Mental Health Association of Portland

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Archive for November, 2009

Oregon Iraq veteran is one of 75,000 battling post-traumatic stress

Posted by admin2 on 29th November 2009


From the Coos Bay World, November 28, 2009

Kevin Dubisar and his wife, Ali, take a trip to the North Jetty on a recent Saturday. Due to post-traumatic stress disorder, Dubisar prefers to stay away from large groups of people and uncertain environments. Dubisar feels safe at the beach, flanked by the ocean and deserted sand.

“When Lily saw the picture, she said ‘Where’s Daddy’s teeth?’” Ali Dubisar said.

The 27-year-old doesn’t smile anymore, or do a lot of things he used to.

Dubisar survived a one-year deployment to Baghdad, Iraq, but the war has followed him home.

“Life for me, as I knew it before the war, has completely changed,” Dubisar said.

Everyday life has become a constant battle.

Dubisar, along with an estimated 75,000 other American veterans, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Dogs are barking in the street, and I’m thinking a bomb or something is going off,” Dubisar said. “I’m constantly looking outside, up and down the street.”

The U.S. Department of Defense estimates 40 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have some level of the mental illness.

“Almost half that we send over there come back damaged,” said Tom Mann, public information officer for the Oregon Department of Veterans’ Affairs. “It’s probably the same numbers for every war. We are just looking for it now; before we weren’t.”

Coos County has an estimated population of about 8,500 veterans, meaning roughly 3,400 would suffer from PTSD based on the calculation. Not all veterans are veterans of war, and many Coos County vets served in previous wars.

PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can occur after a traumatic event — car accident, rape, bombing. It’s been called different names, like “combat fatigue” or “shell shock,” but the illness essentially has been around as long as war itself. The signature symptoms include reliving a terrifying event, severe depression, nightmares, hyper-anxiety, withdrawal, startle reactions, uncontrollable anger and irritability. Other acts, seemingly unrelated, also carry the mark of this debilitating disorder — addiction, fighting, divorce, suicide.

But just because it is widespread among soldiers, doesn’t mean there’s not a stigma associated with PTSD.

“It’s embarrassing,” Dubisar said. “It makes you feel like you’re weak, like you’re not a man or you’re crazy. People just don’t understand.”

Still, Dubisar has sought help. He uses a mixture of psychotherapy, group counseling and medications.

Realizing your triggers is one of the most vital steps in therapy, said Eugene Vet Center Counselor Susan Aviotti, who’s based in North Bend. But even recovery carries unflattering connotations.

“I don’t want people thinking I’m a 27-year-old pill popper,” said Dubisar, who only has a few more credits to go before graduating with a criminal justice degree. “But that is the only thing that calms me down sometimes.”

Aviotti said continued exposure to combat or severe trauma causes a chemical reaction in the brain. Once a soldier is home and his brain is triggered by something associated with the trauma, his brain reacts the same as it did during wartime. That is why medication often is a necessary part of treatment.

“I have tried to mentally reprogram my brain to think how it did before the war, but I can’t,” Dubisar said.

Before the Marshfield graduate joined the U.S. Army in 2001, he liked to hang out with friends and was a good student. He was clean cut, but doesn’t want to shave anymore. It reminds him of his military days.

“I avoid everybody. I used to like family functions and hanging out with the boys,” he said. “When I came back all that stuff was really stressful. It’s because you don’t have control of everybody. When you are over there, you have lots of control.”

At war, Dubisar would be awake for days.

He remembers coming under mortar fire one day while driving back to the base in Sadr City. His truck was splattered with shrapnel. He only got back to safety using emergency air to keep the tires inflated. When he reached the base, everyone took cover. After things quieted down, Dubisar moved his truck. As he walked away, there was a piercing boom. The truck exploded.

He wasn’t hurt, but often startled at the smallest of noises. He was always on guard — he had to be to survive. Now that he is back in Coos Bay, that survival mentality hasn’t subsided.

A car backfiring, a suspicious glance from a stranger, or a mob of people at Walmart all can be triggers.

“The whole time I have to keep reminding myself that I’m in Coos Bay,” Dubisar said. “In a split second, you feel like you’re back in Baghdad. When there is a lot going on, there is more of a possibility of something bad happening. I don’t trust people.”

When Ali Dubisar forgot to put a jacket on her daughter one day, her husband exploded angrily. She thought it was her fault. In her husband’s mind, a small mistake like that could mean death in a war zone.

