How Portland leaders fumbled through a historic year of disorder, violence and despair

As Portland’s public safety system teetered in 2021, the city’s elected leaders confronted a pair of urgent — and sometimes conflicting — challenges.

The first: Answer to calls born out of months of protests and social unrest to reform Portland’s police force and reimagine how the city protects its residents and promotes their well-being.

The second: Tackle a sudden and alarming rise in disorder, violence and despair that cast the city into crisis.

Over the past 12 months, Portland’s mayor and four city commissioners responded with a series of initiatives. But, individually and collectively, they struggled to deliver on even modest short-term remedies — while their bigger-picture reforms got off to a sluggish start or failed to launch at all.

The city set records in 2021 for shootings, homicides and traffic fatalities. Reported cases of car thefts and vandalism surged compared to years past, data shows. The number of Portland police officers, meanwhile, plummeted to its lowest number in three decades, as the bureau labored both to retain officers and hire new ones.

“I’ve never been in a situation as a public official and seen so much wrong at once,” said Mike Myers, who in April became the city’s first community safety transition director, overseeing a realignment among the police, fire, emergency and 911 bureaus. He previously served as Portland’s fire chief and director of emergency management.

Personal tales filled with frustration and fear became a routine part of city residents’ public testimony at City Council meetings.

The council heard from a 9-year-old girl about a gun battle that erupted in broad daylight at her neighborhood park where she was playing with her brother and father. Local business owners detailed repeated break-ins that left their employees on edge and set them back thousands of dollars. A mother talked about her son who was fatally shot outside a bar after celebrating his young daughter’s birthday hours earlier.

“The city feels lawless and we feel abandoned by our elected officials,” Frank Blackston, a disabled resident, told the City Council in November.

But the year also offered vivid reminders of why many in Portland remain wary of — or outright opposed to — entrusting public safety primarily to police. The council approved large financial settlements to people injured or maimed by officers during protests as well as to the family of Quanice Hayes, a Black teenager fatally shot by police in 2017.

Police killed four other Portlanders in 2021, among them Robert Delgado, a homeless man with a history of mental illness. Officers also appeared to target local elected officials deemed opponents of the police bureau, including Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, a longtime champion of police reform.

Hardesty defended the City Council’s inability to bring about meaningful changes in police oversight, training and accountability over the past year and a half since Portlanders took to the streets demanding them after the police murder of George Floyd. “We didn’t build our public safety system overnight and we can’t transform it overnight,” Hardesty said. “There are no quick fixes.”

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler told The Oregonian/OregonLive, “I hear Portlanders’ frustrations and I empathize with their concerns. I often agree with them when they say they don’t always feel safe.” But, he said, even with safety initiatives running behind schedule or yet to launch, “We’re entering the new year more equipped than last year prior to address public safety concerns.”

Here are some of the examples where, time and again, the council or some of its members failed to ensure swift and effective follow-through on promises to keep Portlanders safe.

SLOW ROLLOUT FOR ON-THE-GROUND PREVENTION

The City Council in early April committed an unprecedented $4.1 million to community organizations to step up their efforts to aid shooting victims and their families and attempt to stop the retaliations that often end in further bloodshed.

Dozens of Portlanders were fatally shot — and many more wounded — while the city bumbled to get much of that money out the door.

The city’s Office of Violence Prevention was able to steer nearly $1 million to three established anti-violence programs by May and another $65,000 to several organizations working with impacted families the following month.

But it wasn’t until mid-September that the largest tranche of money, $2 million, even reached the four nonprofits identified by city officials to do the lion’s share of anti-violence work: Immigrant & Refugee Community Organization, Latino Network, Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center and Native American Youth and Family Center.

During that five-month waiting period, the city logged 39 of the year’s 90 homicides. Frustration among community groups and some Portland elected leaders mounted.

Myers, the community safety transition director, chalked the long delay up to the size and scope of the undertaking, a first for Portland and the groups with which it partnered.

“There’s no way to rush something like this,” Myers said. “We funded what we could as fast as we could.”

Commissioner Carmen Rubio, who championed the concept of community-based funding to fight gun violence, lamented the setback.

“We should have been able to tackle this more quickly, but the city was not equipped to get this off the ground,” she said. “We couldn’t afford to lose all of that time. But we did.”

Portland officials continue to sit on more than a $1 million from the April spending package, which they earmarked for small or emerging organizations that have not previously worked with city government. Thirty-five groups applied.

