Mental Health Association of Portland

From The Skanner, April 18, 2013

The police union is in court-ordered mediation with the City of Portland and the Department of Justice, after challenging their settlement agreement on police reforms.

Meanwhile Police Chief Mike Reese is pushing ahead with hiring for the new Behavioral Health Unit. But critics say Reese’s hiring choices are eroding community confidence.

Bret Burton Hired to Mobile Crisis Unit

Portland Police Chief Mike Reese defended the bureau when the Department of Justice report was released

Reese recently appointed Bret Burton, for example, as Portland Police Bureau’s first, and for months the only, Mobile Crisis Unit officer. Burton is the former sheriff’s deputy who used his Taser on James Chasse during the September 2006 confrontation that ended with Chasse’s death in police custody.

“We were very surprised that Burton was selected of all the officers taking courses,” says Jason Renaud, co-founder of the Mental Health Association of Portland. The mental health association position is that officers who are responsible in the death of a citizen should not remain in the police force, Renaud said, and the Chasse case raised troubling issues about the officers actions.

“So we asked for his resignation and we asked the city not to hire him.”

Burton was one of three law enforcement officers at the scene of Chasse’s arrest. His employer at the time, Multnomah County, paid $925,000 to Chasse’s family to settle a civil suit. The City of Portland, who employed the other two men, Officer Christopher Humphreys and Sgt. Kyle Nice, paid out $1.6 million to settle the civil suit. An ambulance company, American Medical Response, paid $600,000.

Renaud, who knew Chasse and produced the documentary Alien Boy about his life and death, says the association asked for all three officers to be fired. But the city went on to hire Burton from the county. Last year he appeared in an Australian video, apparently as a PPB spokesperson on Taser use.

Watch the video here

Portland Police Bureau spokesman Pete Simpson, said the Behavioral Health Unit will be supervised by a sergeant and a lieutenant, under the command of Capt. Sara Westbrook.

The other two teams are: the Enhanced Crisis Intervention Team and the Service Coordination Team. One full-time officer has been assigned to the Enhanced Crisis Intervention Team as the coordinator and another full-time officer has been assigned to the Service Coordination Team as its coordinator.

Burton was the first to be hired to the Mobile Crisis Unit. Asked whether Burton was considered for a coordinator position, Simpson said he was not, adding that because the mobile crisis unit has just three officers, it doesn’t need a separate coordinator.

“The ECIT has 50 detached officers so a coordinator is needed,” he notes. “Same with SCU, although I don’t have the list of officers, but it’s more than a dozen.”

Renaud says Burton could have chosen the job because his experiences in the Chasse case taught him an important lesson.

“Perhaps he is the person who is most affected by this work and has somehow been transformed. Perhaps he is more conscious of people with mental illness,” Renaud said. “The other thing we will benefit from is that he will spend a lot of time working with professional psychotherapists. The psychotherapists with Project Respond will spend a lot more time talking to Burton, their co-worker, than they will talking to people with mental illness.”

Reese’s Hiring Decisions and Community Relations

Dan Handelman, of Portland Copwatch, said Reese’s track record suggests he doesn’t consider the impact of his personnel decisions on police community relations.

“It’s surprising on the one hand, but it fits the pattern,” he says of Burton’s appointment. “He appointed Capt. [Mark] Kruger, known for dressing up like a Nazi and for violence during protests, to teach tactical teams how to respond in crisis situations.”

Handelman also points to the chief’s decision to appoint Todd Wyatt, who inappropriately touched women colleagues, to supervise sexual assault and human trafficking investigators. Wyatt also violated other use of force and professional conduct rules, according to The Oregonian, and the police review board voted to fire him.

“It just keeps chipping away at community confidence in the police,” Handelman said. “They talk about community policing all the time, but they never think about how the community might react.”

Handelman said a pattern was set early on when Reese appointed Mike Kuykendall, a friend who played in a band with him, to a top administrative position. In doing so he lost the opportunity to hire someone who would expand community confidence in his leadership, Handelman says.

Kuykendall resigned in February in a text message scandal, again involving Kruger. At the same time he also resigned from the board of the Police Activities League, which had just announced it had run out of money and would have to close its youth centers. OSHA recently fined the organization for lax health and safety at the East Portland Youth Center, including failing to deal with asbestos flooring in the girls and staff restrooms.

Seven Years After James Chasse’s Death

The other two officers who were involved in James Chasse’s arrest and subsequent death also are still in law enforcement.

