing civil commitment cases eight years ago, the Court of Appeals hardly ever overruled him.

That has changed dramatically.

“It has gone from a flood of affirmations to a flood of reversals,” said Lawrence, 55, a judge for 22 years. “A lot of mentally ill people are going out on the street. The Court of Appeals believes they are protecting the freedom of the individual. But there’s more than liberty at stake here.”

A divisive trend

Civil libertarians hail the decades-long trend away from institutionalized care and civil commitment for those who refuse care. They say eccentric, reckless, even threatening behavior –without clear and immediate danger such as knife wielding –is not grounds for taking away someone’s freedom and forcing treatment.

Others say the pendulum has swung too far, depriving patients of needed treatment and allowing some, as one psychiatrist put it, “to die with their rights on.”

During the fiscal year ending June 30, Multnomah County had about 4,000 emergency holds. Most of those cases were soon dismissed, because the patient got past the immediate crisis or was not deemed sick enough and dangerous enough for a commitment hearing. But 380 reached the hearing stage, and about 300 patients were civilly committed –up slightly from the year before.

“We’re seeing sicker people, a lot more (with) drug and alcohol problems and a lot more meth use,” said Jean Dentinger, county supervisor for involuntary treatment. Still, nine of 10 hold cases are dropped. “That doesn’t mean they don’t need treatment,” she said. “It means they no longer meet the legal criteria for being forced into treatment.”

It’s the hospital emergency staff’s responsibility to try to link such patients –those who are willing –with help, if it can be found. Help could mean anything from medication or private counseling to a homeless shelter.

A major shift in Oregon commitment law came in 1973, when the standard changed from “unsafe to be at large” or “suffering from neglect, exposure or otherwise” to “dangerous to self or others.” During the 1980s, as urban homelessness grew more visible, a backlash prompted some states –including Washington, but not Oregon –to broaden their laws to cover the “gravely disabled.”

Civil commitment remains a crucial tool for people “who are seriously ill but don’t have good insight into that fact,” OHSU’s Bloom said. But it’s not enough by itself. “You can have the greatest civil commitment law in the world,” he said, “but if you don’t have any beds available, it’s a train to nowhere.”

“All the hospitals are full,” said Bob Joondeph, executive director of the Oregon Advocacy Center, an independent group aimed at protecting the rights of the mentally and physically disabled. “It’s a clogged system. It’s hard to get in and hard to move through in a timely manner.”

Multnomah County has lost nearly 200 psychiatric hospital beds in the past five years with the closure of Eastmoreland, Pacific Gateway and Woodland Park hospitals and the Crisis Triage Center at Providence Portland.

Conflicting definitions

One reason civil commitment poses such a dilemma, psychiatrist Falk said, is that the medical and legal definitions of “dangerous” are not the same –and may even conflict.

Consider, he said, a man who is homeless and psychotic, refuses to seek treatment and sleeps outdoors on a Portland sidewalk during a chilly, rainy winter. The man is vulnerable to hypothermia and to others on the street and sometimes acts aggressively toward passers-by. “Medically, you know the man needs treatment,” Falk said. “But legally, it’s a very high threshold.”

The man probably wouldn’t meet the legal commitment standard of being dangerous to himself or others, because he says he knows where the homeless shelter is and will go there if things get rough.

The issue has shifted radically, said Dr. Paul Appelbaum, head of psychiatry, law and ethics at Columbia University and a pst president of the American Psychiatric Association. The question used to be mainly medical: How sick is this person? Today, it’s more complex; Is this person dangerous?

“It’s extremely difficult for family members,” Appelbaum said. “I’ve been called on innumerable occasions by families who say their loved one has left home and is wandering the streets and eating out of dumpsters.

“It’s heartbreaking to tell them that under the law, unless the person can be shown to be dangerous, there may not be anything they can do.”

From The Oregonian, November 19, 2006

Over the past three years, thousands of Oregonians have lost access to drop-in centers, counselors and other services created to treat people with mental illnesses before they become a serious danger to themselves or others.

The changes result from the lingering effects of budget cuts by the Legislature and the growing expense of closing the dilapidated Oregon State Hospital. But the consequences can be seen daily on the streets of Portland and other communities, where police increasingly encounter the mentally ill and more of them end up in jails.

Mental health officials say Oregon has taken an about-face, turning a system once praised as a national model for preventive care into one of triage, with police, crisis workers and emergency rooms feeling the brunt.

