Street roots., October 12, 2012, Image 1

WWW,
OCTOBER 12. 2012
Mayoral an d City
C ou n cil candidates
Charlie Hales, Jefferson
Smith, A m anda F ritz
an d Mary N olan take a
shot at Street Roots’
questions fo r the fu tu re
o f Portland.
Finally! The election trail is winding down to the final month. But between the debates, the interviews and the sundry media mashups,
Street Roots still had questions. We posed the following questions — five for the mayoral candidates and four for the City Council
candidates — to learn a little more about the people vying for your vote and the chance to lead Portland four years onward. Look for their
responses on housing issues in the Oct. 26 edition of Street Roots.
The fìnnartmont Of
the Portland Police
Bureau revealed, among
other things, two serious
problems. One being that
our police use excessive
force on people perceived
to have a mental illness,
due to deficiencies in
policy, training and
supervision. The other
serious problem is
failings in our mental
health support network,
from Mage sites to
engagement with health
providers. What will you
do to correct these
problems?
Excessive use of force is not
acceptable. Ever. Police officers
are not mental health providers
and should not be the first line of
defense for mental health-related
crises. We should be clear that
the failure of the legislature to
adequately fund mental health is a
contributing cause of this
problem. We need more wrap­
around services to support our
mentally ill population.
Charlie Hales
The Department of Justice
report underscores that we need to
focus our police bureau on true community policing —
prevention, relationship-building in neighborhoods and
training in de-escalation. When a community knows the
officers assigned to their neighborhood by name and sees
them on a regular basis, it helps to establish credibility
with members of the community. This, in turn, will help
prevent a collision of strangers resulting in the
unnecessary use of force, making the use of force the
exception, not the standard.
As mayor, I will return our city to true community
policing practices and I will work with all partners at the
local level to provide more services for our mentally ill
citizens. I will lobby Salem for increased mental health
services funding for our local providers and CCOs as well
as advocate for greater Medicaid match. And I will work to
increase police accountability, including ending the “48
hour rule” that prevents getting the facts from police
officers involved in shootings until two days after the
incident.
In the public safety plan I recently released
these two areas — better training of police and
an expansion of our capabilities in dealing with
people suffering from mental illness — are
cornerstones of the work we need to
accomplish.
Our training should make sure officers arrive
on the scene with a mindset to solve problems
— not limited to punishment or arrest. The new
training center is a chance to enhance training
practices and implement better procedures for
our police to use. We need to look at how other
Jefferson Smith cities
— New York’s department is far from
perfect, but they have reduced the number of
incidents involving police using weapons in recent years.
In addition, we must invest in treatment options that offer more
choices about where to take people who come into contact with law
enforcement and are suffering a mental health crisis. Today, they can go
to the emergency room or to jail. That’s wasteful and ineffective. Our
Mobile Crisis Unit pilot project works in only one precinct. We must
expand programs like that to better serve the communities and the
people affected. We must also work with our nonprofit service providers
to bring the full complement of possible services into the equation every
police officer can use when faced with these situations.
Finally, we need one more thing — better communication between all
of Portland: communications that must be led by the mayor’s office.
I’m proud to have the support of safety activists, local civil rights
leaders, public safety officers and clergy, who are all deeply concerned
about public safety in our community and who all recognize the issues of
police accountability being debated in Portland.
As mayor I will work to bring all of these parties together, to ensure
that our streets are safe, to build faith between our communities and our
police and that all people’s civil rights are respected.
See pages 4 and 5 for the rem aining questions and the answ ers from A m anda Fritz and M ary Nolan
Inside
Measuring up
Street Roots weighs
in on the state and
local measures on a
ballot near you
Page 3
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Î
Survivors’ stories
Joseph Stiglitz
M arking National
Domestic Violence
Awareness month
with three stories o f
survival
A n interview with
the Nobel Prize
winner about his
new book on
inquality
Page 8
Page 10