In July 2012, an arbitrator overturned the city’s disciplinary action against both men. They had been given 80-hour suspensions without pay.

Sgt. Kyle Nice was returned to street patrol in East precinct in September 2012. Previously he had been placed in a desk job after an April 2010 road rage incident, where he pulled his weapon and flipped off a motorist.

Officer Chris Humphreys was involved in another controversy in 2009, when he shot a 12-year-old girl in the thigh with a beanbag gun at close range. She was struggling with another officer after being arrested for being on the MAX train. She had been barred from TriMet.

Five Hundred PPB officers staged a demonstration wearing tee-shirts that read, “I am Chris Humphreys.” Humphreys collected disability for job-related stress until November 2010 when he was medically laid off. He then ran for Sheriff in Wheeler County Oregon. His only opposition was a write-in candidate and he was elected in November 2012.

The Department of Justice report found Portland Police had a “pattern and practice” of violating the civil rights of people with mental illness or perceived to have mental illness. It also raised questions about police relationships with communities of color.

The agreement is meant to resolve the Department of Justice finding, by changing policy on use of force and changing how police deal with people in crisis.

But Portland Police Association challenged the reform efforts, saying many provisions are subject to contract negotiations. Now the police union is in court-ordered mediation with the city and the DOJ. The union will have the right to appeal if it disagrees with the outcome. The Albina Ministerial Alliance has a seat at the table, but no power to challenge or appeal the decision.

Judge Michael Simon, who happens to be married to Sen. Suzanne Bonamici, has ordered everyone involved to keep a strict silence about the negotiations.

Jo Ann Hardesty, who represents the Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for Justice and Police Reform in the mediations, says the tradeoff is worth it.

“It’s so important for the community to have a seat at this table,” she says. “The Department of Justice believes it represents the people, but they don’t have the deep history of the injustices that go way back in this community.”

The mediation is supposed to be coming to a close with the parties ready to report back to Judge Simon on April 24.

President Obama recently nominated Thomas Perez the attorney who led the investigation for the federal Office of Civil Rights, for Secretary of Labor. His nomination is facing strong opposition, however, from Republicans.

Portland police officer involved in James Chasse case now part of mental health unit

From The Oregonian, April 21, 2013

One of the officers who had contact with James P. Chasse Jr. before he died in police custody in 2006 is now part of the Portland Police Bureau’s expanded mobile crisis unit.

Chasse, 42, suffered from schizophrenia and died from blunt force trauma to the chest on Sept. 17, 2006, after officers chased him and knocked him to the ground in the Pearl District. Officer Bret Burton, then a Multnomah County deputy, had used a stun gun on Chasse.

Paramedics came to the scene, but didn’t take Chasse to the hospital. Instead, police drove him to jail, but jail staff refused to book him. Police then drove him in a police cruiser to the hospital, and he died on the way.

Chasse’s death resulted in $3.1 million in settlements by the city of Portland, Multnomah County and American Medical Response to Chasse’s family. It also prompted the Police Bureau in 2007 to require all officers be trained in crisis intervention.

Burton, who was subsequently hired as a Portland officer, now is one of three officers who are paired with Project Respond mental health workers. They connect mentally ill people who have frequent contact with police to local agencies for treatment and help. He doesn’t respond to emergency calls for service.

Portland police expanded the unit from one officer to three this year as part of the pending city settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, which found that Portland police engage in a pattern of excessive force against people suffering from mental illness.

Portland police and Burton didn’t immediately return calls for comment Thursday.

In an interview February with KGW, Burton said the encounter with Chasse was “something I think about every day.”

“It’s definitely something that’s changed my life and changed the way we do police work here in the city,” he said.

Jason Renaud, co-founder of the Mental Health Association of Portland, in the past called for the officers involved in the Chasse case to be fired or resign. He said Thursday he still believes they should have lost their jobs, but he admires Burton.

“I think it’s impressive that he wouldn’t run away from it and instead is using his experience to do more to get involved,” said Renaud, who produced a documentary on Chasse. “We can’t always get what we want. But some times, we find that some things can change.”

By Bob Heye, KATU News, April 10, 2013

A new Portland police unit is about to enter training to cut down on violent confrontations between police and people with mental health problems.

Police hope it will cut down on the chances they’ll encounter people with mental health problems, and when they do, these specially-trained officers will lessen the chances those encounters will turn deadly.