“We’re spending a lot of resources to build new projects for people as they leave the state hospital,” said Bob Nikkel, administrator of the state’s Office of Mental Health and Addiction Services. “That’s well and good, but they’re expensive projects. . . . We haven’t invested enough in the front end to keep people well.”

In response, Nikkel’s agency is proposing a 32 percent increase in state mental health spending over the next two years, with the bulk of the new money focused on community programs that have been squeezed.

The death last month of a 42-year-old man with schizophrenia who was fatally injured by Portland police during a street arrest has again placed the condition of Oregon’s mentally ill population in the public eye.

James P. Chasse Jr. lived in subsidized downtown housing and had access to medication and professional help. As such, he was better off than many low-income Oregonians who are not so ill as to require hospitalization but instead depend on the web of state-funded mental health services provided in local communities.

The shrinkage in the system dates to 2003, when Oregon lawmakers moved to plug a recession-racked budget. They made it harder to qualify for medical insurance under the Oregon Health Plan, cutting 80,000 low-income residents from the rolls, including an estimated 13,000 who regularly used mental health services.

Separate cuts left some 2,000 mental health workers and drug and alcohol counselors without jobs. And lawmakers eliminated monthly stipends for the poor that many mentally ill people used to buy medicine or pay rent.

In the years since, lawmakers have poured millions back into mental health. But it has not offset all the reductions. Much has been eaten up by the cost of moving patients out of the state hospital, where conditions had become bad enough to prompt a civil rights lawsuit and an ongoing U.S. Justice Department investigation.

By the end of 2009, officials hope to cut the hospital’s population of nearly 800 in half by placing patients in community facilities such as group homes or medium-security centers. Now, there are not enough such places to go around.

Troubled in Portland

In Portland, it’s unusual to walk through some downtown areas without seeing people with untreated mental illnesses –often complicated by alcohol or drug addiction –slumped in doorways or mumbling at bus stops.

Police encounters with the mentally ill are on the rise, averaging about 40 a week last year in Portland. Calls to Project Respond, which provides mental health specialists to assist officers, are up 40 percent this year, according to Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare, the largest provider of mental health services in Multnomah County.

Recent budget restraints forced Cascadia to close four community drop-in centers for people with severe and chronic mental illnesses. Before the closures, the centers on a typical day served up to 300 people debilitated by brain disorders such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

“A lot of the guys now are just walking around downtown,” says John Shatokin, 58, a mental health client who attended the drop-in center in Southeast Portland until it closed. “They’re not getting pills or going to classes. They’re just wandering around and getting sicker.”

Jerry Wiseman, 48, is a frequent visitor to the city’s last remaining drop-in center at the Royal Palm Hotel in Northwest Portland. He said it’s one of the few places he can avoid being hassled by police.

“It’s very difficult because it seems like society doesn’t want us anywhere else,” Wiseman said. “They’d rather not see us and our problems.”

Cascadia’s medical director, Dr. Maggie Bennington-Davis, said the situation shows the system’s fragility.

“When you stop paying for things, you put pressure on every other part of the system –hospital emergency rooms, jails, police, alcohol and drug, homeless shelters,” Bennington-Davis said.

The situation can be desperate for those who need help and those trying to provide it.

Recently, a man in his 50s with schizophrenia showed up at a downtown Cascadia clinic asking for medication and a place to sleep, according to agency officials. Two emergency rooms had turned him away, the man said. When told there was nothing to offer him, he stabbed a caseworker in the chest with a pen.

Police arrested him for felony assault, and he ended up in jail –a common outcome.

A recent state report determined that up to 20 percent of all jail and prison inmates in Oregon are mentally ill. That is higher than a national estimate cited in a May publication by the Justice Department, which said 10 percent to 15 percent of people who are jailed have a severe mental illness.

Once a “shining example”

No one believes jails are the place to treat the mentally ill, especially in a state that 10 years ago had established itself as a leader in treating people with brain disorders in community settings.

“Most of us saw Oregon as a shining example in the country for community mental health,” said Dr. John Talbott, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland at Baltimore and a nationally recognized expert. “Then we saw you get the stuffing kicked out of you.”

Talbott recently delivered a largely critical speech in Portland about Oregon’s mental health system, saying the state relies too heavily on long-term hospitalization to treat difficult cases of mental illness.

