Street roots., February 20, 2015, Page 8, Image 8

P age 8
Commentary
S tre e t R oots • February 20-26, 2015
An
impenetrable
force
Reflecting on the Portland police
union, past and present, with
labor historian Norman Diamond
BY MARTHA GIES
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
I
Portland writer M artha Gies has contributed to
Street Roots since the newspaper’s earliest days.
n the new documentary “Arresting
Power,” which premiered at the
Northwest Film Center in January, there
is a 1981 film clip of Portland police
commissioner Charles Jordan in heated
dialogue with outraged citizens protesting a
blatant act of racial harassment. A group of
police officershadleft four dead opossums
at the door of the Burger Barn, a black-
owned business on Northeast Union Avenue
(now Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd). In this
bit of news footage, the eloquent Jordan
Portland’s first African American to serve
on City Council — fends off their demands
that Chief Bruce Baker be fired, obviously
believing that firing just the officers will fix
the problem.
The very next day he and Chief Baker did
fire Jim Galloway and Craig Ward, the
authors of the prank and two of seven
officers who carried it out
The Portland Police Association (PPA)
came back fighting: It organized a rally on
behalf of Galloway and Ward, then hired
them both on as union employees at the
same pay they had on the force.
The real test, Jordan had insisted to the
protesters, is: “How do we correct it to
make sure it.doesn’t happen again?” His
optimistic response sounds especially
poignant today in a film that reminds us how
little has changed in 34 years.,
“Arresting Power,” made by local artists
Julie Perini, Jodi Darby and Erin Yanke,
looks at 50 years of policing in Portland.
The work is filled with emotionally
wrenching moments, among them the
interviews with family members of unarmed
black youth who were shot and killed in
encounters with the police. On camera,
local activists and historians analyze policing
in terms of relationships to race and class.
The film offers no solutions. As filmmaker
Yanke points out, “That’s because every
community is unique, and it’s all about
relationship building, conversations and
building trust.”
That conversation takes place across a
wide spectrum, political as well as
geographical.
In New York, Police Commissioner
William Bratton, talking to Robert Siegel
last month on NPR’s “All Things
Considered,” acknowledged that African-
American men experience harsher
treatment than their white counterparts.
Bratton went on to point out that it was not
a simple matter of reforming the police.
“We’re talking about a much more complex,
larger national issue,” Bratton insisted.
“Don’t go blaming the police. I’m sorry,
we’re not going to be the whipping boy, if
you will, for this issue in America.”
On the other end of this discussion, the
prison abolition movement, which author
Kristian Williams addresses in the new film,
does not find police reform a worthwhile
effort.
Meanwhile, in Portland, people of faith
and people of color are desperate to see the
shootings and beatings stop. The Albina
Ministerial Alliance, the NAACP, the ACLU,
the National Lawyers Guild, and many other
groups have long protested, with pen or
picket, the inappropriate use of deadly force,
but to little avail.
Supposing that a trigger-happy racism
infects only a tiny minority of our officers,
citizens have tried for decades to pressure
successive chief and city commissioners to
root it out by firing those few. The Rev. Dr.
LeRoy Haynes Jr., who has emerged as one
of several leaders of this campaign, reminds
us: “A hallmark of American democracy is
the belief in civilian control over the military
and law enforcement”
But firing never seems to work, because
the PPA is prepared to spend any amount of
time and money litigating to get their
members reinstated, usually with back pay.
A recent case in point was the firing of
Officer Ron Frashour, after he fatally shot in
the back unarmed Aaron Campbell, 25, in
January 2010, during a police welfare check.
^Campbell’s brother had died that very day.)
The see-sawing back and forth of tiiis case
was excruciating to watch: Chief Mike
Reese fired Frashour in the fall of 2010; the
PPA contested by filing a complaint with the
Employee Relations Board; ERB arbitrator
Jane Wilkinson ordered Frashour reinstated;
Mayor Sam Adams, determined to go the
distance, appealed back to the ERB, then in
September 2012, Frashour was reinstated
with back pay and 9 percent interest for the
two years he was in limbo; whereupon City
Council sent the matter to the Oregon State
Court of Appeals, where it languishes.
Copwatch’s Dan Handelman, a dedicated
full-time activist, has anguished over this
question for years: “What does it take to
keep an officer fired?”
The reactionary muscle of police unions
is not just local. In New York, the
Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association recentiy
pitted itself against Mayor Bill dse Blasio
who dared to campaign on police reform,
principally in the area of stop-and-frisk
procedures and their related racial statistics.
I can’t help thinking that hundreds of our
police officers must be equally uneasy about
this situation: Anonymity inside the machine
of the police union must be like being
trapped inside the black mask of riot gear:
the good cops - their opinions, their hopes
for better community relations and their
very humanity - are silenced and invisible.
But I know almost nothing about police
unions; only that we don’t see from them
the external solidarity that characterizes
other unions. We know that longshoremen
(ILWU), say, or electrical workers (IBEW)
would not cross an SIEU picket line if they
found a hotel or restaurant on strike. Why
aren’t police unions in that same fraternity
of workers?
To help understand the nature and
history of the PPA, I turned to author and
labor historian Norman Diamond. He’s been
a steelworker, sawmill worker, machinist,
university professor and president of the
Pacific Northwest Labor College. He has
lectured widely, in Europe and Latin
America, as well as Canada and the United
States. For nine years he hosted “The Old
Mole Variety Hour” on Portland’s KBOO
community radio station as part of a rotating
group, and he continues to make guest
appearances on the air. He’s the author of
numerous essays on labor
environmentalism, workers’ control and
labor history and co-author of “The Power
In Our Hands: A Curriculum On the History
of Work and Workers in the United States.”
His recent publications include “Occupy the
Workplace,” “Against the Current,” and
“Why Teach a 100-Year-Old Strike?” in
American Educator. He serves as trustee for
the Pacific Northwest Labor History
Association and developed a labor history
tour of Portland for that organization.
Martha Gies: Norm, is it fa ir to describe
you as a staunch ally o f labor?
Norman Diamond: Absolutely, of both
working men and women and organized
labor. I began working with unions as a 15
year-old, out of the United Automobile
Workers’ Solidarity House in Detroit, and
that was more than five decades ago. To
anticipate your next question, my