“Ninety-eight percent of the time it has nothing to do with the person that you are freaking out on,” Dubisar said.

It wasn’t until Ali Dubisar started going to a group for spouses and partners of combat veterans that she started to understand why her husband acts the way he does.

“I didn’t know what was wrong at first,” she said. “He was always angry. It was like he had an argument going on in his mind. He is always lecturing me on every possible thing that can go wrong.”

Unfortunately, many never learn to cope. Mann said VA statistics show only about a third of all veterans ever seek treatment.

One of Dubisar’s closest friends committed suicide while with him in Iraq, but the surviving soldiers never talked about it.

The suicide rate for Oregon male veterans is more than double that of non-veterans, according to the 2005 Oregon Violent Death Report. From 2000 to 2006, 1,066 male veterans took their own lives — that’s 3.7 a week.

Veterans with PTSD do not receive a purple heart for the mental scars inflicted by war. But their wounds are real, as is Dubisar’s plight. He is taking the steps, along with his wife, to recovery.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be fully healed,” he said.

But by getting help and admitting he has a disorder, Dubisar said he believes he can live a functional life post-war.

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Portland police are playing the wrong confidence game

Posted by admin2 on 27th November 2009

Editorial from the Oregonian, November 25, 2009

The police union calls for a vote of no confidence in the chief and a commissioner, while news events repeatedly raise a very different question

At a rally outside Portland City Hall on Tuesday morning, intended to drive the effort for a police union vote of no confidence in Police Chief Rosie Sizer and Police Commissioner Dan Saltzman, members of the Portland Police Association wore T-shirts reading, “I am Chris Humphreys.”

For the Portland city attorney, already involved in a liability lawsuit featuring that officer, hundreds of police officers claiming his identity couldn’t be an encouraging sight.

Nor was it encouraging for Portland residents hoping for some sense that the police understand what’s at stake here.

Fundamentally, this is not about whether the police union has confidence in the police chief. The real question is whether Portlanders have confidence in their police.

This is not a judgment in the current controversy over Humphreys’ shooting a 12-year-old, 160-pound girl with a beanbag shotgun while another officer tried to get her under control, for which Saltzman placed Humphreys on administrative leave. It’s not even a judgment on his role in the 3-year-old death of James Chasse Jr. while in police custody, for which Saltzman recently ordered Humphreys suspended for 80 hours. A lawsuit against the city in that case is pending, while the related case against Multnomah County, which involved a sheriff’s deputy, was recently settled for $925,000.

The issue is whether Saltzman, an elected city commissioner put in charge of the police by Portland’s elected mayor, and Sizer, named police chief by the mayor, have disciplinary authority over the police — or whether, as police union chief Scott Westerman charges, the only question is whether officials and citizens stand with the police.

In front of City Hall on Tuesday morning, Westerman warned the city’s elected officials, “If you do not, you have put political expediency in front of law enforcement.”

Yet Portland citizens might have a different idea about who works for whom — and might think that Westerman has it reversed.

The past decade has seen a considerable number of incidents raising questions about police behavior — inevitable in any city of Portland’s size. Several of them have involved the death of Portland residents, others ended with the city paying considerable sums in damages. We have seen repeated efforts to recraft the review structure. All together, they raise questions about our system for dealing with charges against officers, especially considering that the union-negotiated arbitration system frequently overturns any penalties.

Concerning Saltzman’s suspension of Humphreys, Westerman commented Tuesday, “We all know when this goes to arbitration, we’re going to get it back.” He regarded this probability as validation; others consider it part of the problem.

On Nov. 27, the police union starts its no-confidence vote on Saltzman and Sizer, expecting to report its results Nov. 30. “If it comes back at 97 percent of our members saying they have no confidence,” asked Westerman, “how can that be an effective leader?”

But that might be the wrong question, or at least, not the only question.

The deeper question is whether Portland’s police officers are accountable to the city’s elected and appointed officials — or the other way around.

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Portland police in T-shirts send tone-deaf message

Posted by admin2 on 24th November 2009

Anna Griffin

Anna Griffin

Editorial Column by Anna Griffin from the Oregonian, November 24, 2009

A bit of friendly advice to the fine men and women of the Portland Police Bureau:

If you give a rat’s tail about how you’re perceived by the people you’re paid to protect – the people who also happen to pay your salaries — take off those T-shirts and go back to work. Because right now, you bear a startling resemblance to a bunch of out-of-touch thugs.