Last month two Portland police officers shot and killed Santiago Cisneros III after he opened fire on them. Cisneros was a veteran who’d reportedly been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In 2010 police shot and killed Aaron Campbell. They’d been called in by Campbell’s family who was worried about Campbell’s grief over his brother’s death.

In 2006 it was James Chasse, a man diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, who was beaten by police. Chasse died in the back of a police cruiser.

Police say their new unit is aimed at cutting down those deadly encounters.

“To get them out of a crisis-cycle so we’re not encountering them on a regular basis,” said Sgt. Pete Simpson, a Portland Police Bureau spokesman.

Every Portland police officer gets training to deal with people having mental health problems. In September, a Justice Department investigation into those previous cases said that wasn’t enough.

Now 50 Portland officers will get extra mental health response training. It is training unique to Portland.

“There’s really nothing like it in the country that we’ve been able to take out of a box and say, ‘this is what we’re going to do,’” Simpson said.

Mental health advocates believe that extra training will pay off and know the federal focus on Portland police problems will get attention from cities around the country.

“Because we have had this additional attention on these use-of-force issues, Portland is now way out ahead of the rest of the nation,” said Jason Renaud of Mental Health Association of Portland. “It will be the other cities coming to visit us to find out how to make this happen.”

To make it work police need a place to take people in mental health crisis other than jail or to the hospital. Under the agreement with the federal government, that’s supposed to be a mental health walk-in center.

But nobody has come up with the $1 million it will take to get the center running.

Listen and download @ http://kboo.fm/node/54128

Documentary film producer and Mental Health Association of Portland board member Jason Renaud speaks with KBOO radio Wednesday host Lisa Loving about the film Alien Boy: the Life and Death of James Chasse and the state of police reform in Portland, Oregon, February 27, 2013.

From KBOO: Tickets are still available for ‘Alien Boy,’ the documentary about the police killing of James Chasse now showing at Cinema 21. We are live in Studio Two with the film’s producer, Jason Renaud. Did you know James Chasse? Give us a call, 503-281-8187

From the Portland Mercury, October 31, 2012

Building on last month’s federal report that blasted Portland cops’ use of unconstitutional force against the mentally ill, the US Department of Justice and city officials last Friday, October 26, reached accord on a “watershed” set of reforms bearing big promises—but even bigger questions.

The agreement aims to expand civilian oversight of the police bureau, strengthen mental health treatment and training, tighten Taser and use-of-force policies, and speed up misconduct investigations.

Charlie Hales by Catlin Gabel student Emmy Foster

“This is a watershed moment,” Mayor Sam Adams said. “We are fully embracing the responsibilities we have and the realities we face.”

But that landmark moment comes with a major price tag that Adams doesn’t yet know how he’ll pay: $3.5 million in annual costs for dozens of new positions—cheaper than in cities like New Orleans and Seattle, but a tough sum to absorb in a city facing budget cuts.

The deal also leaves much of the implementation to Portland’s next police commissioner. And advocates who have been tracking civil rights issues for years already are asking whether the deal actually addresses the problems laid out by the feds.

“It doesn’t solve my problem at all,” says Jason Renaud of the Mental Health Association of Portland, who wrote to the feds asking why the agreement doesn’t include stronger provisions for firing cops who use excessive force. “There are police officers on the streets who have killed my friends. And they’re likely to kill again.”

Some changes, however, will happen quickly. Portland City Council is set to approve the reforms at a 2 pm hearing this Thursday, November 1. Then, the council will immediately seek out applicants to serve as a new city compliance officer—someone charged with making sure the city delivers on its promises while also leading a 15-member community oversight board (of which five members would be nominated citywide).

That person will not serve as a monitor with court-bestowed powers, officials say. Rather, he or she will report quarterly to the feds and to the public on how well the city is holding up its end of the bargain.

The police bureau also must begin sifting through several changes in training, policy, and oversight, including:

• Creating an Addictions and Behavioral Health Unit that will have power over a restored Crisis Intervention Team of specially trained mental health officers and oversee an expansion of the bureau’s mobile crisis units.

• How to wrap up misconduct investigations, including appeals, within 180 days—far shorter than the current year-plus average. The police bureau’s Internal Affairs division and the city’s Independent Police Review division are both expected to nearly double their teams of investigators.

• Changing Taser policies to ban the use of multiple stun guns on the same person at the same time. Cops will be also banned from using consecutive Taser cycles on someone—a change long sought by advocates.

