So far, the city of Portland has paid over $2.8 million resolving police use of force lawsuits and claims stemming from the racial justice protests that roiled the city in 2020.
The Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd catalyzed nightly protests continuing for more than 100 successive days, establishing Portland as a focal point during the national racial justice movement protesting police brutality and racism.
During the sometimes destructive protests, police frequently tear gassed, punched and batoned protesters and fired countless less-lethal munitions like rubber bullets and pepper balls. Portland Police Bureau officers documented over 6,000 uses of force during the protests and were ultimately on the receiving end of a slew of lawsuits.
More than two years later, the city is still wading through lawsuits and potential claims against PPB officers, the bureau and the city itself.
35 and counting
As of March 23, the city paid over $2.8 million to resolve 35 bodily injury claims and lawsuits stemming from policing during 2020 protests. Payments include settlements and offers of judgement (payments resolving claims that aren’t technically settlements) in addition to legal fees incurred by the city itself. This figure doesn’t include pending litigation or additional unsettled claims against PPB.
Of the $2.8 million, the city paid more than $1.7 million for its legal defense and consultation in these cases. Another $1 million was spent on settlements, offers of judgement, medical bills and legal compensation for people who said Portland police injured them or otherwise violated their rights during 2020 protests.
Most lawsuits and claims allege chaotic and oft-violent police responses to the protests.
Plaintiffs’ allegations run the gamut of police misconduct, from indiscriminately firing less-lethal munitions to holding a protestor down and repeatedly punching them. A handful of lawsuits demand legal restitution for vehicle damage caused by police during protests.
One lawsuit alleges injuries to a protester after PPB officers fired projectiles into a crowd. In another, a man said he was injured after PPB officers fired a projectile at him while he picked up a friend from a protest. In yet another instance, the city paid $22,500 to a protester after Portland police shot them with a rubber bullet and exposed them to chemical weapons during a protest. Including legal costs, this instance cost the city $65,302.
The city paid $32,465 in fees for one lawsuit brought by a man who said he was arrested at a protest while only standing and holding a sign — the man received $5,000, and the remaining $26,465 covered the city’s legal and court expenses. In another instance, the city paid $126,608 in total fees after a PPB officer shot a protester with a beanbag and injured him.
Notably, five of the bodily injury resolutions allege police violated the First Amendment right of freedom of the press. These cases absorbed nearly $250,000. Of this, $133,944 funded city legal fees and $115,001 funded payments to individuals, their lawyers and medical fees.
Street Roots examined City Council-approved settlements and payouts resolving litigation dating back to May 2020, in addition to requesting all litigated bodily injury payments relating to PPB actions from the city's office of risk management. The searches did not capture unlitigated payouts of $5,000 or less, as only sums over $5,000 are subject to City Council approval.
Street Roots identified three City Council-approved unlitigated payouts in council minutes, for a total of $79,500 paid to plaintiffs. The legal fees and expenses incurred by the city for these three claims are not included in the figures provided in this story.
Uprecedented force
The protests resulted in the PPB’s then-Chief Jami Resch, a white woman, resigning amid criticism of how PPB was handling protests, Resch’s all-white command staff and the bureau’s legacy of racist policing. Resch promoted Chuck Lovell, a Black police captain, to take her place. Lovell has served as PPB chief since June 2020. PPB also faced a record number of resignations following 2020, compounding a personnel shortage.
Protests continued to be marked by increasing tension between police and protesters, exacerbated by then-President Donald Trump’s deployment of federal agents and officers to the city. In nightly skirmishes, federal law enforcement and Portland police worked in tandem to dispel protesters with the liberal use of teargas, rubber bullets and pepper balls.
The city of Portland has since acknowledged Portland Police officers “used force at unprecedented levels” during protests. Officers documented more than 6,000 uses of force during the protests.
The city of Portland released a “Lessons Learned” report in April 2022, noting community members had filed hundreds of complaints with the Independent Police Review about officer conduct during protests.
The report found multiple factors “hindered the City’s ability to hold officers accountable,” including unprecedented breadth and frequency of use of force, inadequate documentation of force incidents, limited accountability, lack of direct access to bureau records by investigators which slowed investigations into misconduct and, at times, community members perceiving misconduct that was actually part of enforcement policy.
Protests presented unique and lasting challenges for Portland police, Terri Wallo Strauss, PPB public information officer, told Street Roots in an email. Wallo Strauss said the protests impacted many bureau members, leading to changes and some resignations.
