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PEPPER SPRAY: Portland Professors & Berkeley Police On February 5, citizens of Portland sent a letter to Portland's City Council, City Attorney and City Auditor condemning the Police Bureau's use of pepper spray and certain restraint holds such as hogtying. The letter, signed by professors from four local Universities and ten others, cites the Amnesty International report, United States of America/Rights for All (1998) (see PPR 16). The authors note that the AI study "shows that each by itself--the pepper spray or one of the 'dangerous' restraint holds--can kill." The letter specifically refers to the death of Dickie Dow in October 1998 (see PPRs 16, 17, 18 &19) as one case in Portland in which death resulted from such police actions. They also make the very good point that the dozens of people who died after being hogtied by the LAPD since the mid-80s were only suspects, and should have been presumed innocent under our legal system.
Mayor Katz responded on March 8, pointing out with carefully chosen words that Amnesty's report "contends that the spray 'may' have been a contributing factor in some deaths." She states that the PPB may only use pepper spray "when persons display the intent to use violent, aggressive actions or offer physical resistance...pepper spray may not be used when officers are faced with passive resistance." Mayor Katz goes on to describe how the PPB's "Crisis Intervention Team" has been set up to deal with mentally ill individuals, and how Portland was given a mention in the Amnesty report for creating the CIT. Her final assertion is that all officers "receive training in Sudden Death Syndrome," which we assume means they are told to recognize a person's immediate and perhaps inexplicable death, rather than that they are trained to cause it. Meanwhile, police officers in Berkeley, California, are trying to get their city officials to allow them to take safety seals off of their pepper spray canisters. An article in the December 17 San Francisco Chronicle says the matter will end up in court if City Council does not reverse their 1997 order to the use the seals. The police cite incidents such as a suspect biting an officer on the hand and other "emergency situations" in which officers were "unable to break the safety tab." The Chronicle states "opponents of the eye- and nostril-burning spray say it is an untested chemical weapon that can be lethal when directed at people using certain drugs or with heart and respiratory conditions." In a final note, the article reports another policy the Berkeley City Council adopted: "Officers must fill out reports every time they use pepper spray, and they are not allowed to use it to control crowds." If this policy were passed in Portland, it could be a good interim step to an outright ban of pepper spray.
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April, 2000
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Portland Copwatch Portland Copwatch is a grassroots, volunteer organization promoting police accountability through citizen action.
People's Police Report
#20 Table of Contents
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