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.”

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 In These Times, September 3, 2011

There’s no sufficient apologizing for the inanities of the essay below; we only include it as a portion of our comprehensive archive of the issues its author comments on.

On June 8, the Justice Department announced a civil rights investigation to see if police officers in Portland, Ore., were engaged in a “pattern or practice” of using excessive force against the mentally ill. The investigation comes after several incidents in which police shot people in psychological crisis.

The problems with the mental health system are real enough, but this focus may obscure other dynamics propelling police violence—specifically, those relating to race and class.

Two high-profile cases in Portland help illustrate the point.

James Chasse, beaten & dying

James Chasse was a well-known figure in downtown Portland, a writer and musician with a history of mental illness and occasional homelessness. In September 2006, the police spotted Chasse loitering in the recently redeveloped Pearl District. As one officer put it, he was “doing something suspicious or acting just, um, odd.”

Officer Chris Humphreys approached; Chasse ran. The police chased him, tackled him and beat him. Chasse suffered 26 broken bones (mostly ribs), 48 distinct bruises and abrasions, extensive trauma to the head and a punctured lung. He died later that day.

His family sued and received a $1.6 million settlement. Meanwhile, two cops were suspended for failing to ensure that the bloodied, unconscious man they were arresting received medical treatment. No one was disciplined for beating him.

There is no evidence that Chasse committed any crime. The worst he was accused of was urinating in public. The offense itself builds in an element of class-bias: It is the equivalent of trespassing under bridges or panhandling, activities that homeless people resort to in order to survive. In practice, enforcement of such laws comes very close to criminalizing poverty per se.

In this case, moreover, the accusation was merely an excuse for what then-Transit Police Commander Donna Henderson later termed a “pretext stop.” In other words, the police approached, and then chased, and then killed Chasse, not for anything specific that he did, but simply because, as they saw it, he was “suspicious”—or rather: “just, um, odd.”

Chasse died because the cops decided that he did not belong.

Keaton Otis with his parents

Nearly four years later, on May 12, 2010, Portland police pulled over a young African-American man named Keaton Otis, ostensibly for changing lanes without a signal. It’s not clear exactly what happened next, but within minutes Officer Christopher Burley had been shot and Otis was dead after being shot 23 times.

It was not long before the police were placing the blame on the mental health system. Burley told the press that he wished Otis had found treatment for his psychological troubles: “The community as a whole failed Mr. Otis,” he said. “He deserved resources.”

But the police did not stop Otis because of his mental distress any more than they stopped him because of his driving. The cops involved were part of the “Hot Spot Enforcement Action Team,” a gang squad concentrating on the area surrounding Lloyd Center mall. They stopped Otis because Officer Ryan Foote saw a black man wearing a hooded sweatshirt and concluded “this guy… kind of looks like he could be a gangster.”

It is against Portland police policy to single people out solely because of their race, but Foote’s assessment seems to pass official muster. After the shooting, the public information officer, Detective Mary Wheat, stated: “The officers would not have been doing their duty if they had not pulled him over.”

Police now admit that they had no evidence that Otis had any history of gang activity. Aside from a single traffic ticket, his record was clean. Again, we see police policies unfold in ways that are not only discriminatory, but deadly.

Policing ‘quality of life’

In Portland, the standards of public order that the police enforce are shaped and propelled in large part by the agenda of the local chamber of commerce, the Portland Business Alliance (PBA). In terms of both dollars spent and the number of visits to public officials, PBA is the most active lobbying group in the city.

PBA has been a vocal advocate of “quality of life” policing and was a major proponent of the “Sit-Lie” law, which prohibited resting or reclining on the sidewalk. Predictably, between August 2007 and June 2008, 72.3 percent of the 159 people receiving warnings or citations for violating the Sit-Lie law were homeless. In fact, Mike Kuykendall—then vice president of PBA and co-chair of the Mayor’s Street Access For Everyone (SAFE) committee, now director of services in the Police Bureau—admits the law was designed with the homeless in mind. In 2008, he told the Portland Mercury: “The behavior of many of the teenagers and young adults who spend their days on Portland streets was the impetus behind the SAFE ordinance, as many businesses were impacted by the negative impression they were giving downtown.”

Central Precinct Commander (and now Police Chief) Mike Reese agreed: “The folks we’re really having a problem with are these Road Warrior youth.” After twice being ruled unconstitutional—first in 2004 by Circuit Court Judge Marilyn Litzenberger, then in 2009 by Circuit Court Judge Stephen Bushong—the Sit-Lie law was replaced in 2010 with a new Sidewalk Management Plan. The new version does not ban sitting outright, but in selected commercial districts it requires at least six feet of clearance between the seated individual and any building, essentially forcing people to the curb.

PBA’s agenda is clearly outlined in the April/May 2010 issue of its downtown “Business Improvement District” newsletter, BID News, in which BID chair Michelle Martin explains the problem, as she sees it: “We have seen a group of individuals, who some refer to as ‘road warriors’ or ‘summer travelers,’ begin to return to downtown Portland. They are approximately 18-30 years old, can be very unkempt, … and regularly engage in illegal or aggressive behavior.”