Community mental health took a cut of $30 million, or 18 percent, three years ago. The effects were widespread. Some mental health clients lost access to medication. Others were evicted from group homes.

Although lawmakers put money back into the system in the current budget, not everything was restored.

The General Assistance Program, which provides stipends for disabled and low-income people who are unable to work, was eliminated. The benefit was only $314 a month, yet it allowed caseworkers to access treatment and housing programs that require mentally ill Oregonians to pay a percentage of their income to remain eligible.

General assistance also helped plug another gap in the system. The chronically mentally ill may apply for and receive federal disability benefits under Social Security. The benefits, usually at least $800 a month, are a lifeline. But qualifying can take as long as three years in Oregon because of a large case backlog.

Mentally ill people depended on the general assistance money to make co-payments and pay rent until federal benefits began. “Now they have nothing,” said Leslie Ford, Cascadia’s executive director.

Alcohol and drug services for those who work but earn too much to qualify for Medicaid were reduced $3 million at the end of 2003. That put more than 1,000 drug and alcohol counselors out of work and eliminated nearly 10 percent of the state’s treatment beds, state officials said.

Experts say that up to half those with mental health problems also are substance abusers. The alcohol and drug services haven’t been restored.

The community mental health cuts forced agencies across the state to lay off another 1,000 people who worked directly with mentally ill people. Caseworkers who once managed 30 or 40 clients now handle more than 100.

Also eliminated was the state’s Medically Needy Program, which covered more than 9,000 Oregonians who had unusually high medication expenses but didn’t qualify for Medicaid. “Several thousand people who lost that program had mental illnesses,” said Madeline Olson, a deputy state mental health administrator.

The Oregon Health Plan was designed as a way to expand eligibility for health coverage under Medicaid to the working poor. But the 2003 cuts limited enrollment to 20,000, down from 100,000, and stricter rules make it harder for patients who do qualify to stay on the plan, Ford said.

“If they make one mistake, like missing a premium payment, they’re off it,” she said.

The collective result of all the cuts, Ford and others say, is that thousands of people with mental illnesses can’t get help until they are so sick that a judge commits them to a hospital for their own safety. But with the Oregon State Hospital slated for closure, and alternatives still works in progress, that creates new pressures.

State hospital overcrowded

The Oregon State Hospital houses nearly 700 patients and has long struggled with inadequate staffing, poor physical conditions, overcrowding and violence.

Most residents are forensic patients –those who have been found guilty of crimes except for insanity. Empty beds for civil commitment patients are virtually nonexistent, which leads to crowding in acute care hospitals and emergency rooms.

Eleven months ago, the Oregon Advocacy Center, a federally financed watchdog group for people with disabilities, sued the state to force a staffing increase and improve safety and quality of care at the hospital.

The Legislature acted quickly. Meeting in emergency session last spring, lawmakers approved $9.2 million from reserves for staff and community placements for patients who could be helped in less-restrictive facilities.

The lawsuit was settled, but scrutiny remains intense. The Justice Department alerted Gov. Ted Kulongoski in June that it would investigate whether patients’ constitutional rights were violated at the hospital. Department investigators visited the hospital last week.

Improving conditions at the hospital will help patients. But state officials say they must also create new inpatient and community-based alternatives for current hospital residents and future patients.

The state hired a San Francisco architectural firm last year to assess what to do with the hospital. That led to a bipartisan plan to replace the hospital with four new facilities at a cost of up to $334 million. Decisions about the location, design and financing for the facilities are on the 2007 Legislature’s agenda.

Oregon spends large sums on mental health and addiction –$352 million in the current two-year budget, not counting federal dollars. The biggest share, $174 million, goes to community mental health.

The latter sum includes a $40 million increase from the prior budget, but officials say about 40 percent of that is being absorbed by the state hospital transition.

Nikkel’s office is asking for a huge increase –$113 million –in the 2007-09 budget submitted to Kulongoski. The bulk of that increase is targeted at community services.

“We can’t turn away from the hospital’s problems,” Nikkel said. “But it’s become clear that until we invest state general fund dollars in front-end services, we’ll never get ahead of this process.”

In 2004, the Governor’s Mental Health Task Force issued a “Blueprint for Action” calling for improvements in care for mentally ill Oregonians of all ages. But only two of its 10 proposals have been enacted. One is a parity law, effective next year, which requires private health insurers to provide equal coverage of both mental and physical illness. The other provision suspends rather than terminates Medicaid benefits when someone is jailed.