“After the murder of George Floyd, we experienced both peaceful protests and near daily occurrences of civil unrest, destruction and violence,” Wallo Strauss said. “PPB operated an Incident Command Post for 170 days, which has never occurred in the history of the city. Portland is one of a few cities that dealt with civil unrest on a nightly basis for an extended period.”
Who was under seige?
Trump and other politicians exaggerated the protests, mischaracterizing Portland as being “under siege,” a portrayal worsened by national media coverage, which depicted the city as a place embattled by roving protests. In reality, destructive protests rarely ventured from focal points like the downtown federal courthouse, Portland Police Association headquarters and police precincts, leaving the vast majority of the city unscathed.
While police often pointed to a handful of protesters engaging in illegal activity — vandalism and throwing objects at law enforcement were common refrains — the central legal issue at play is the then-nightly effort to disband hundreds of protesters using tear gas, impact munitions, force and arrest. Police did not target these efforts at individuals who had broken the law, but instead applied them generally to any protesters gathered at a site.
This key fact is the centerpiece of many legal arguments against law enforcement on the part of protesters, who say their civil right to protest was violated by police. Ross Caldwell, director of Portland’s Independent Police Review, said police were interpreting the actions of single individuals in a crowd as justification for use of force.
“People were trying to say that the actions of the crowd could justify use of force on the individual,” Caldwell said. “So they … say, well, you know, he fired an impact munition at this person in the crowd. But people in the crowd were throwing rocks, and police were getting injured. Somebody threw a Molotov cocktail, and all these things are happening.”
This stance has proved legally fraught because, in practice, this approach results in peaceful protesters being penalized, often violently, for the actions of others. Critics of police conduct say these protesters were being punished despite peaceful protest, a core civil rights violation.
“There's other problems, but this is, I think, the most salient,” Caldwell said. “People are arguing, like, yeah, if the guy in the crowd is throwing a rock at you, it's okay to use force on that guy because that's what the directive says. But it's not okay to use force on the guy who's standing in front of him, who's just there.”
Bad reputation
Even before 2020, PPB had a storied record beset by allegations of misconduct, including a 2012 lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice arguing PPB systematically overused force in the course of policing, specifically “subjecting individuals with actual or perceived mental illness to excessive force.”
The resulting settlement stretched on for years, and the terms were mostly finalized by 2019. When protests ignited in 2020, the DOJ again found PPB out of compliance, this time for its method of crowd control during the protests and a failure to document instances of use of force.
With PPB already out of compliance, the city faced yet another high-profile lawsuit brought by Don’t Shoot Portland and five named protesters, which eventually settled for $250,000 plus attorney fees.
Notably, in the lead-up to this lawsuit, Mayor Ted Wheeler released a police protest training slideshow featuring a slide mocking protesters and encouraging police brutality. The slideshow was produced in 2018 and discovered in documents compiled for the hearing.
As reported by The Oregonian at the time, the Department of Justice was “furious” when news of the slide came out because it violated the existing disclosure requirements during the city’s settlement with the DOJ regarding PPB use of force.
Outcomes
While the protests garnered national attention, police accountability advocates say they led to limited substantive changes.
The mayor’s office points to several structural changes implemented since 2021.
“The City is implementing a number of changes as a result of the 2020 protests,” Cody Bowman, Wheeler’s communication lead, said. “These changes include updated use of force and crowd management trainings at PPB and the changes agreed to by the City and the U.S. Department of Justice and approved by United States District Judge Michael Simon, such as the addition of a civilian dean of training for PPB, the implementation of body-worn cameras, and a process to ensure the successful implementation of a new community police oversight board.”
In 2020, state legislators led by now-Gov. Tina Kotek passed six police reforms championed by the People of Color Caucus. The bills included a ban on chokeholds and using tear gas during protests without a formal riot declaration, the creation of a statewide database tracking officer suspensions and revocations of certificates, and the establishment of the Joint Committee on Transparent Policing and Use of Force Reform.
The 2020 protests also spurred changes in the use of force code.
“A lot of it is clean up or stronger language, in my opinion,” Caldwell said. “I think it’s important to make improvements to directive, but obviously the training and implementation of these changes is crucial.”
Among these changes, the definition of what is “objectively reasonable” in justifying use of force “has been updated and fleshed out,” Caldwell said. De-escalation is now broken down into two categories — proactive de-escalation (preventing the need to use force) and reactive de-escalation (reducing force).
