In 2019, Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty failed to muster the votes needed to amend the City's
budget by cutting the Gun Violence Reduction Team (GVRT) and School Resource Officers
(SROs). Initially, pushing those cuts in 2020 seemed like an uphill climb, too, until the murder of
George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked a movement too large and loud to ignore. Although the City
truncated the usual public input into the budget, when it came time to vote, roughly 700 Portlanders
testified, demanding the police be defunded and the money be used to support those communities
most harmed by law enforcement violence. This made Hardesty's proposals more palatable to
Mayor/ Police Commissioner Ted Wheeler, particularly as he recognized he as a white man needed
to listen to the first African American woman elected to Council and the voices of the people
protesting. The GVRT and SROs (see SRO article in this issue) were cut, along with the Transit
police and
eight members of the Special Emergency Reaction Team (SERT) for a total of $15 million in cuts.
However, since
the Police take up the largest chunk of the City's discretionary funds at $250
million, community demands (including from Unite Oregon and the Portland African American
Leadership Forum) were to cut $50 million. While supporting Hardesty's amendments to cut the
abovementioned programs, Commissioner Chloe Eudaly ultimately voted no on the overall budget,
citing that the Council was falling short of community expectations.
The GVRT (and its previous incarnation, the Gang Enforcement Team), notoriously over-police
Portland's relatively small Black population, with about 60% of their stops being of African
Americans in a city that is 6% Black. While some in the community, including the very vocal
mother of Patrick Kimmons, who was killed by patrol officers in September 2018 (PPR #76
and see Shootings article in this issue), are concerned the GVRT's ability
to build relationships will be lost, institutionally
speaking it's only a plus to disband a group with a track record so poor.
The eight SERT officers had only just been added to the 2020-2021 budget by the Bureau, so their
elimination was more of a zero-sum change.
The Transit Division has long been a nightmare, particularly because the Portland Police were in
command, but officers from more than ten neighboring jurisdictions participate. This has led to
many times where officers were not able to be held accountable because they are not directly
responsive to PPB policies-- or its complaint system (see PPR #45, for
example). TriMet,
the regional agency which runs the area transit, has promised to find a way to keep security
grounded in a law enforcement model, but will move funds for six of 76 positions into
"community-based public safety approaches" (Oregonian, June 19). Of the 76
officers, 32 are currently from Portland; they are reportedly going to stay on the Transit Division
until December (Oregonian, June 20). While the Multnomah County Sheriff said they
might take over supervision, that decision is still in flux.
No More School Resource Officers... For Now
On June 3, after the death of George Floyd and the subsequent days of sustained protests in
Portland, Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty proposed to defund the School Resource Officer (SRO)
program, as she did in 2019 (PPR #78). The
next day Guadalupe Guerrero, Superintendent
of Portland Public Schools (PPS), made a dramatic reversal and announced PPS will discontinue
the district's SRO program. That day, under mounting pressure, Mayor Wheeler also announced
he would be discontinuing the SRO program for all three Portland school districts, transferring the
13 police officers in the program to other departments. However, the community should not rest
easy-- it is an easy lift to take officers out of schools which are closed due to the pandemic.
Nonetheless, Portland Copwatch believes schools should provide care, not cops and applauds
PPS's decision to remove SROs, which comes with the promise to hire more school support staff.
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