Police officers, by one major measure, have been in retreat on the streets of Portland.
In recent years, the number of what’s known as self-initiated calls by officers has dropped dramatically. These calls range from traffic stops to investigating something suspicious down an alley to having a casual conversation with someone on a street corner. Such activities contrast with officer actions prompted by 911 and other calls from the public.
In 2012, Portland Police Bureau officers logged over 157,000 such self-initiated actions. In 2018, that number was less than 99,000, a nearly 37% decline.
This sharp drop is of concern to top police officials and others, who argue that such proactive policing can be a vital contributor to preventing crime and to improving relations between the public and the Portland Police Bureau.
“Research suggests that proactive policing is most effective in fighting crime,” said Kris Henning, a criminology professor at Portland State University who has done extensive research on policing in the city. He called the drop in officer-initiated activities “a huge change that has not been fully appreciated by people in the city.”
In a November interview with Street Roots, Chief Danielle Outlaw said it’s a priority of hers to get those officer-initiated numbers back up.
“I would love to see those numbers increase,” she said.
Outlaw said she believed increased interactions between officers and residents that didn’t involve confrontations would cause complaints about police to go down and “we’d see the relationships improve.”
There is room for improvement, according to a recently released report by the bureau. This Strategic Insights Report, which was based on meetings, interviews and surveys of more than 3,000 members of the public and the police force, found that “71% of the community indicate that they don’t have a high level of trust in the Portland Police Bureau. This lack of trust grows in communities of color.” Residents also felt “this diminished community trust is the largest barrier to an effective and efficient police force and safe communities throughout Portland,” the report said.
While many welcomed the idea of officers making greater outreach efforts, the report said that sentiment was tempered by concerns the police “don’t always have the best interest of the communities they serve in mind.”
Leland Baxter-Neal, an attorney for the Oregon affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, worries that self-initiated activities by police officers with homeless people could simply be “a pretext for investigating individuals for committing survival crimes,” such as loitering or vagrancy. The police bureau needs to ensure the contacts wouldn’t be used in a way “that criminalizes or further criminalizes one of the most vulnerable sectors of our community.”
Last June, the ACLU of Oregon sent a letter to Mayor Ted Wheeler and Outlaw concerning complaints it had received about police officers’ “profiling and harassing unhoused individuals in violation of their rights.” The alleged harassment included searching personal belongings and running checks for possible outstanding arrest warrants without reasonable suspicion or probable cause.
“By some accounts, the only reason for those actions is the individual’s apparent homelessness status,” which would be “inhumane and counterproductive” and illegal, the letter said.
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The ACLU letter sparked a continuing investigation by the Independent Police Review, an oversight agency that’s part of the City Auditor’s office.
A bureau spokeswoman told Street Roots that the agency didn’t have any comment on the ACLU letter. A spokeswoman for the mayor also declined to comment on the ongoing investigation. Officers, who “play a vital role in helping all community members,” are expected to follow the law and police bureau policies, “including the prohibition on disparate treatment of any individual based on housing status,” she said.
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The possible reasons for the steep drop in officer-initiated activities range from simple arithmetic to not-so-simple factors, such as increased scrutiny of police.
As for the math: Over the past decade, Portland’s population has grown more than 12% to about 650,000.
The number of calls for police service, either through the 911 system or a non-emergency line, has grown even faster. They’re up 28% since 2012 to nearly 260,000 last year, according to bureau statistics.
Technology has contributed to that rise, Deputy Chief Robert Day said.
“Now everyone has a cellphone,” he said. “If you see a problem, you call the police.”
But the number of sworn officers is essentially the same as it was 10 years ago, less than 1,000. To explain the drop in officer-initiated actions, “for starters, it’s just a numbers game,” the Day said.
Police conduct and misconduct have also come under greater scrutiny in recent years by the public, the press and governmental bodies. Much of the attention has been spurred by high-profile cases of alleged misdeeds by police, often involving the use of deadly force against young black men.
Some have publicly wondered whether all this attention and criticism has made officers more reluctant to actively patrol their communities – a phenomenon known by such terms as “de-policing” and the “Ferguson effect.” The name drawn from Ferguson, Mo., where in 2014, a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, setting off sometimes violent protests and a nationwide debate about police conduct.
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In a 2015 speech, then-FBI director James Comey said he had a “strong sense” that there was “a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year. And that wind is surely changing behavior.”
Comey said some of that change could be for the good, making officers more careful about avoiding improper, or worse, conduct when dealing with the public. But, he added, it could also make officers reluctant to dive into situations where aggressive policing was necessary. The nation needs to be careful that proper policing “doesn’t drift away from us in the age of viral videos, or there will be profound consequences,” Comey said.