Parity helps Oregonians with private insurance but does not increase access to care for the poor.

“We need to be directing our resources into the development of community systems that keep people out of hospitals,” said Bennington-Davis. “We ought to be paying attention to what works nationwide –everything we know that does has been cut in the last year or so. We’re going in the wrong direction.”

Kulongoski declined an interview request. But Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, who sponsored parity legislation in 2005, said he will push for mental health reforms in the upcoming Legislature.

“The whole system is in need of repair and has been for years,” he said. “Parity gave us a foundation and now we’ve got to build on it. I’m going to predict we’re going to make more progress in the next 10 years than we have in the past 75.”

From the Portland Mercury, November 16, 2006

The official police investigative reports into the in-custody death of James Philip Chasse Jr. on September 17 appear to have ignored—or at least heavily re-interpreted—the direct testimony of several independent witnesses.

The police investigation found that Chasse was killed because Officer Christopher Humphreys “accidentally fell” on him, as Sergeant Kyle Nice and Sheriff Deputy Brett Burton ran to catch up. But several witnesses—in separate transcripts of their statements released on November 9, alongside the cops’ official investigation—said the cops “leapt” on or “tackled” Chasse. (The Multnomah County Grand Jury, on October 17, did not find the officers criminally liable for his death.)

The collected documents, which weighed several pounds, were not made available in electronic form, and were only being given out in bundles last week to media that had requested them weeks in advance. The cops defended the eight-week delay between Chasse’s death and the release of the documents, saying they wanted to be fair in releasing the investigation to all media simultaneously. They also said it took a while to ensure all medical information was expunged, as required under federal law.

The witness statements paint a vivid picture of what happened on September 17.

“As soon as the guy was down, he basically leapt, leaped on him,” said witness Justin Soltani of one of the officers, in a phone interview with detectives on September 24. But Detective Jon Rhodes‘ separate investigative report said, “Soltani believed the officer fell on the subject he was chasing, stating, ‘The officer was half twisted on him,’” making no reference to Soltani’s description of the officer who “leapt.”

Another witness told the investigator a similar story. Rhodes’ question was, “Can you tell what the catalyst for him going to the ground is? Was it a push, was it a trip or, or could you tell, did they just all of a sudden kinda all go down?” Diane Loghry said, in a telephone interview with Rhodes on September 21: “He went down because three guys were on top of him.” But Rhodes’ report of Loghry’s testimony waters down the account to “she saw officers take the subject to the ground.”

“I saw them throw him down to the ground,” witness Jamie Marquez told the police on September 24. “It was like a… a football tackle, like you know, a… a nose guard tackling into the quarterback, kinda just throwin’ him to the ground.”

Detective Lynn Courtney‘s write-up of Marquez’s testimony, however, only says he “observed three police officers chasing Chasse and watched them tackle him to the ground at that intersection.”

Witness Randall Stuart told the police on September 21 that “the three men in uniform were able to gain on him enough to leap upon… I think it’s fair to say everybody leapt upon him.” Courtney’s report, once again, tempers the testimony, writing that Stuart saw “the three pursuing officers jump on the individual, causing them all to fall to the ground.”

Another red flag raised in the investigative report is the testimony of another witness, Constance Doolan, which indicates that one of the officers lied to her about Chasse’s historic use of drugs. Doolan says an officer on the scene told her Chasse had “14 former convictions for crack cocaine,” and how he and his colleagues “found a vial of crack cocaine” on Chasse that afternoon.

Chasse had no drugs on him or in his bloodstream, according to the autopsy and police reports. But the investigating officers do not appear to have asked Doolan which officer told her this, or for a description of him to try to ascertain who he was. From the investigation’s transcripts, their only response to her story about an officer’s apparent fabrication was, “Um-hm.”

Chasse’s lawyer, Tom Steenson, says the cops have not “had the common courtesy” yet to send him a copy of the investigation and witness transcripts they have released to the media. He does say, however, that what the transcripts appear to reveal is not surprising.

“If the detectives are summarizing witnesses’ statements in this way, it is consistent with the approach of the city and police bureau so far,” he says. “Consistently, from the moment this matter became public, the police bureau and the city have put out information that is false and not accurate in terms of what witnesses saw.”

