Mingus Mapps decided to make a run for Portland City Council after he was terminated from the city’s Office of Community & Civic Life, a bureau his opponent, Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, oversees. He has said he was let go for refusing to discipline a subordinate. His experiences in the bureau left him with the impression that City Hall is “dysfunctional and ineffective,” and he says he wants to change that. Before getting involved in city government, he taught urban politics at Harvard and Cornell.
Candidate Q&As: Portland City Council
Street Roots: You say that you intend to prevent price gouging in the rental market and we would like to know, what is your plan to accomplish that?
Mingus Mapps: I’m interested in the next generation of renter protection reforms, which I think should concentrate on issues like making sure that landlords aren’t abusing tenants, that tenants are able to exercise their rights, that they have access to lawyers, and there’s not any of that sort of subtle intimidation that bad landlords sometimes resort to in order to try to manipulate tenants. I think that is something that we need to move beyond. And then after that, I have a platform for bringing more affordable housing to the city, too.
I support the current protections we have on price gouging, I think we need to extend them, especially during the time of COVID. I also support things like extending the eviction moratorium through this financial crisis and public health crisis. I also endorsed things like putting as many dollars as possible into emergency rental relief so that people don’t lose their housing in the first place.
You know, I think that the city’s always been terrible (on) actually developing meaningful anti-displacement measures. And I want to make that a top priority.
And finally, I think that we have to have a zero tolerance around racism in our housing marketplace.
Street Roots: You’re calling for a better first response to the streets and to get police out of being first responders to nonviolent and mental health crises. You credit the idea of Portland Street Response, but say there needs to be more programs like it. What are you proposing?
Mapps: I very much want to see, No. 1, our Portland Street Response teams up and going. And if they work, I’d like to expand them throughout the city. I think it’s very important to have that service downtown, especially right now, since we have such a proliferation of folks who are living on the streets. I think that’s really important. Also, if we implement street response teams, I think we can dramatically decrease the number of 911 calls that we send police out on. The only tools that cops have to solve the problems like this are to take someone downtown or to tell them to move along. I think we can do better. And I think we should do better.
Street Roots: We were wondering what programs — because you said you think that Portland Street Response is a great idea, but we need to do other things like that. What other programs are you proposing?
Mapps: We’ve experimented with, and I think it’s been stalled, getting some sort of version of an unarmed police officer out on the streets to both respond to human needs (Public Support Safety Specialists, PS3s).
If you think about all the investigations that police do after the fact. After your bike has gotten stolen or after your car’s gotten stolen, there’s no reason why you need to send out an armed police officer to deal with situations like that.
I’m also a huge believer in crime prevention and community policing. And I’ll tell you, I’ve done a lot of work on alternative models to public safety. And our current model, our traditional policing model, isn’t really about stopping crime. It’s really about responding to crime.
If you want to prevent crime from happening in the first place, one of the things you have to do is have a strong, healthy, connected community. You have to have neighbors talking to neighbors, businesses talking to businesses, houseless folks talking to housed folks. These are things that can be done.
Street Roots: I’m going to keep pressing on this just because this issue is of great importance, really the question is talking about responding to the nonviolent and mental health crises on our streets, not so much crime. What other programs address the crises on our streets that aren’t crime related?
Mapps: I think in general, one of the issues that Portland, in particular, has and Oregon, in general, is that we have a vastly underdeveloped mental health system. One of the problems there is that we don’t have the resources that are available to folks. So one of the things I’m excited about, with some of the new resources that we’ve got online for mental health services, I hope that we’ll have some slots open to actually aid people.
And then I think the government’s job, especially the city government, on the public safety side, is to have folks who are out there helping connect residents to those new mental health services that we have.
If I were to have a single innovation that I hope will restructure, and just rebuild and reorganize our public safety system here in Portland, it should be to move away from the classic model of you dial 911 and a cop comes out and provides some sort of limited use of force, to direct people from one direction or another. The folks (who) go out are really focused on connecting people to the services they need. And we know that today most of those mental health services, or most of the services that people really need, revolve around either poverty or mental health issues. And so that’s kind of what I wanted to do, was to get us towards a 21st century public safety system and social service system. Because right now, we’re still based on a model that comes from the mid-20th century, which doesn’t really imagine or make much space for mental health issues. Whereas it’s really mental health and drug addiction issues that are basically what the challenges of the day are right now.
Street Roots: In moving out of the pandemic, we’re going to be looking at a lot of budgetary shortfalls — would you be willing to take some of the funding that goes to the Police Bureau to fund an expansion and help the county pay for mental health services?