City officials said they expect to award the funds within the first three months of this year.

POLICE STAFFING SHORTAGES PERSIST

The Portland Police Bureau deployed fewer sworn officers in 2021 — 787— than at any point in the last 30 years as the city strained to hire new cops and retain the ones it had. It wasn’t that City Council members cut back on officer staffing levels; rather, the bureau had a record number of funded positions it couldn’t fill.

Officers started to leave the state’s largest police force in droves in 2020, a phenomenon that has yet to subside. Cops have cited a lack of support from city leaders and the community at large, as well as criticism bureau members sustained during Portland’s reckoning against racial injustice and police violence.

Due largely to screening and training requirements, it takes between 18 and 24 months to hire new police recruits and put them to work in Portland. So Wheeler, who serves as police commissioner, in November finally pushed — and received unanimous support among his council colleagues — to immediately rehire up to 25 recently retired Portland police officers.

Even if the modest rehiring program proves a success, which is not guaranteed, residents should expect to see the ranks of Portland’s police force dwindle further this year when an additional 80 officers become eligible for retirement in July, said Lt. Nathan Sheppard, a bureau spokesman.

“We have not hit the bottom yet, that’s for sure,” Sheppard said. “We could hire 500 [new] people today, and still not have a single extra hand to help with the work until 2023.”

Meanwhile, a new program that aims to bolster the number of non-sworn staff to assist Portland’s officers has hit bureaucratic and political snags.

The City Council authorized funding in June’s annual budget to nearly triple the number of “public safety support specialists” to 34, up from an original team of 12.

These unarmed specialists, known as PS3s, write reports for non-emergency calls, respond to low-level crimes and work patrols, allowing the bureau’s sworn officers to focus on more demanding police work.

The problem: Since June, the city has added only six public safety support specialists, bringing the total number to 18.

Commissioner Mingus Mapps, a supporter of the unarmed specialists, said concerns among some of his council colleagues about the program’s overall effectiveness prompted an internal evaluation that’s slowed the hiring process.

The City Council is expected to review that evaluation sometime in the next few months, he said.

“There is often a tension between moving fast and being accountable,” Mapps said. “Hopefully, we’ll eliminate the bottleneck soon.”

NO GUN VIOLENCE TEAM DURING DEADLIEST YEAR

In April, Wheeler authorized the creation of a new team of officers tasked with preventing shootings, nearly 10 months after the City Council eliminated the bureau’s Gun Violence Reduction Team amid calls for police reform and concerns that the team disproportionately targeted people of color.

The revamped unit, known as the Focused Intervention Team, will operate under the guidance of a community oversight group that seeks to bring a level of accountability and public buy-in that eluded its predecessor.

Whether the oversight group achieves these goals remains to be seen — the new 12-member team will not hit the streets until Jan. 15.

It took months for the City Council to select members for the community group, then more months for the panel to establish protocols for the police unit it will oversee. Portland police leaders, meanwhile, had trouble recruiting the specialized officers, all of them reassigned from other bureau divisions.

By the time the Focused Intervention Team finally launches, Portland will have spent 19 months without a dedicated gun violence unit — during the deadliest stretch in the city’s history.

“This is utterly unacceptable,” Mapps said. “Our ability to respond to and prevent gun crime is an absolute matter of life or death. We get a failing grade on that one.”

Wheeler defended the pace, however. “Yes, it took months to create this new model,” he said. “But we committed to making these changes and they were needed to ensure the new model has the oversight the community called for.”

PORTLAND STREET RESPONSE DELAYS

City leaders bucked the public safety status quo when they launched Portland Street Response in the Lents neighborhood last February, far later than originally planned. Then they pumped the brakes on expanding it to other parts of the city, even though they had set aside money to do so.

The program dispatches an unarmed paramedic and social worker team to assist people experiencing homelessness or a mental health crisis outdoors. To date, it has responded to about 700 calls, according to the program’s online dashboard —an average of about two a day.

The entire City Council has been united in the belief that Portland needs an effective alternative to the traditional approach of sending police on such calls. But a majority of the council —Wheeler, Mapps and Commissioner Dan Ryan — voted in May to delay releasing additional money earmarked for the program. Ryan was the lone member of the council who declined The Oregonian/OregonLive’s requests to comment for this story.

All three at the time said they had too little information about the program’s strengths and shortcomings as well as questions about whether the city should contract a portion of the program’s work to outside nonprofits.

The City Council in November unanimously authorized spending $1.1 million more for Portland Street Response, leaving about an additional $1.5 million still held in check.