“The detective’s summaries are not designed to reinterpret or summarize the witnesses’ statements,” says the Portland Police Bureau’s Public Information Officer Brian Schmautz. “There is no attempt to change, delude, or decrease what is said, nor any intent of subterfuge. If you’re suggesting the detectives are attempting to be sneaky, that is why we have released the transcripts—for the sake of transparency.”

As far as the allegations of lying about Chasse’s drug use are concerned, while it is rare for officers to be fired for use of force, they have been sacked for lying. In May and June of 1999, the bureau fired Officers Kenneth Ellison and Donald Warren, after one denied reversing into a light pole in a parking lot, and the other called in sick when he was not.

“Usually officers don’t get fired for use of force, but for lying, cheating, or stealing,” says Portland Copwatch activist Dan Handelman. Of Doolan’s testimony, he says: “This is just one witness statement, but if it happened, then it’s pretty outrageous.”

“The police have repeatedly attempted to suggest that drugs were involved,” says Steenson, who is still considering the possibility of a civil lawsuit with the Chasse family, “and that somehow, suspicion of drug use would justify what they did.”

“I cannot explain that comment,” says Schmautz. “There is no information that any of these officers had had contact with Chasse, so why would someone say that? Either it is somehow a misinterpretation of what was said, or it is wrong.”

From Willamette Week, November 15th, 2006

Even through a stack of documents released last week revealed further discrepancies between witnesses and Portland police accounts of the fatal Sept. 17 takedown of James Chasse Jr. in the Pearl District, they do back police up on a crucial point.

None of the civilian witnesses describe a higher level of violence than the officers involved themselves described in their statements: several punches and kicks and the application of a Taser (which didn’t seem to have much effect). But it will be up to medical experts in the litigation that will likely stem from the incident to argue whether those blows could have led to the 42-year-old schizophrenic man’s death.

The state’s chief medical examiner, Karen Gunson, ruled the broad-based injuries were consistent with an officer falling on top of Chasse. An attorney representing the family is questioning those findings.

“I have seen um police brutality on the news and it wasn’t as, it wasn’t um, I wouldn’t say it was gratuitous,” said Constance Doolan, who saw the incident from across the street. “Um you know, I did feel like the kicking happened in response to the man trying to bite them but having read in the paper today that you know he was acting strange and pissing on the sidewalk, makes me angry that that this is the treatment he received and that he wasn’t, if it, even if it did take that much force to arrest him, and now I’m wondering if there was even a good reason for it.”

Like many of the other witnesses, Doolan questioned the adequacy of the medical evaluation of Chasse.

“I wondered whether he had broken ribs or who knows what after what had transpired,” she said.

The investigator asked her, “What made you think he might have broken—from the kicking?”

“The kicking and landing on the ground, all the struggling, the arms twisted behind the back.”

From the Willamette Week, November 14th, 2006

None of six civilian witnesses to the police takedown of James Chasse Jr. agreed with the Portland Police Bureau’s official story that the mentally ill man was pushed—rather than tackled—to the ground during his fatal encounter with cops on Sept. 17.

Police issued a “fact sheet” a month after Chasse’s death, which a coroner ruled was caused by blunt-force trauma suffered in Chasse’s tangle with several officers. The “fact sheet” reads: “Did officers tackle Mr. Chasse?” It then provides an answer: “One officer used his forearm to push Mr. Chasse to the ground to end the foot pursuit, which is consistent with Bureau training.”

But not a single civilian witness describes such a push in the newly released documents.

Additional accounts of the events leading up to Chasse’s death have emerged in hundreds of new pages released to the public for the first time Thursday, and may step up pressure on Police Chief Rosie Sizer and Mayor Tom Potter for explanations of that discrepancy.

The medical examiner ruled Chasse’s fatal injuries most likely occurred when Officer Christopher Humphreys fell on top of him. Police came under fire when other statements made by the three officers involved, which came out before the more recently released witnesses’ statements, didn’t match the bureau’s “fact sheet.”

At that time, police spokesman Sgt. Brian Schmautz said the “fact sheet” was assembled from the totality of the evidence, including the then-confidential witness accounts.

Of the nine people who saw the initial takedown or its immediate aftermath, including the three officers involved, only one person (Humphreys) described something similar to the “fact sheet”—a version that just happens to conform to police procedures.