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People's Police Report 20th Anniversary!!!

Dear readers: It's hard to believe that we've reached another milestone here at Portland Copwatch. Since late 1993, we've been publishing the People's Police Report three times a year to bring you news and analysis about Portland's Police, laws designed to be enforced selectively, the oversight system, and civil rights and liberties in general. Pictured here are the 5th, 10th, and 15th anniversary issues, along with summaries of their contents. (Each of these three previous anniverary issues summarized the preceding 14 editions.) We have posted all 59 previous covers on our website at portlandcopwatch.org/PPRcovers.html .

Anniversaries like this are opportunities to examine where you've been and where you're going. It certainly occurs to us regularly that while the PPB has its share of corruption, brutality and racism, things could be a lot worse if PCW were not around. The changes to the Bureau's use of force policies (some forced by the Department of Justice), the police oversight system (which when we began was an "auditing committee" with one staff person, but now includes 11 staff members, some of whom go out to the scenes of police shootings), the laws (Sit/Lie is on iteration #4 and still isn't right; drug-free zone exclusions now have to be made upon conviction, not arrest) and the uses of deadly force (by our count becoming less frequent on average, though still too many) have all been moving in the right direction. Where wešre going is obviously dependent on all of you taking action to support these changes taken to their full conclusion, resulting in a city which one day can actually model how it protects all its residents without resorting to violence.

People's Police Report #45 (September 2008)

PPR #45 (Septembet 2008): Lt. Kaer fired over
shooting incident; racial profiling statistics
show no change; protesting Sit/Lie 3.0.

People's Police Report #30 (September 2003)
  (10th Anniversary Issue!)

PPR #30 (August, 2003): Unarmed motorist
Kendra James killed; five review board members quit;
shooter cops awarded.

People's Police Report #16 (December 1998)

PPR #16 (December, 1998): Dickie Dow dies
after police beating; 450 march against police brutality;
police shoot "non-lethal" rounds at crowd.

September, 2013
Also in PPR #60

Portland Copwatch
PO Box 42456
Portland, OR 97242
(503) 236-3065/ Incident Report Line (503) 321-5120
e-mail: copwatch@portlandcopwatch.org

Portland Copwatch is a grassroots, volunteer organization promoting police accountability through citizen action.

People's Police Report #60 Table of Contents
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