I have tried to write this column many times. In one version, I began by describing a man I’ll call E. as he was last week — peaceful, smiling his sweet smile, sitting on a bench wrapped in a wool blanket on an overcast late summer morning.
In another version, I began by describing E. last month, in distress, smashing his fists against my office window from the sidewalk, crying out old memories as if they were unfolding now, in mental distress as he revealed that his physical flesh was injured by scabies.
And in another version, I describe E. as he was three years ago, raging as he pulled rock after rock from his bag. “This is all I have!” he said of the river rocks as he was shouting about horrible traumas, his dementia already thick enough to scramble details and time.
Each time I write a version, the details well up and overwhelm the points I want to make. I imagine you will have many questions. You might want to ask about the many services he’s accessed, the moments of crisis that ended in the emergency room or jail. You might have ideas. You might decry the fact that a man with dementia sleeps on the streets.
So I will simply write my point: A key outcome for Portland Street Response is that people have fewer encounters with police. It’s worth repeating this now because, after two and a half years of build-up, it’s tempting to paste a grab-bag of expectations onto the plan. But in the case of Portland Street Response, I fear that some of those expectations could make it less effective.
There’s a reason I turn to the stories of E. to make these points. Three years ago, when E. filled his pockets with rocks and then broke down at Street Roots, we called Project Respond, which sent its fantastic crisis workers but also reminded us they would be accompanied by police, as they frequently were.
Because of E.’s erratic behavior, his violent rhetoric, his dementia, because of his years fighting for survival, my fear was that he might say something or move in such a way that could lead to police pulling out weapons.
So this is what I did. I had E. empty everything he had make sure he didn’t have any weapons, or anything like those rocks that could be construed as a weapon. I practiced with him keeping his hands visible. As he came undone, I did everything I could to make sure E. wouldn’t get shot.
Here I was — a writer, a nonprofit director, not a first responder — prepping a crisis situation before the crisis responders arrived to avert worsening the crisis. I swore to myself that I would fight for a system in which that wouldn’t be necessary.
And that incident last month with E. banged his fists against my window?
I desperately wished I could call Portland Street Response — who I believed could have handled the situation well. All my responses were inadequate, but mostly, I thought about how he could move out of a situation of demonstrative fury.
For a while, I simply kept working, my microphone muted on my meeting. Then I talked to him about the path to walk to Old Town Clinic when it would be open the next day to get the scabies treated. I wouldn’t say he calmed down much, but a little. He stopped banging his fists against the glass.
What he needed was to move out of a state of high crisis without something bad happening. That’s it.
If Portland city council saddles Portland Street Response with other expectations beyond crisis de-escalation — such as measures of services that a person must be connected to — that could bog down the effectiveness of simply meeting a person where they are at.
I recently talked to Jason Renaud of the Mental Health Association of Portland. He’s long tracked how people die at the hands of the police while in the throes of a mental health crisis.
A solution, he reminded me, is for people in these crises not to encounter police. Take the weapons out of these moments.
And, of course, Street Roots has always focused on taking police out of a lot of interactions with unhoused people to decrease criminalization. Once people are entangled with the legal system, it’s harder to get jobs or housing. And since more than half of all arrests in Portland target unhoused people, legal entanglements create enormous barriers to jobs and housing.
Back in 2019, when we first were discussing Portland Street Response, this point seemed clear. I want to make sure it still is: Portland Street Response can’t take people to respites that don’t exist, and it can’t fix the police. However, it can meet people where they are at to be with them as they move through crises.
Last week, as E. watched the Willamette River roll along, wrapped in his wool blanket from a park bench, I felt relief for his momentary calm.