The U.S. Justice Department, particularly during the Obama administration, investigated police departments around the country, looking for patterns of misconduct, such as excessive use of force or discrimination against minority groups. It reached settlements with a number of cities requiring local police departments to make wide-ranging changes in officer training, conduct and record-keeping.
Portland reached such an agreement in 2012 with the Justice Department, which had claimed that police too often used excessive force when dealing with mentally ill people. The city and police department are still working to implement the changes agreed to under the settlement.
The increased scrutiny along with the Ferguson effect could be factors in the drop in proactive policing by Portland officers, Deputy Chief Day said. In certain situations, “some officers say ‘why bother’” initiating an action.
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In the bureau’s fourth quarter Compliance and Outcome Assessment Report, the firm hired to help monitor Portland’s progress in meeting the terms of the federal settlement agreement noted that there had been a 51% drop in the number of stops of drivers by police over the past five years. This drop could be positive sign of improved driver safety and of police making traffic stops only when necessary, the report said. However, it added, if the decline “reflects some degree of ‘de-policing’ in light of local and national criticism of police, then it may be a reason for concern.”
Cutting down the amount of self-initiated activity is a way for officers to protect themselves from unfair criticism or worse, said Daryl Turner, president of the Portland Police Association, the local police union.
“We don’t want to just drive around and wait for the radio to call,” Turner said. “We want to police proactively but need the resources and political support to do so. This is a critical point in time where proactive policing is going away. We can see that in the livability issues in the city where the communities are suffering.”
The impact of the drop in officer-initiated calls on crime in Portland is unclear. While crime rates generally remain at historically low levels, “there has been an uptick in some property crimes” in recent years, said Henning, with PSU. However, he added, “we don’t know” if there is any tie to the drop in self-initiated police activity.
In response to an emailed question about the property-crime numbers, Deputy Chief Day pointed to the increasing demands on officers and the changing nature of police work.
“Property crimes are largely crimes of opportunity, such as car break-ins and burglaries. If officers were more available, being seen and engaged, I believe we could impact those numbers,” he wrote.
Outlaw, who took over the department in October 2017, said she is dedicated to turning around the decline in self-initiated actions. The numbers in 2018 did rise from the prior year but were still far below earlier years.
“A lot of our relationships are established and built upon self-initiated activity,” she told Street Roots in November, “meaning I’m just getting out of the car and saying, ‘hey,’ and I’m putting myself out here on this corner because I just want to chat.”
Past experience suggests that approach doesn’t ensure winning the hearts and minds of local residents. In 2014, in the face of some rising crime rates after years of decline, the bureau, under then-Chief Mike Reese, launched a program that dispatched police officers on more than 13,000 calls, each about 15 minutes, to areas viewed as crime “hotspots.” A particular location would get two or four such visits a day. A major aim of the program was to improve police-community relations by getting officers out of their cars and talking to residents.
The program, known as the Neighborhood Involvement Locations Project, didn’t deliver the hoped-for results. While the officer visits “increased positive contacts with residents in the targeted areas, they did not impact residents’ overall attitudes toward police,” according to a follow-up analysis done by the bureau and PSU.
The analysis included surveys of Portland residents in areas that got extra police visits and some that didn’t. The surveys suggested that in some areas, the police visits made residents feel less safe than people in areas that didn’t get the extra visits. One possible explanation was that “infrequent visits by police to a high-crime area signals potential danger to residents,” according to the analysis. Some business owners didn’t like the officer visits “for fear their presence would send the wrong message to customers.”
There is a question of how well police officers, trained to fight crime and arrest criminals, are suited to be goodwill ambassadors.
The police have “never been great interacting with the community,” said David Linn, former chairman of the Montavilla Neighborhood Association. Too often, he said, officers come to community meetings “with body armor, give people dirty looks and are incredibly defensive answering questions” while blaming political leaders for problems.
A common citizen complaint to the Independent Police Review office about officer conduct has to do with lack of courtesy.
The demands on officers are changing, Outlaw told Street Roots in November. Officers are being trained to be more attuned to bringing in social-service and other agencies to help someone in distress rather than just making an arrest, she said.
“We’re adapting and we’re learning, but the nature of our calls are becoming far more complex,” she said.
“I tell officers I want you to know people (in the community.) You’re not going to get a bonus for making five arrests,” Day said. “We’re trying to get officers to look differently at the community to understand why people claim there is harassment.”
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