Without the political will to comprehensively address Portland’s houseless crisis, the Portland Police Bureau will continue to serve as first responders to Portland’s houseless community. This role as first responder requires a different skill set than is currently recruited and trained for.
Those aren’t our words; that’s from the Portland Police Bureau, as published in the bureau’s Strategic Insights Report released this week. It’s gotten a lot of attention in the media for its most unsettling, but not surprising, conclusion: Most Portlanders – especially Portlanders of color – don’t trust the police.
The report was compiled by the firm Corragio, on behalf of the bureau, using data collected from community and PPB members. It will be used to set priorities for the bureau in its five-year strategic planning process.
A dominate thread throughout the report is how the city responds to people experiencing homelessness and mental health crises. From all sides of the survey – both among officers and community members – we’re doing it wrong, and we're dragging the Police Bureau down in the process.
Social conflicts on our public streets and in our neighborhoods are the meat and potatoes of police calls these days, and those are the circumstances in which most of us will encounter police activity – not a major crime. These are the overload of “unwanted person” calls, the large numbers of homeless people arrested for petty offenses, the quality-of-life complaints. This is where the idea of trust needs to take root.
A better response to people on the street has to be part of the solution and may actually be the linchpin to creating the space for more effective policing and proactive engagement with the community.
In our March 15 edition, Street Roots laid out the framework for what the response could look like, a plan we’ve labeled Portland Street Response, which focuses on finding solutions to end people’s crises while reducing unnecessary calls for uniformed police. It’s a plan based on a proven model, CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets), which has operated for 30 years as a response to behavioral issues on the streets of Eugene and Springfield. In 2017, CAHOOTS handled approximately 17 percent of calls requesting police services. And unlike Project Respond, Portland’s mental health crisis response, CAHOOTS does so usually without a uniformed officer in tow. That’s important, because in addition to unnecessarily conflating the criminal justice system with the situation, the presence of an armed uniformed officer can be highly traumatizing to people in crisis.
FURTHER READING: Portland can learn from CAHOOTS model (Director's Desk)
The report also concludes that the bureau's response times are considered inadequate and that better response times would reduce the feeling that certain communities are marginalized when it comes to addressing calls and resolving crimes. According to the data collected, 67 percent of community members believe response rates are sometimes, rarely or never appropriate.
Redirecting calls to the appropriate response means freeing up critical time for officers to meet community expectations.
A great example of this in progress is Portland Fire and Rescue’s Community Health Assessment Team, or CHAT. This one-man outreach program was created to reduce the number of unnecessary calls to 911. And that is precisely what it is doing, by addressing the needs of high-utilizers of the service, housed and unhoused alike. In the absence of that kind of assistance, people were calling 911. Calls to the emergency dispatch by CHAT clients have dropped 50 percent.
Portland needs a comprehensive, dedicated structure for what’s happening on our streets today. We have to disentangle our humanitarian crisis on our streets from our overreliance on 911 and a police response. There are overlaps, to be sure, but the crises has grossly outpaced our solutions, and we have to catch up quickly.
The city is now in the middle of its budget process. Now is the time to lay the political and financial groundwork for a systemic approach, including hiring a developer as soon as possible, updating 911’s dispatch protocol and investing in a response team that truly responds to the needs on the streets – and not just the complaints.
If you want to get involved, visit portlandstreetresponse.org.
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Street Roots is an award-winning, nonprofit, weekly newspaper focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. Our newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Learn more about Street Roots