Similarly, Caldwell said, the code now includes two resistance categories, passive resistance and active resistance, which includes not using force on people engaged in passive resistance without impeding a lawful objective, and not using force on individuals “who express verbal discontent with officers” but do not pose a threat or impede a lawful objective.
The updated code states the use of force directive applies to protests.
“I think this is important because it makes clear that this is the standard, regardless of what other directives say about crowd management,” Caldwell said. “We have learned from 2020 that it’s important to clearly state that all crowd management is subject to the force directive.”
A fight over body-worn cameras
The 2020 protests also resulted in a push for PPB to integrate body-worn cameras. The requirement merged into the existing settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice has met resistance.
The Portland Police Association held up the agreement, pushing for the ability to pre-review footage on body-worn cameras before it is shared, a step police reform advocates say will severely undermine efforts at transparency and accountability.
A bill curtailing this effort, Oregon Senate Bill 236, was introduced in January. The bill targets existing loopholes enabling law enforcement agencies to sweep violations under the rug, by mandating new reporting requirements and record-keeping in instances of misconduct. It would also ensure body-worn camera footage is available before police can review it.
Ultimately, settling the issue of pre-review and body cameras could take years, said Jason Renaud, Mental Health Alliance board member.
“The new (body-worn cameras) item is likely to take several years to resolve in arbitration and higher federal courts, so the (settlement agreement) will not close entirely until (body-worn cameras) are in practice for a year — maybe as long as 2026,” Renaud said.
Increased accountability?
Much of the post-2020 PPB reforms are protest-specific. Jessica Ashlee Albies, a lawyer who represented Don’t Shoot Portland in its case against Portland police, said it's difficult to measure the impact of the case because PPB hasn’t faced the same intense protesting.
“We haven't seen those wide-scale protests,” Albies said. “It's really hard to say if the bureau would react much differently. I think that some people feel less safe protesting because of their experience in 2020. And some people might feel more empowered because of their experience in 2020.”
The Don’t Shoot Portland case was pivotal for reforms, both in the DOJ case and in the PPB use of force code. While these reforms represent progress, Albies said, broader issues are still at play.
“I think there's still a lot of work to do to increase accountability or to effectively have any accountability,” Albies said. “The data on police stops and uses of force still continue to show disparate impact on communities of color and people in mental health crisis. That's an ongoing concern and ongoing issue.”
The protests brought community discontent about the police force, which already had a history of racist policing, to the fore. For instance, in 2021 and 2022 Portland police were found to stop Black motorists in traffic stops disproportionately.
When protesters were still crowding the city center on a nightly basis, City Council voted to cut PPB’s budget.
While this received both support and criticism, as Street Roots reported in August 2022, the budget cut was short-lived. Ultimately, PPB’s 2020-2021 actual budget decreased by $11.4 million from the previous fiscal year. By 2022-2023, the budget surged past pre-protest levels, reaching a record high of $249 million.
Yet, the momentary decrease propels the idea that an underfunded police force has spurred an increase in crime. Focus in recent years has shifted away from police brutality as the city faces rising gun violence and crime. Shooting incidents in Portland surged in 2022, rising to 1,308 incidents from just 413 in 2019, a trend in cities nationwide.
Homicides are also more frequent. In 2020, there were 57 homicides reported in Portland. By 2022, the annual homicide count climbed to 97. Instances of other crimes, such as assault, robbery and theft, also surged.
In 2023, homicides and assaults are on the decline so far. In January and February this year, homicides totaled 10, and assaults numbered 1,285. Last year, there were 21 homicides and 1,395 assaults during the same period.
With responses to 2020 protests progressing slowly, some advocates for reform are skeptical about the terms of the U.S. Department of Justice settlement agreement bringing lasting change.
“It's unlikely that the variety of administrative accountability measures — both in place and planned — can reduce lawsuits, or increase trust and confidence, or remove officers with poor performance or who violate directives,” Renaud said.
The Portland Police Bureau and the city of Portland point to changes to policing since the 2020 protests. Still, advocates are skeptical the changes brought by the city — and the settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice — will have a significant impact.
“For our group, in general, we think the (U.S. Department of Justice settlement agreement) has done little or nothing to reduce use of force against people with mental illness or to improve trust/confidence that police contact will not result in physical harm,” Renaud said.
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