Portland City Council members will meet at 2 p.m. Thursday to determine how the city’s budget of $4.4 billion will be spent over the next year, beginning on July 1.
This comes after 12 days — and counting — that people have turned out in our streets and across the nation, demanding justice for Black lives. People taking to the streets have shifted the political conversation in the city.
Today and tomorrow, the City Council’s discussion of item No. 452 takes on immense gravity. This is about the call to defund part of the Portland Police Bureau’s budget — currently proposed to be $242.6 million — and reinvest in the health of communities, centering Black lives. Don’t Shoot Portland and Care Not Cops, as well as Portland African American Leadership Forum and Unite Oregon, have all called for $50 million in cuts to the bureau. So far, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has said he supports cuts of about $7 million, slightly less than 3% of the police budget.
You can bet that the docket of speakers will be long as people testify to why a police system “born in oppression” — as Street Roots staffer DeVon Pouncey said last night on international television — can’t simply be reformed with a tweak here and a tweak there.
Much of the nation has been educated on what defunding the police actually could mean. There is a sickness — chronic and fatal — in a country built on police rather than health. Racism makes people sicker. Black Americans are dying at the hands of the police, and at twice the rate of white Americans from COVID-19.
Street Roots has long called for fully funding non-police first responders, specifically Portland Street Response. And we continue that work today. We know that our 911 operators can reroute calls away from police and to teams of EMTs and crisis workers. The city funded one pilot; if it could fund multiple pilots and invest in the work long term, we could better determine how this could work best. Black organizers need to be at the table for this.
Our call for Portland Street Response is about reimagining what a healthy community can be and how many crises can be met with health know-how and compassion, and not a badge and a gun. We’ll never know if Andre Gladen’s life could have been saved should our community have fully invested in this kind of non-police response. Blind, unarmed — he posed no danger until an armed police officer showed up. It was a police officer’s knife that police say he was found with.
But reimagining public safety is larger than just one program, and Black lives have to be centered in the call for how this can be done.
We need to make this clear: Portland Street Response needs to be fully funded, and so do Black-led initiatives for re-investing the police budget.
It’s not a zero-sum game, and one good thing should not be pitted against another.
PAALF calls for an investment “in a community-centered health and safety model that is developed in strong partnership with community partners,” and it has put forth a “People’s Plan.”
As we press ahead, let’s remember how Black community health has been policed in the past.
As Kent Ford, one of the founders of the Portland chapter of the Black Panther Party, takes to the streets night after night at the age of 77, I’m reminded of how much work the Portland police did to sabotage the Black Panther Party’s dental clinic, health clinic, and a breakfast for children program.
Evidence of the bureau’s surveillance of the Black Panther Party is stored now in the City of Portland archives. Black empowerment was considered dangerous.
This is our legacy: A city that invests in police and not in the health and well-being of its Black residents.
The status quo is powerful in its endurance. It hums along. So no matter what happens tomorrow at City Council, the people’s movement must outlast it, and outshout the hum of oppression.