Some 650 people, Portland officers and their friends and families, rallied downtown Tuesday to protest recent command decisions. They carried signs and wore freshly printed blue T-shirts bearing the motto, “I Am Chris Humphreys.”

Humphreys is the 10-year veteran at the heart of two recent high-profile incidents of police force. Three years ago, he chased and then fell on James Chasse, the schizophrenic man kicked and Tasered by police after they spotted him urinating on a Pearl District sidewalk. Chasse died in police custody from blunt force trauma to the chest.

Earlier this month, Humphreys shot a 12-year-old girl in the thigh at close range with a non-lethal bean-bag shotgun. The girl had slapped another officer and resisted attempts to remove her from a MAX train.

Humphreys faces a two-week suspension in Chasse’s death and, last week, was placed on paid leave while internal affairs investigators look into the bean-bag shooting.

That prompted Tuesday’s rally. Union leaders, receiving advice these days from the same lobbying team behind Merritt Paulson’s clumsy effort to bring Major League Soccer to town, say they need more support from City Hall and the Police Bureau’s upper echelon.

“This is not about one officer,” union president Scott Westerman told the crowd. “This is not about one incident.”

Those T-shirts suggest otherwise.

The requisite caveat: Most of the city’s 922 officers work exceptionally hard under difficult, sometimes dangerous circumstances. They go out of their way to avoid violence.

The crowd Tuesday shouted, “Will you stand with us?” again and again. As a community, our answer should be a resounding, “Yes, yes, yes.” We will stand with the vast majority of you who do your jobs well – and well within the confines of both common sense and the law.

But will officers and their union stand for true accountability? Will they acknowledge that sometimes the best cops make poor choices and that bad cops – or good cops who cannot control their tempers – need to find new jobs? Will they recognize that they work for taxpayers – and Police Chief Rosie Sizer and City Commissioner Dan Saltzman – not the other way around?

Because at the moment, they seem to have forgotten.

There is an innate disconnection between the police and the people they protect, particularly in a city as liberal as this one.

Many Portland cops live outside city limits, preferring to escape far from urban life at the end of a shift. Working in a paramilitary organization, one in which you put your life on the line daily, creates a natural “us against the world” mentality. City leaders have been absentee landlords recently, allowing the internal investigation into Chasse’s death to drag out three frustrating and perplexing years – a disservice to both Chasse’s memory and the officers present for his death.

A union leader’s job is to get as much as he or she can for union members. Westerman, a genial, solidly built guy who could have played an extra on “The Sopranos,” may do that with this impressive display of organization.

Oregon labor law makes it hard to discipline police officers. City Council members seem determined to let the Chasse family’s wrongful death lawsuit play out in court, rather than settling. Judging by the turnout Tuesday, when an ocean of blue covered the sidewalk outside City Hall, the “no confidence” vote union leaders have called against Sizer and Saltzman seems likely to pass.

Yet to what end?

There’s been talk that Sizer –widely considered Portland’s best chief in a generation — may retire soon. She can’t do that now without looking as if she’s caved to union pressure. Mayor Sam Adams, who has been completely removed from the recent conversations, should have kept leadership of the bureau himself from the beginning. He cannot take it back now. You don’t give in to bullying.

It’s no coincidence that incidents of police force and the crime rate have both dropped in recent years as bureau leaders worked to lessen the divide between officers and civilians. Now that disconnect is growing again.

Most of us have few face-to-face interactions with the police. What we know comes from images on the news or in the paper. The recent ones include that snapshot of Humphreys and other officers standing around, drinking coffee and chatting, as Chasse lay prone and hog-tied on the sidewalk, and the grainy video of Humphreys firing his shotgun at a girl who’d already been put on the ground by another officer.

Now this, a remarkably well-attended, remarkably tone deaf rally.

“I am Chris Humphreys.” Are you sure that’s the message you want to send your constituents?

Portland cops made T-shirts once before. They included a smoking gun and the phrase, “Don’t Choke ‘Em, Smoke ‘Em,” to protest a new ban on the so-called “sleeper hold” after an off-duty security guard placed in the position died.

The two officers involved in Lloyd Stevenson’s death were cleared of criminal charges by a grand jury. The officers who sold the shirts were initially fired but won their jobs back after another hard political and legal push from union representatives.

The public relations damage from that sad incident took years to clean up.

Apparently our friends in blue need a history lesson.