Mapps: Absolutely. You know, right now, close to half of what the police do basically is mental health related. As I’ve said several times, I think that’s a bad use of government resources. I think those folks are going to be better served by providing people with safe places to sleep, access to hygiene facilities, and access to doctors and mental health facilities. That’s part of public safety.
I think we make a mistake by defining public safety first as what cops do. I think that’s wrong. I think we should take a look at what communities need and then develop services and programs around that. Right now, we’re in this awkward adolescence where we have inherited a public safety system from the last century and it just doesn’t fit with the way Portland works today.
Street Roots: You have said that you would like to "take the energy and ideas that we see out on the street and write it into the police contract." Can you be more specific on what ideas you’re seeing that you would like to write into the police contract?
Mapps: There are many things that we can do. There’s a shift in tone and approach to policing. I believe in prevention, rehabilitation and nonviolence, for example. But the real concrete issue here, which we’re going to be struggling with over the next year or two, is figuring out how we go about providing meaningful, independent oversight of the Portland police department.
And I think there are two tracks here. There’s a governmental track, like how does the police department and government investigate itself? And then, how do we provide for independent civilian oversight? In terms of the governmental investigation of itself, I think we need some changes there. I think that we should have the state investigate police shootings, as opposed to doing that locally.
And then let’s take a look at how do we provide for civilian oversight. That’s something which is going to be written into the police contract.
I’m excited to help lead that discussion. There are several important issues that need to be sorted out, like the amount of the powers of the investigatory powers that Independent Police Review will have.
Will the Independent Police Review have the ability to change policy? Will Independent Police Review have the ability to fire people or punish people? And how transparent will that process be?
I think that we should have a powerful Independent Police Review that has the authority to investigate. Should it have the power to change policy? I don’t know, I think that’s a community discussion that we need to have. We’re constrained a little bit on some legal issues. I’m in the similar space on the ability of Independent Police Review to punish officers. I think that there should be a place for that. But I think we have to actually think very carefully about what powers we should and can give to an independent group to fire a police officer.
I’m sure there are HR (human resources) issues involved and legal issues involved. But on the other hand, if they don’t have these kind of powers, what do they have? You know, what’s the point of the exercise? And then I’m very clear on the fourth point, which is I think that this process for Independent Police Review should be transparent. And we should keep those records for 30 years.
Street Roots: Like yourself, I’ve been in this city for many years, and I’ve heard those kind of ideals and those goals bandied about, if not every election, every year, every time there’s an event. So would you accomplish that, given the power of the police union in contract negotiations?
Mapps: I am mystified when I hear our current Council say that they have or implied that somehow the police contract has been imposed on them. I’ve been involved in labor negotiations, not at the contract level, but I’ve been involved in contract grievances, and it’s a collaborative process.
The city doesn’t have to sign off on anything it doesn’t want to sign off on, and if there’s some argument that the contract negotiations are inherently biased against the city, I’m a little surprised at that, but I’ll hear that. But it seems to me when someone says, “Oh, the police union has so much power,” I hear that as going, “oh, we have elected weak public leaders.” Because it’s just a contract like any other contract that you would negotiate. We can stand by our ideals, and if we don’t have an agreement by the end of the timeline, we don’t have an agreement by the end of the timeline. I assume that we just continue the contract out until we do get to an agreement and eventually we will get to an agreement.
Street Roots: Gun violence is a rising concern across our community, particularly impacting younger Portlanders of color. What do you propose the City Council can do to prevent gun violence in our community?
Mapps: I want to see us dramatically increase funding for the (Office of Youth Violence Prevention). They do amazing work; they’re underfunded. Now that we got rid of our gun violence task force, those are the next folks online to help keep our community safe and to protect Black lives.
I’d also support stronger gun laws. So many of our problems locally and nationally, ultimately can be traced back to the proliferation of handguns in our community.
Street Roots: The police bureau believes that the elimination of the Gun Violence Reduction Team has caused adverse effects on gun violence. Do you agree with that position of the police bureau?
Mapps: I think we have crime analysts that need to look at this, and I’ve called for City Council to actually investigate what’s going on. We have a bunch of hypotheses out there as to why gun violence in Portland has increased exponentially. We are basically back to the bad old days of the crack epidemic in terms of gun violence here in Portland. I used to work at 111th (Avenue) and Sandy (Boulevard), and this weekend there, someone was shot at five in the morning, and then later in the day, someone was caught shot at 7 p.m. at the same place. It is truly out of control.