With the new cash infusion, the program will expand to two additional Portland neighborhoods in March and add a mobile unit that can respond to calls citywide. Hardesty said that, had council released all of the set-aside funding last year, the non-police response program would be up in running in six neighborhoods by this spring.

LITTLE PROGRESS ON NEW POLICE OVERSIGHT SYSTEM

In November 2020, Portlanders overwhelmingly supported creating a new police oversight board with the power to investigate and discipline officers for misconduct. The measure, backed by 82% of voters, delivered a resounding, unambiguous rebuke to the current system that allows police chiefs to routinely ignore recommendations for sanctions – or allows arbiters to undo discipline a chief imposes.

Portland leaders, however, did little to hasten or amplify the change in the year that followed, despite continued vows to place police reform and accountability at the center of their public safety agenda.

It took the City Council until July to appoint a 20-person commission tasked with designing the new oversight board and another two months after that to hire the sole city staffer assigned to oversee the group.

Hardesty, Wheeler and Myers defended the city’s sluggish pace in November, saying in a statement, “We only have one chance to do this right.” The ReThink Police Accountability Commission held its first official meeting in December, 13 months after voters passed the ballot measure. The commission now has up to an additional 18 months to submit its proposed changes to the mayor and city commissioners for final approval.

“Like the public, I’m disappointed that it’s taken so long to convene this committee,” Hardesty told The Oregonian/OregonLive in a recent interview. “They have a lot of work to do, but they have a plan to get it done.”

CALLING 911? PREPARE TO HOLD

In September, Bob Cozzie, director of Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communications, issued a dire assessment of the city’s ability to field 911 calls. “We’re at a tipping point,” he said. “The system is broken.”

Most residents who contacted an emergency dispatcher in 2021 were placed on hold far longer than the national standard of 15 seconds. That’s in part because the bureau says it experienced a 25% to 40% increase in 911 calls compared to the year prior. Meanwhile, more than a dozen authorized staff positions remained vacant.

The average 911 caller wait time in November was 57 seconds, the highest month in bureau history. December’s data is not yet available. “This is just unacceptably long,” said Dan Douthit, an emergency communications spokesman.

Wheeler and Mapps, who oversees the bureau, sought a number of fixes to the 911 system in 2021. They included funding to hire additional dispatchers, technology to automatically generate return calls when incoming calls get dropped and plans to beef up the city’s 311 non-emergency system.

None of the upgrades are expected to materialize until later this year.

TRAFFIC BARRELS TO STOP SHOOTINGS

Hardesty, as the commissioner overseeing city’s transportation bureau, directed the agency in October to install traffic-calming devices across a six-block area in the Mt. Scott-Arleta neighborhood.

The reason? Weary residents had reached out to her office over the summer amid a surge in shootings — some of them linked to high-speed drivers — and pitched the idea with the hope of nipping both dangers in the bud, she said.

“They called me and didn’t say, ‘We needed police.’ They said, ‘We have an idea that will reduce gun violence in our community,’” Hardesty said.

If successful, the experimental — and relatively inexpensive — program could be implemented in other neighborhoods throughout Portland.

However, a KGW investigation found that reports of shootings and reckless driving in the area remained nearly unchanged in the two months after the orange traffic barrels went up compared to the two months prior.

Hardesty said the city recently sent out surveys to 300 nearby residents to gauge the level of community support for the pilot and expects to publicize the findings later this month.

“What I can tell you right now is that those neighbors feel listened to,” she said. “They feel City Hall was responsive to their call for help.”

PARK RANGERS HIRED AFTER PEAK SHOOTING SEASON

As part of their push to curb the rise in shootings and homicides, city leaders embraced a novel approach last spring that would not require additional armed police officers: Spend $1.4 million for around-the-clock foot patrols by two dozen new park rangers.

Critics, including some longtime city park rangers, quickly panned the plan as misguided. Police bureau figures show extremely few shootings occur in Portland parks — about 3%. And while rangers wear uniforms and have the authority to enforce rules in and near public spaces, they are armed only with pepper spray and receive minimal public safety training.

Almost none of these park rangers hit the streets last summer, during the season that sees the most gun violence in Portland each year. By the end of August, the city had hired just two of the 24 new positions. That number increased to 17 by the end of December, according to parks bureau officials, meaning 30% of the positions remain unfilled.

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh; 503-294-7632

Email at skavanaugh@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @shanedkavanaugh

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