(Both Reese and Martin have argued that these young people aren’t really homeless because they choose to live on the streets.) Martin then explains several steps PBA is taking as part of its “Clean and Safe” program, beginning with the sidewalk law: “First, we have been working with Mayor [Sam] Adams … on a new Sidewalk Use Ordinance, which was passed by the Portland City Council on May 6. … Second, Central Precinct Commander Dave Famous has instituted a ‘zero tolerance’ program to deal with individuals committing livability offenses downtown.”

Hired guns

PBA also takes a hand in enforcement. The Clean and Safe Program deploys “42 armed and unarmed security officers, many of them retired police officers.” In addition, PBA has contracted with the Portland Police Bureau to provide four bike cops and the Mounted Patrol Unit to police the downtown using the organization’s radio dispatch system.

PBA spends $1.15 million annually—the largest item in its budget—to contract with a private security firm, Portland Patrol, Inc., which in turn leases sworn officers from the Police Bureau. According to the company’s website, “PPI has the honor of being the only private security agency in the country to have four full-time police officers housed out of a private security office, working hand-in-hand with our staff to improve community and business livability along with chronic nuisance issues.”

Under the terms of PPI’s contract, its officers are required to “wake up all individuals who use [the] sidewalk, and business doorways, as sleeping locations,” and to “stop offensive conduct wherever possible.” Making its mission clear, PPI staff have distributed laminated cards to local businesses, urging them to call the private guards to handle “Homeless Persons,” “Panhandling” and the “Mentally Ill.”

Though dressed like cops and often carrying guns, PPI officers have no public oversight and cannot make arrests. But they are authorized to issue warnings and exclude people from city parks. Furthermore, according to the corporation’s website, their partners in the Police Bureau “frequently make arrests, write citations for criminal and ordinance violations, or take other actions based on direct referrals from PPI officers. … As a result, our PPB officers regularly average over 100 arrests per month!”

Exclusion—and ‘livability’

In addition to its war on the poor, the Business Alliance has also been supportive of Drug Free Zones, which allowed police to exclude suspected drug dealers from certain designated areas prior to trial. PBA spokesperson Megan Doern said the law helped create “an attractive, livable downtown.”

The zones were abandoned in 2007 when it was shown that more than half the people issued exclusions (59 percent) were black. (Blacks represent only 6 percent of the local population.) But earlier this year, Mayor Sam Adams revealed a plan to re-introduce Drug Free Zones with one important change: Judges, and not cops, would issue the exclusions. Around the same time, the city also created Gun Crime Exclusion Zones, including one downtown and one in the city’s largest black neighborhood.

While the zones were defunct, the police, aided with $50,000 in PBA funding, simply replaced them with the Neighborhood Livability Crime Enforcement Program. The program consisted of a secret list of persistent low-level offenders to be singled out for special attention—surveillance, enforcement and felony prosecution, plus, as a salve to Portland’s liberal conscience, special access to services like housing assistance and drug treatment. More than half of the 408 people on the list are African-American.

By the Bureau’s own reporting, in 2009, blacks represented 12 percent of all Portland Police traffic stops—twice the percentage of the population. That same year, taking into account all police stops—not just traffic stops—blacks represented 21 percent. Additionally, they comprise 23 percent of arrests and 29 percent of the incidents in which police report using force. Those rates have been more or less constant for the last five years, with black drivers stopped at 2.73 times the rate of whites.

The numbers reflect something more than the personal biases of individual police officers. They demonstrate an institutional orientation that treats blacks as suspects, as hazards and as targets for violence. The death of Keaton Otis is one result of this orientation. In September 2009, several months before he shot Otis, Officer Berne admitted in court that race is “a factor I’d consider” when making a stop.

Clearly, Berne is not alone. More than a year earlier, James Pitkin, a Willamette Week reporter, tagged along with the cops during “Operation Cool Down,” in which police increased their presence in gang-affected neighborhoods. Pitkin reported that the cops passed by groups of white people without notice, but stopped, searched and questioned black and Latino men when they saw them.

Gang enforcement officer Russ Corno explained: “Profiling—to me, I’m not scared of that word. … If you’re profiling people based just on their race, that is an issue. We’re profiling people based on crime.” And yet, Pitkin wrote: “Corno is frank about who they’re targeting: young black men.”

The police chief at the time, Rosie Sizer, seemed to endorse this approach. She told the newspaper that gang violence, “is predominantly African-American males being violent against other African-American males. So from the sense of criminal profiling as opposed to racial profiling, race is in the mix. … We do not want to target young African-American men who are uninvolved in gang activity. But it’s impossible to perfectly sort.”

Enforcing inequality

The deaths of Otis and Chasse are not generally discussed together, but they share several elements worth noting.

Neither of these men were, in any real sense of the word, “suspects.” They were stopped simply because they belonged to groups that the police considered suspicious in and of themselves. One was black, and the other was—or rather, the police labeled him—”transient.” Both incidents began with trivial pretexts and ended with deadly violence.

Moreover, both involve police control of public space. In particular, they show the cops acting to restrict disadvantaged groups from using the streets in commercial districts. In all these respects, the two cases resemble each other. These similarities show us something of the real nature of proactive and public-order policing. They show the race and class bias implicit in terms like “quality of life” and “livability”—at least as they are applied to law enforcement. And finally, they reveal the violence underlying our systems of race and class privilege.

Author Kristian Williams is also author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America and American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination. He volunteers with Rose City Copwatch.