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Training Advisory Council Gets Active on Justice Issues Despite canceling their May meeting due to the pandemic, the Training Advisory Council made up for lost time at their online meeting on July 8. They voted on no less than eight items, including asking the PPB to revisit its (ridiculous) refusal to include demographic data along with quarterly Force reports, heard a presentation on two sets of force data from the still quite oblivious to community concerns Lt. Jeff Niiya, and elected their officers, including a second term for Chair Shawn Campbell.
The group also supported Chair Campbell's analysis of PPB Force data which show, once again, a disparity in how often African Americans are subjected to force. While that is clear to anyone with a brain-- the numbers from Q4 2019 and Q1 2020 show that 25-29% of people receiving police violence were black in a city that is 6% African American-- Lt. Niiya made no note of this ongoing problem. When the Lieutentant, famous for his friendly texts with alt-right leader Joey Gibson (PPR #77), was asked how he planned to integrate the staggering number of force incidents at the ongoing police accountability protests into the next report, he said "Oh, you feel my pain." This was a deeply off-key comment to make in the context of people being hit with chemical agents, "less lethal" rounds and other munitions. Niiya also noted that there was one use of deadly force in Q4 2019 but could not remember who it was, being so long ago. During pubic comment, PCW's Dan Handelman noted that it was Koben Henriksen, a man in mental health crisis, whose similar behavior had been deescalated by officers days before he was killed, and that the PPB should know and say his name. Find information on the TAC here. |
September, 2020
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Portland Copwatch Portland Copwatch is a grassroots, volunteer organization promoting police accountability through citizen action.
People's Police Report
#81 Table of Contents
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![image of Shawn Campbell from July TAC meeting July
2020]](http://www.pjw.info/copwatch/PPR81/ShawnC_tac070820.jpg)
Remarkably, three of the recommendations were to sign on to those already made by the Po
rtland
Committee for Community Engaged Policing (PCCEP). Portland Copwatch has long complained
that the City and the Bureau seem intent on keeping the various advisory bodies "atomized" so they
can't compare notes and see common ground. That changed with the murder of George Floyd in
late May, leading to Campbell, Citizen Review Committee Chair Candace Avalos, and PCCEP co-
chair Lakayana Drury putting out a strong statement asking that they be involved in any discussions
about changes being made to the Bureau and its oversight systems. The TAC as a whole voted to
support PCCEP's December recommendations around the Portland Police Association contract
(which themselves echo a community letter on that topic), as well as their June motions around
officer duty to intervene and applying restorative justice to police encounters, especially with youth
(