Jefferson Smith by Catlin Gabel student Emmy Foster

Another key element required a buy-in, not only from the feds and the cops, but also the city’s health care industry. The state’s Coordinated Care Organizations (CCOs), tasked with implementing federal health care reform in Oregon, have promised to add, by mid-2013, at least one center where cops can drop off people in crisis.

That’s sooner, Adams explained, than the CCOs otherwise would have moved. CCOs also will work with the city and Multnomah County to improve treatment in clinics and emergency rooms.

The city has at least five years to make the fixes. But skeptics, including Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch, worry the city will skirt some of the more substantive reforms through the use of loopholes.

He lamented that Police Review Board hearings, which greatly inform discipline decisions by the chief’s office, remain closed to the public. Discipline, or a lack thereof, in deadly force cases still can’t be appealed. And he cited a change that would ban any cop rapped for the use of force in a three-year period from training other officers.

“The police want to find ways to keep doing what they’re doing,” Handelman says. “Nobody ever gets found guilty of use of force. They are accused, but it’s rare someone gets found out of policy.”

Both mayoral candidates, Charlie Hales and Jefferson Smith, have indicated—Hales explicitly so—that they’ll keep Police Chief Mike Reese. Both also tell the Mercury they’ll be willing to make deep cuts at city hall while also looking to Multnomah County for help with funding.

But Smith appears more willing to play a bit rough if either the cops or the health care system refuse to fall in line. He says he’d hold up permits and zoning approvals for the CCOs if they didn’t work with the city.

“Since this is a federal agreement and the department of justice has also investigated our state mental health system,” Smith says, “the CCOs also have an incentive to live up to their end of the deal, lest they face greater scrutiny.”

And he also said he’d take action if, for example, the benchmarks for speedier misconduct probes aren’t met.

“The question of a special [court-appointed] monitor,” Smith says, “might need to be revisited.”

From Remote Outposts blog, September 10, 2012

Two of my friends, Erin and Icky, put this zine out years ago but it somehow eluded me until very recently. Erin gave me her last copy and I promised her that I would archive it digitally, somehow. So, here it is.

James Chasse was a staple of the early Portland, OR punk scene back in the late 70′s / early 80′s. By all accounts, he was at every show, he made zines, played in a band called THE COMBOS and always had a kind word for all of his friends. He suffered from schizophrenia for most of his life and his parents even shipped him off to a mental institution when he was still a teenager. James (or Jim-Jim as many of his friends knew him back then) was a big inspiration to Greg Sage and provided lyrical ideas for some of the songs on the LP “Is This Real?” In 2004, James (who had no criminal record and was not suspected of any crime) was beaten to death by Portland police officers in front of a dozen witnesses. They tasered him repeatedly and broke 17 of his ribs. The death was ruled to be “accidental” and the officers involved were cleared of criminal wrong-doing and placed back on active duty.

If any good can come out of this, the court case ruled that officers are now required to undergo a 40 hour training that prepares them to work with mentally ill people in crisis. I work with mentally ill people every day at my job and I wish this training was mandatory for all officers. I’ve seen people get thrown on the street and hog-tied just because they yelled at a cop. I barged between a client and 5 cops once because the cops were about to attack him for simply muttering “fuck you guys.” (miraculously, that worked…I think only because we were in a house where I worked and not on the street). Police shot and killed a mentally ill man at a BART station simply because he was waving a knife around…and people were on the platform waiting for trains. This kind of training definitely needs to happen more often because cops are acutely aware that they can kill people and get away with it, especially if the person is “crazed”, “homeless” or “aggressive”. (also, “gang member” or “illegal immigrant” works as well).

The downloads include a PDF document of the entire zine (Thanks for the help, Kyle) along with an audio interview by Erin Yanke and a radio show about James’ life that appeared on Circle A Radio. The zine contains stories and quotes by Greg Sage (of The WIPERS), KT Kincaid (of the NEO-BOYS), Jason Renaud (of the Mental Health Association of Portland) and many others. There’s also snippets of James’ old zines as well as amazing pictures from the early days of Portland’s punk scene. Thanks to Erin Yanke for giving me permission to put this all online.

DOWNLOADS

Alien Boy zine (PDF, 54 MB)

Audio files:

01 Interview with Jason Renaud by Erin Yanke, 20 min. (MP3, 29MB)

02 Circle A Radio show about James Chasse, 50 min. (MP3, 73MB)

Zip file (150MB) with zine and both audio files, can be downloaded here.

The $6.5 million property that will house a new police training center, 14912 N. E. Airport Way.