If there’s ever a moment when Black lives really matter, and we need to come into focus on that.
One hypothesis is that COVID has caused a bunch of economic disruption and that’s resulted an increase in gun violence. Another hypothesis is t we got rid of the organization that traditionally investigates gun violence and then weeks later, we see a spike.
I think that we should be able to tease out how much of this is about COVID, how much this is about the police stopping investigating gun violence, and how much of it is about other issues.
I’ve actually investigated this a little bit, my intuition is that it’s going to be a little bit of all of the above. COVID is obviously a big factor here. Certainly, really, people in the public safety community seem to think that losing the Gun Violence Task Force was an important loss. I don’t know. But we can probably measure that out. And then you can kind of see there are uniquely Portland things happening right now that we’re clearly in a cycle of tit-for-tat acts of violence. One of the things I think we need to do is develop strategies for breaking that spiral of violence that we’re currently in right now.
Street Roots: Like other candidates in this election, you’ve been critical of the commission form of government in Portland. But you also call for instituting a city manager system to oversee the day-to-day operations of the city services, and even increasing the number of city council members. How are these specific changes going to improve the lives of Portlanders?
Mapps: They will improve the lives of Portlanders in many significant ways. One thing that is true about Portland is that we are bad at delivering services and we’re bad at solving problems. And that is not a bug in Portland’s system. It’s a feature. This is the way Portland’s government is supposed to work. We’re designed to be inefficient. And that has to do with the commission form of government.
Unlike every other city in America of our size, we use this antiquated form of government which dates back to the 1880s where policymakers are not just in charge of voting on budgets, they’re actually the chief operating officers for at least one city bureau. Which means that we don’t have one mayor and four members of City Council — what we have are essentially five mayors, each in charge of their own fiefdom. Often they don’t work too well together.
This really impacts us on important issues. You might think homelessness is a relatively straightforward issue. To solve homelessness, we need to have housing, right? And then the problem is solved. But housing, homelessness is a complex issue, which is about more than housing. It’s also often a mental health issue, it’s often a drug addiction issue, it’s certainly a public safety issue. So if you want to have an effective houselessness program, one of the things you need to be able to do is to coordinate services across different city bureaus and city programs. And one of the things about this moment in Portland’s form of government is that we can’t do that effectively.
If you have two commissioners who are on different sides of an issue and decide they don’t want to work together, they don’t. I would argue that’s one of the reasons why we have failed to make progress on the houselessness problem. So that’s how the city manager will make your life better, we will have more effective government.
Now, you also mentioned how I want to increase the number of seats on City Council. Currently, we have four. I don’t know what the right number is, but I know it’s more than four and I want to change the way we build those seats. Right now, every member of city council runs at large. I think that we should run, we should fill our City Council seats through neighborhood-based electoral districts, so you might have a representative that is from downtown, or you might have a representative who is specifically from East Portland, or St. Johns or South Portland.
How does that make your government better? And how does that improve your life? Well, No 1: You’ll have someone on City Council who will actually understand the unique needs of your community. The battles that folks are fighting downtown are different for the battles and challenges that folks face in East Portland, which are different from St. Johns.
If we move towards neighborhood-based representation, you’ll actually have a voice in City Council. And I would also argue that one of the reasons why we see so many protests right now is that people feel disconnected from their government. And that’s unsurprising when our government just consists of four city councilors, even if you’re working hard, 24 hours a day, you can’t be everywhere that you need to be all the time.
But on the other hand, if you had a City Councilor who lived in your neighborhood, I think you would feel a connection to that person, either positive or negative, but it would give you a place to go.
City Hall feels far away and distant. I think if we reduce the space between the people and their representatives, we’d have better decisions made in City Hall, we’d have a more diverse discussion, I think people would feel closer and more connected to their government.
Street Roots: You know, I want to just follow up on that, Mingus, I have to say, and I, I don’t know what the dollar figures are, but that sounds expensive. And who knows what the financial future is going to be like for cities like Portland. But is there a cost concerned with adding more people and restructuring?
Mapps: I would argue that the cost savings of just becoming more efficient, and actually being able to coordinate programs would offset the costs of having three more members of City Council, for example.
I would also push back on the notion that it’s expensive. This is what every other government of our size does. This is not some sort of extravagant new thing. This is just sort of the cost of moving away from a horse and buggy form of government. Eventually, we’re going to have to do it. We should have done it 75 years ago, but at some point, you’re going to be at a point when you’re facing COVID and climate change and a housing crisis. This is exactly the moment to make those changes. You know, we’ve got to gear up for the moment that we live in.