Street roots
Jan. 22, 2010
Futility lies in trying to contain information in the 21st century
BY ROY SILBERSTEIN
community groups, in church basements
and living rooms, and told the story over
and over. We told everyone.
We’re also making a feature-length
documentary film about what happened to
James. It’s called “Alien Boy,” and whether
Chasse vs. Humphreys happens at the
federal courthouse in Portland or on the
steppes of Bhutan, we’ll be there with
carperas rolling. We plan to finish filming
with the end of this trial, edit the film and
seek a buyer for National distribution.
We are proud of the advocacy we’ve done
and will teach Others to do the same. It’s
'th e 21st century and information can no
longer be contained.
Our work is far from over. We will not
abide impunity.
There’s no reason to believe what
happened to James Chasse will not happen
again. The police insist they followed their
training by beating Chasse. That training
hasn’t been changed.
The police adopted a national model of
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T
eft unblamed by thé city of Portland’s
attorney James Rice in his petition to
move Chasse vs. Humphreys is the
nonprofit advocacy organization responsible
for informing the community about what
happened to James Chasse.
The Mental Health Association of
Portland spoke out and often about the'facts
of what happened to James since the day of
his death, S e p t 17, 2006. We’re responsible
for Rice’s desperately irrational and
unprecedented request of Federal Court
Judge Garr.King to move Chasse v.
Humphreys out of state.
H
COMING UP
FOR AIR
The Mental Health
Association of Portland
Roy Silberstein is the president o f the M ental Health
Association o f Portland, a nonprofit advisory organization that
supports advocacy efforts on issues about mental health.
Information about their work is available a t www.
mentalhealthportland.org.
James was a person with a diagnosis of
schizophrenia, a person with friends, a
family and a rich spiritual life. And he was a
person beaten to death by those who swore
to protect and to serve.
His death was brutal, reprehensible and
avoidable. As longtime witnesses for
persons with mental; illness hu rt by
institutions, we knew the city’s strategy
would be misdirection, delay and defiance.
As advocates, we humbly accepted we
would lose in court as well as in the
administrative processes, politicians would
be befuddled by bureaucrats, and legal
justice would slip through our fingers.
■ 4
So we selected a different strategy.
We’ve done our best to speak to the truth
about what happened to James: Advised by
police officers, lawyers and colleagues, we
gained an understanding of Portland’s bleak
history of disciplining police officers for
excessive use of force, of the number of *-
persons with a diagnosis of mental illness
killed or badly injured by police officers, and
we’ve advocated publicly for changes in how
police officers ar§_ recruited, trained and
disciplined.
•'
We collected every public scrap of
information about James Chasse and what
happened to him and put it online. And it
will remain there.
We talked to the media, to students, to
training for mental health crisis, yet Officer
Christopher Humphreys, ironically now
himself on disability leave due to a trauma
disorder — a mental illness -i has used
immoderate force in several incidents since
his training, including shooting a 12-year-old
girl with a lead pellet bag at point-blank
range.
Just last weekend, a Portland police
officer shot Aaron Campbell in the back
with a semiautomatic rifle. Campbell was
distraught because of th e death of his
brother. Because someone thought he might
havea gun, he was left without medical
.attention and died in front of his family, and M
friends who had called for help.
The truth is Chasse v. Humphreys is
Immaterial to the safety of our community.
There’s no vindication for the officers if the
family loses. There will be no sense of
security or regained trust if the city loses.
Either way the civil trial goes, we all lose.
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