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That thinning blue line

Posted by admin2 on 21st November 2009

Editorial from The Oregonian, November 20, 2009

By hitting a police officer, a 12-year-old put herself at risk, but was it necessary to shoot her with a beanbag?

Snap judgments are almost invariably wrong in police use-of-force cases. We repeat: “almost” invariably.

In Arkansas last week, a police officer zapped a 10-year-old girl with a Taser to force her to take a shower before bedtime. “People here feel like that he made a mistake in using a Taser, and maybe he did,” Mayor Vernon McDaniel said, with an excess of caution — maybe? — “but we will not know until we get an impartial investigation.”

Let’s go out on a limb here and say that, yes, that officer did make a mistake. But judging what Portland Officer Chris Humphreys did a week ago today on a MAX platform is not as simple. Humphreys fired a beanbag shotgun at a 12-year-old girl, hitting her in the thigh.

This juvenile had made what can be, and has often proved to be, a fatal error: She struck Humphreys’ fellow officer, Aaron Dauchy, in the face.

It will take an internal affairs investigation to determine whether Humphreys acted in accordance with Police Bureau policy and training. Although admittedly, if he did, then it’s fair to add: Maybe it’s time to improve both.

It would be nice to think that two Portland Police Bureau officers would be capable of subduing a 12-year-old girl — even one of adult height and weight — without resorting to weaponry, even the less-lethal variety. Yet the reality is that neither the bureau’s critics nor its defenders actually know enough, based on the video image that’s been shown, to condemn or exonerate this officer. And yet that didn’t stop both sides from rushing to their predictable battle stations Thursday.

To the critics, it’s obvious that Humphreys shouldn’t be a police officer anymore. And let’s admit that he does have another strike against him. He was one of three officers involved in the fatal foot pursuit of James P. Chasse Jr., the schizophrenic man who died in police custody three years ago.

On Thursday, Police Chief Rosie Sizer called the MAX platform video “troubling” and determined that Humphreys shouldn’t be on patrol but could perform desk work, pending the results of an internal affairs investigation. City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who oversees the Police Bureau, went further, deciding that Humphreys should be placed on paid leave. “I did not want him on the street,” Saltzman said.

These are reasonable judgments to make, based on the circumstances. But you’d never guess that based on the reaction of the police union. More than 40 officers assembled Thursday, shoulder to shoulder on the steps of the Justice Center. To these officers, it’s apparently obvious that an officer who shoots a weapon at a 12-year-old girl is above reproach.

But how can the officers be so sure about that? The police are actually trained not to make snap judgments, but to examine the evidence — which isn’t all in, in this case. It would be nice to see Portland police officers demonstrate the cautious, tempered judgment that they expect their critics to demonstrate.

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Portland officer in 12-year-old girl’s beanbag shooting files for stress disability

Posted by admin2 on 20th November 2009

From The Oregonian, November 20, 2009

Portland police Officer Christopher Humphreys filed a stress-related disability claim as the Portland Police Bureau began an internal investigation into his Saturday night beanbag shotgun shooting of a 12-year-old girl on a Northeast Portland MAX platform.

The move is consistent with a long-standing pattern of Portland police officers taking stress disability while facing investigation or potential discipline, but police and others say reforms to the disability system should prevent abuse.

Whether Humphreys’ actions could impede an internal inquiry is unclear; Portland police are proceeding with the investigation, contacting witnesses and others, said Detective Mary Wheat, a Portland Police Bureau spokeswoman.

“The goal is to have it done as quickly and thoroughly as is possible,” Wheat said.

Portland police union president Sgt. Scott Westerman said Friday that Humphreys was “hung out to dry for three years” while the bureau investigated his role in the death of James P. Chasse Jr., a 42-year-old man with schizophrenia. Chasse was knocked to the ground after he ran from officers who suspected he was urinating in a street. He died in police custody from blunt force trauma to the chest Sept. 17, 2006.

This month, City Council member and police commissioner Dan Saltzman proposed that Humphreys, a 10-year veteran assigned to the transit police, be suspended for two weeks for failing to insist that Chasse be taken by ambulance to a hospital after police stunned him with a Taser and after the jail refused to book him because of his physical condition. Saltzman also found that Humphreys failed to provide paramedics at the scene with a full account of the violent struggle.

“Now that takes a toll on anyone,” Westerman said.

Humphreys was devastated this week, Westerman said, when the commissioner ordered him off the street and had his badge and gun removed while police investigate the 12-year-old’s shooting.