By Maxine Bernstein, The Oregonian, Sept. 6, 2012

Portland’s mayor recently invited multiple community activists to apply for a seat on the Portland Police Bureau’s future Training Advisory Council, the first citizens’ group in city history that will have input on officer training.

Portland Copwatch and the Mental Health Association of Portland received the invites, but their representatives politely declined. They object to a “non-disclosure” clause, which would prevent their representatives from sharing material discussed among the council members.

“It just seems like too many restrictions,” said Dan Handelman, of the police watchdog group Portland Copwatch.

The two groups argue that the public must have a say on police training, and that to restrict the sharing of information obtained at the training advisory council meetings would be unfair.

“The whole point would be to get a community voice at the table,” Handelman wrote in a response to the mayor’s invite. “To be a legitimate voice, you have to be able to bounce the ideas off of other people in the community.”

Jason Renaud, of the Mental Health Association of Portland, told the mayor in a written response that not only has he decided not to apply, but he’s discouraged other association members from seeking a seat on the panel.

He said the council’s policy restricting the sharing of what’s discussed and materials presented is “incompatible” with community representation. Community members on the council must share the information with the organizations they represent for input, Renaud argued.

“These tasks of a community representative are not possible to complete when speech is constrained,” Renaud wrote.

Mayor Sam Adams and police bureau officials counter that some of the training policies and protocol to be discussed must be kept confidential to prevent police tactics from getting into the hands of criminals.

Sgt. Pete Simpson, a police bureau spokesman, said the training advisory council meetings – to be held quarterly – will be closed to the public, citing “the confidential nature of some information being shared.”

Yet the mayor on Wednesday left some wiggle room, when questioned about the training council.

“We will further refine what aspects of the Council’s work will be open to the public versus in executive session,” Adams said. “I do not want criminals to have access to some of our training tactics and deployment strategies so they need to be kept confidential.”

The creation of  a training advisory council comes as the bureau is readying property on Northeast Airport Way for a new police training center. This spring, the City Council approved the $6.5 million purchase of a site at 14912 N. E. Airport Way.

According to early plans by Chief Mike Reese and the police bureau’s director of services Mike Kuykendall, the police training council would comprise of police Community Academy graduates “who have the knowledge and understanding of police training, tactics and techniques and have exhibited a willingness to work collaboratively with the police on training-related issues.”

The bureau’s Community Academy is a one-day introduction to Portland police training designed to give local officials, business and neighborhood representatives a sample of police training, which includes a morning at an outdoor firing range, a demonstration by the bureau’s Explosives Disposal Unit and scenario-based training role plays.

The cut-off date for applications for a seat on the new police bureau training advisory council was Aug. 31. The council is to meet a minimum of four times a year, and members are expected to make a two-year commitment to sit on the council.

Sgt. Pete Simpson said Wednesday that the final number of council members has yet to be determined, and members have not been selected yet. The bureau’s captain of the training division and one other Portland police bureau member – yet to be determined – will sit on the council as well.

Simpson said another reason the material discussed by the council must remain confidential is that part of the council’s work will be to sift through the host of training recommendations made by outside consultants to the city, including from the Police Assessment Resource Center, and  Los Angeles County’s Office of Investigative Review.

He said the new training council will “have a work session to fully vet these recommendations,” and forward the ones the council supports to the chief.

It’s unclear why the discussion of the outside consultant’s recommendations would require a closed-door session, as all the recommendations have been made public and are posted on the city’s website.

Simpson said the police bureau is “also working on a way for the public to directly provide input” to the training council, “but that has not yet been fully determined.”

From the Portland Mercury, August 21, 2012 – by Denis Theriault

As noted in yesterday’s post about the Portland Police Bureau’s new Training Advisory Council, I’m still waiting on more details about how public—or not—the citizen panel will be. A posting seeking applicants didn’t mention whether the group’s four meetings a year would be open to observers.

Meanwhile, the same posting said anyone who is chosen will have to sign a “nondisclosure agreement.” Lieutenant Robert King, a police bureau spokesman, told me he didn’t think the NDA was written yet, when I asked for a copy, but he also said he didn’t know exactly what it might try to limit.

These aren’t insignificant questions. If the group’s meetings are going to be private, and if the group’s members won’t be allowed to talk about their work with neighbors, reporters, and other advocates, then it’s fair to ask whether the council is going to be a meaningful tool for improving community-police relations or another piece of window-dressing filled with handpicked cheerleaders from, say, the Citizens Crime Commission.

