Mike Schmidt is running against Ethan Knight for Multnomah County district attorney. Street Roots interviewed both candidates with a focus on how the office policies and procedures interface with people experiencing poverty and homelessness.
Mike Schmidt walked in circles around the outside of the Target on Southeast Powell Boulevard as he answered questions from Street Roots about how he would run the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, should he be elected into its top position.
With a toddler and newborn at home, the 39-year-old said going for a walk was the only way he could maintain good call quality. On his way out the door, he was handed a bag and told to pick up some diapers while he was at it.
It was an unusual way to conduct an interview with an unusual candidate for top prosecutor. Since throwing his hat in the race, Schmidt has made it clear that he wants to progressively reform the District Attorney’s Office, using research that’s emerged in recent years as his guide. He’s said he won’t pursue the death penalty, and he helped work on legislation to end driver’s license suspensions due to failure to pay fines and fees.
He’s earned the endorsement of Multnomah County Sheriff Mike Reese and Department of Correction’s director Collette Peters, as well as the endorsement of criminal justice reform advocates and public defense attorneys. But the Multnomah County Prosecuting Attorney’s Association, which represents the attorneys the winner of this election will oversee, has endorsed his opponent, Ethan Knight, for DA.
Schmidt is the director of the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, where he’s used data-driven approaches to help push justice reforms in Legislature and brought transparency to incarceration rates across the state’s 36 counties. Schmidt also worked as a prosecutor in the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office after graduating from Lewis & Clark Law School in 2008.
Joanne Zuhl: How will you dramatically improve, specifically, the “effectiveness” of our criminal justice system, as your campaign says you will? What specific inefficiencies are you going to address and how?
Mike Schmidt: For me it really is all about being a data driven office that uses math and research to make decisions. When I was in the District Attorney’s Office, our policy manual that sets out how we go about resolving cases and coming to plea agreements and negotiations, and also our sentencing laws in general, are not based on research or evidence into what works. They’re typically based on this idea that every time we see you, the punishment should get harsher, and that supposedly at some point we will meet a threshold where it will change somebody’s behavior. But there is just so much evidence in the literature that says that’s not how the human mind works. That model, that paradigm, doesn’t work for things like addiction, for example, where we know that relapse is part of recovery. This model of ascending sanctions really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
So, when I say improve the efficiency of the criminal justice system, for me it starts with actually tracking data and outcomes. Right now, district attorney offices, not only in Multnomah County, but across the country, are pretty much black boxes when it comes to data. They don’t make it available, it’s not transparent, it’s not well researched. If you talk to criminal justice academics, it’s really a big black hole in our understanding in how our criminal justice system works. Step one is making that transparent, like I’ve done at the state level by putting that information out publicly on dashboards, and then actually using that information to drive decisions.
Another thing I talk a lot about is wanting to decrease the disparity in our criminal justice system. Well, you can’t really decrease the disparity in the criminal justice system if you’re not measuring what the disparity currently is and then looking at what is the underlying causes that might be driving that. Sometimes it’s policies; sometimes it’s practice, and then figuring out what you can change and attacking it from there.
It’s really using the data and the research. Senate Bill 1008, that was just passed in the 2019 session, was really the first time I’ve seen this drive for using research, and that bill was all about not automatically transferring juveniles into adult court for Measure 11 crimes. And, recognizing that the science says juveniles’ brains are still developing all the way up until the age of 25. We should take that into account, into our sentencing system.
Emily Green: What do you say to the criticism that you’ve never tried a (violent) felony case in court or before a jury and are therefore underqualified for this job?
Schmidt: I’ve tried cases to 12 jurors, I have that experience. Since leaving the District Attorney’s Office, I’ve worked with victims’ groups to improve their services, to get them additional funding, to talk about what they get from the criminal justice system and whether or not it’s what they actually need to heal. That’s why I’m big on restorative justice.
Although I’ve never tried violent felonies to the court, I absolutely know how to try a felony to the court. I understand what pushing a caseload is like — I did that during my time in the (Multnomah County District Attorney’s) office. Since then, I’ve really spent a lot of my time working on the bigger picture, how the criminal justice system is functioning, and talking to all kinds of groups that are impacted. So I think my experience actually translates extremely well, because I have a much broader perspective than just being a career prosecutor.
Zuhl: You’ve said that one way to lower the caseloads and burden on public defenders is to reduce the amount of prosecutions. If elected, what would you not prosecute?
Schmidt: It goes back to looking at the data that we have coming into the office. When I read articles in the newspaper that Street Roots has reported on and other papers and see how half of the arrests in the system are of people who do not have a registered home on file, and then I look at the cases that are being pushed through the District Attorney’s Office, you see how many of them are for things like criminal trespass and disorderly conduct — the crimes that I think are most typically associated with people living on the streets. I think that’s really a waste of resources; that’s inefficient. When I look at different ways that we can handle it, I’m a huge supporter and applaud Commissioner (Jo Ann) Hardesty, who’s also endorsed me in this race, for her championing the response project, the pilot in Lents, where they’re going to look at whether or not law enforcement response is necessary, and where it’s not, they’re going to look for other system actors to go out and do the response.
When I say I want to decrease prosecutions, it’s not necessary saying there is one crime, and I’m never going to prosecute that again, it’s looking at the crimes that we’re prosecuting currently under their context, and thinking, “Are there better ways to handling these where we get the result that we’re looking for?”
When I talk to folks, and they see people in front of their homes and their businesses, they feel like they need a resolution because the person is obviously displaying some sort of mental health issues or crisis. They’re not looking for that person to be arrested, jailed, convicted and then sentenced to 2 or 3 days in jail or community service. I think the outcome the community wants is to solve the problem. Get the person connected to resources, we don’t want them to have a mental health crisis on our streets.
I think frequently, the criminal justice system can actually get in the way of goals that we as a community share, which is getting people the help that they need. I’m going to be looking for ways, in crimes under those circumstances, that we can use alternative methods instead of prosecution, where possible.
Another example that I’ll give you really quickly, I was talking to the director of Unite Oregon, Kayse Jama — Unite Oregon has also endorsed me in this race — and he was telling me a story about an immigrant woman who was newer to our country. She was a single mother, three kids, and she was receiving unemployment benefits. And at some point, she was no longer eligible to receive those benefits, and not really being acclimated or understanding all the cultural nuances in our country, she continued to collect those unemployment checks, assuming the government would know when she was no longer eligible and would just stop sending her the money. That of course, wasn’t true, and she ended up getting charged with, prosecuted and convicted for felony theft. To me, that just doesn’t make sense. You have a single mother who’s trying to get by — she actually does get employment, which is what ended up making her not eligible any longer for the benefits — and then either through misunderstanding or even if she did something she shouldn’t have done and she knowingly did it, is the result that we’re seeking? To make this single mother, who is already having a hard time making ends meet for her kids, make her a felon and make her unemployable? I think that’s exactly the type of case that a District Attorney’s Office should show some discretion.
Do we need to hold a person who is receiving benefits they’re not entitled to accountable? Yes, I think we do. They need to pay those back, and that’s important. But, it doesn’t mean that we have to cripple their ability to earn or get a job in the future thereby putting them in the exact position or situation they were in in the first place.
Street Roots also asked Schmidt six other questions that were also posed to his opponent. Read their responses to each question.