Westerman, though, would not comment on Humphreys’ recent disability claim to the Fire & Police Disability & Retirement Fund. Instead, he spoke generally, saying the voter-approved reforms adopted in 2006 removed the board from hearing claims, leaving it up to independent hearing officers.

The reforms, passed in November 2006, did change the makeup of the fund’s board, previously dominated by police and fire employees. It also removed the board from voting on claims, instead passing that authority to the fund’s staff or hearings officers.

Every stress claim approved for police since the reforms has been valid, Westerman said, and has been taken so officers can preserve “their own mental health, and to see and receive the assistance that they need,” Westerman said.

Meanwhile on Friday, the police union prepared to mail ballots today to its 922 members to hold a vote of no confidence in Chief Rosie Sizer and Saltzman. Ballots will be collected Nov. 27 and the results announced Nov. 30. The union also plans a rally Tuesday in support of Humphreys. “I believe our faith in the leadership of the Portland Police Bureau is gone,” Westerman said.

He said that Humphreys acted as he was trained and did everything to minimize injury to the 12-year-old girl.

According to the bureau, Humphreys shot the girl once in the thigh as fellow Transit Officer Aaron Dauchy struggled to take her into custody on a MAX platform at Northeast 148th Avenue. Police said the girl had swung at Dauchy’s head when he tried to arrest her for violating a TriMet exclusion.

Dauchy took her to the ground. Humphreys, who arrived with a beanbag shotgun over his right shoulder, pinned it to his side and tried to reach out with his left hand to help grab the girl’s hands, but he could not, Westerman said. Then Humphreys stepped back and circled the girl, waiting for a chance to fire. One shot struck the girl in the thigh, leaving a bruise.

“If the officers were able to grab control of her hands, none of this would have happened,” Westerman said. The chief and commissioner asked internal affairs to determine whether the force was justified and whether the beanbag firing at such close range fell within training.

Bureau directives say nothing about distance restrictions, but the force trains officers to shoot a suspect in the torso at no less than 10 feet with no restrictions on a person’s extremities, police say.

During the past several years, reports from the Police Assessment Resource Center, outside experts, have recommended that the bureau adopt a more specific policy on beanbag shotguns, noting that model policies recommend shots be aimed at the abdomen, thighs or forearms and not at the head, neck or groin, with optimal shooting distance between 21 and 50 feet. They note that rounds present a risk of death or serious injury at less than 10 feet when fired at the chest, head, neck or groin.

Westerman said he was disturbed that Sizer did not release the police report, which he says shows that the girl’s mother apologized to Dauchy.

“Her (the girl’s) actions is what led to the use of force against her,” he said. “This perception this was a 12-year-old girl going to the zoo with her family is wrong.”

Saltzman did not return calls Friday afternoon about Humphreys’ disability claim. Wheat said the chief would not discuss any claim. She also had no response to the union’s position.

“She understands the high emotions that are running and doesn’t want to add to that by making statements,” Wheat said.

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Police Union Planning No-Confidence Vote

Posted by admin2 on 20th November 2009

From KPTV.com, November 20, 2009

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Shoot beanbag at 12-year-old girl? Just the latest from the Portland police

Posted by admin2 on 20th November 2009

Steve Duin

Steve Duin

Editorial column by Steve Duin, The Oregonian, November 20, 2009

In the brutal chain of personalities and events that have licensed Portland police to turn a beanbag shotgun on a 12-year-old girl, the aloof commissioner, absentee mayor and anything-goes police chief aren’t nearly as significant as James Chasse Jr., Eunice Crowder and Barbara Weich.

Chasse, of course, died after Officer Christopher Humphreys pancaked the 145-pound schizophrenic when he had the audacity to flee the cops’ approach.

Crowder? In 2003, police pepper-sprayed the 71-year-old blind woman with such enthusiasm that her glass eye popped out of its socket, then used a Taser on her four times as she lay in the dirt.

And Weich? In 2005, the 58-year-old gallery owner tossed a derogative term at one of Portland’s finest — Officer Greg Adrian — after the motorcycle cop gave her a ticket, she says, then mocked her annoyance.

Adrian followed Weich over the Hawthorne Bridge and pulled her over again. “He then hit her in the face with enough force to leave bruising on her cheek and neck,” said Greg Kafoury, her attorney. “He then grabs her arm, pulls it out the window, twists it, puts his weight down on it … fractures the arm.”