Since then, I’ve heard from Jason Renaud of the Mental Health Association of Portland, a longtime observer and critic of police training practices, especially concerning the bureau’s efforts to limit the use of deadly force against the mentally ill. Renaud emailed a strong warning about the chill an NDA would have on community dialogue and urged like-minded advocates to stay away if silence is really going to be part of the arrangement. I’ve also heard similar concerns raised by sources in city hall.

Advocates speak out AND carry the response to the community they represent. People who do one but not the other are simply self-appointed pretenders. They are not advocates.

You can’t communicate to the community you represent—you can’t be a community representative—when silenced by a non-disclosure agreement. The intention of a NDA is to silence actual advocates; requiring one from a community advisory council underlines that the PPB and the city are still in public relation/spin mode, obtuse and arrogant.

With a NDA we do not endorse this Training Council and would not encourage anyone to participate.

As always, I’ll update when I hear back. I hope, though, that the bureau and the mayor’s office are thinking hard about these concerns. Meetings should be open to the public. And the NDA should either be scrapped or crafted to be sufficiently and objectively narrow enough (not giving away state secrets, etc.) so as not to stifle a genuine community discussion about police training.

By Jenny Westberg, Portland Mental Health Examiner

Michael Justin Evans

Around 10:30 p.m. on August 14, Michael Justin Evans became the latest casualty in a years-long series of bloody encounters between Portland-area police and persons with mental illness or addiction.

Evans, 23, was killed by one of the two Gladstone police officers dispatched to the home he shared with his grandmother, Judie K. Reich, in the 300 block of West Fairfield Street, after reports that Evans was tearing the residence apart. Soon after their arrival, either Officer Steve Mixson or Officer Christopher Spore fired multiple rounds at Evans, who police say was armed with a knife. Witnesses said they heard four gunshots.

Evans’ father, who was nearby, heard the shots and hurried to the scene, where he saw Michael’s body on the front lawn.

He started screaming. “The cops shot my son! The cops shot my son!”

To Jason Renaud of the Mental Health Association of Portland, it was grimly predictable.

Renaud has been cataloguing deaths at the hands of Portland-area police (see elsewhere on this site for a list, plus background information).

Early on in the process, Renaud recognized a pattern: Since at least the early 1980s, in 170+ documented cases, virtually without exception, the people who are shot by police (fatally or nonfatally) are those with a mental illness, an addiction problem, or both.

The latest death is no exception.

Michael Evans struggled with mental illness and substance abuse. His short life included trouble with the law, suicide attempts and erratic behavior. There were also attempts to get help: he joined AA at age 14. Those who knew him say he could be scary. But overall, friends remember him as a nice kid.

One of Michael’s friends, Jim Reynolds, told The Oregonian the cops knew Evans’ history, and he wonders why they didn’t take it into account.

“I don’t know why they had to shoot him four times,” said Reynolds. “They knew he was a mentally ill kid.”

The overkill of shooting four times — or continuing to shoot a person who is already dead; or going straight to lethal force when the situation could be handled other ways; or shooting a person who is unarmed, or who is surrendering — has, unfortunately, become a familiar part of police response to people with mental illness and addictions.

Aaron Campbell was shot in the back, unarmed, as he tried to surrender. Keaton Otis was shot so many times that another officer arriving on the scene thought it sounded “like World War III.” Jack Collins was shot and killed as he shuffled forward in a daze, holding a knife he had been using to harm himself. Anthony McDowell was shot dead as he came out of his house in a “surrender” position, his rifle held over his head. Thomas Higginbotham was coming out the door, holding a knife, but with a blood alcohol content so high it’s difficult to imagine him wielding it — but police didn’t wait to find out. James Chasse was just standing on the street, not committing a crime or suspected of one; even so, police confronted him, chased him, knocked him down, and while he lay on the sidewalk, they kicked him, Tasered him, and beat him so badly he died soon after, in the back of a patrol car.

Those are a just a few.

Renaud points out that when officer-involved shootings involve exclusively persons with mental illnesses and/or addictions, these are people with disabilities — a federally protected class.

Indeed, the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year launched an investigation into whether there is a pattern of conduct on the part of Portland police that violates the civil rights of persons with a mental illness.

For Michael Justin Evans, dead before he had much of a chance to live, it hardly matters. Or you could say it was the ultimate civil rights violation.

Officers Mixson and Spore are on administrative leave while the case is investigated.

And Dean Evans mourns his son.