Weich subsequently moved to rural Idaho. “She was shattered by the experience,” Kafoury said.

Adrian? “He received no discipline,” Commissioner Randy Leonard reminds us.

Portland police are all about imposing discipline, not exercising it. For years now, escalating displays of excessive force have prompted nothing but shrugs from the police chief and six-figure settlement offers from city attorneys.

Not until Humphreys unloaded his beanbag shotgun at that unruly 12-year-old did Commissioner Dan Saltzman express his annoyance. Overruling chief Rosie Sizer, he put Humphreys on leave. With pay.

“The first glimmer of light I’ve seen in seven years,” Leonard said. “The first time I’ve seen an incident that I considered inexcusable and unjustified in which the chief and the police commissioner followed up.”

Like thousands of Portlanders, they watched the TriMet videos.

The videos offer a vivid contrast to the Police Bureau statement, which tries to explain all this away by insisting Officers Aaron Dauchy and Humphreys were responding to a call about a party “involving several known gang members,” marauding teenagers “wanting to fight,” and a gun that, conveniently, had just been discovered in bushes a mile away.

Given that dramatic buildup, I expected to see Dauchy and Humphreys wade into a chaotic mob scene on the MAX platform at Northeast 148th.

Not even close. The platform is virtually empty as Dauchy first cuffs a juvenile male he knows to be on the TriMet exclusion list, then orders the 12-year-old girl off the train. As he moves to cuff her, she swings on him and Dauchy takes her to the ground. Humphreys is circling the tussle with the shotgun, seemingly desperate to get his licks in.

Every day in Portland, parents are forced to rein in angry adolescents without hauling out the shotgun. When did bureau protocol put the official stamp-of-approval on child abuse?

“The real problem,” Leonard says, “lies in the chief’s office.” And the problem is augmented by the churlishness of the union, the charade of “independent” citizen review, and the cops’ refusal to admit mistakes, much less learn from them.

“The city as it relates to the police bureau is essentially leaderless,” said Chuck Currie, one of the clergy at Chasse’s 2006 memorial service. At the time, he cautioned people to have patience and push for justice.

“Asking for patience,” Currie said Friday, “was a mistake on my part.”

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Christopher Humphreys – Use of Force 11 19 2009

Posted by admin2 on 20th November 2009

Below are all the relevant news articles about the suspension of Christopher Humphreys on November 19, 2009.

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Trimet surveillance video, November 19, 2009
Live blog, videos: Portland police suspend officer who shot girl, 12, with bean bag, The Oregonian
Portland officer suspended after shooting girl, 12, with beanbag gun, The Oregonian, November 19, 2009
Police officer suspended after girl shot with beanbag, Portland Tribune, November 19, 2009
Officer On Leave For Using Force Against 12-Year-Old, KPTV.com, November 19, 2009
Officer on leave after shooting girl with beanbag gun, KGW.com, November 19, 2009
Saltzman Suspends Chasse Cop For Beanbag Shot On 12-Year-Old Girl, Portland Mercury, November 19, 2009
Chasse Cop Christopher Humphreys Placed on Administrative Leave, Willamette Week, November 19, 2009
Weekend incident prompts officer suspension, KATU.com, November 19, 2009
Officer put on leave during abuse of force investigation, KOIN.com, November 19, 2009

Rogue cop at it again, Jack Bogadanski, November 19, 2009

NOVEMBER 20, 2009

Portland police vote “no confidence” on Saltzman and Sizer – KOIN.com

Experts consider training, procedure in use-of-force case, KATU.com
Police union plans to hold a vote of no confidence for Sizer, Saltzman, KATU.com

Police union defends officer on leave over beanbag gun incident, KGW.com

Portland officer in 12-year-old girl’s beanbag shooting files for stress disability, The Oregonian
Mayor supports officer’s suspension for shooting girl with beanbag, Portland Tribune
Police Union Plans No-Confidence Vote on Saltzman and Sizer, Willamette Week
Shoot beanbag at 12-year-old girl? Just the latest from the Portland police, The Oregonian
That thinning blue line, editorial from The Oregonian
Police Union Planning No-Confidence Vote, KPTV.com

DOCUMENTS

Use of Force Continuum, Portland Police Bureau (PDF)
Use of force policy – City of Hillsboro (PDF)
Defensive Tools Policy – Washington County Sheriff’s Office (PDF)
Portland Police Association press release, November 20, 2009

READ – Everything about Christopher Humphreys

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