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November 15, 2017
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Ex-gang member Dontae Blake heads a non-profit, Live Free, where he takes at-risk youth on
camping excursions in Bend to get them out of the gang life.
No More Gang Lists
C ontinued from f ront
of Equity and Human Rights,
was one of the civil rights or-
ganizations that has been ad-
vocating for eliminating the
gang lists.
“It’s an excellent policy
change,” said C.J. Robbins,
the group’s program coordi-
nator. “It’s a piece of a much
larger puzzle. I’m definite-
ly encouraged by the move-
ment.”
Robbins thinks the new
policy will encourage police
officers to see black members
of the community as individ-
uals a bit more. The old pol-
icy also was not helping peo-
ple trying to escape gangs or
anyone experiencing the stig-
ma of being labeled a gang
member.
Dontae Blake was an ex-
gang member who has tak-
en responsibility for his past
and successfully lived crimi-
nal-free for the better part of
a decade.
He said eliminating the gang
lists improves his attitude to-
ward police, dusting off an old
idea that police were “just bad
dudes that […] want to kill us
in the streets.”
“It means something to
me that on a piece of paper,
somewhere, it don’t just say,
‘There’s Dontae Blake, he’s a
Crip.’” Blake told the Portland
Observer. “Personally it feels
good to have a stigma off my
back.
Blake has been doing an-
ti-gang outreach for Unify
Portland, a violence preven-
tion program for at-risk youth
for more than two years now.
Since 2010, he has been men-
toring younger gang members
to help them get out of a life
of crime by taking them on
camping excursions in Bend
for his non-profit, Live Free.
Lieutenant Andrew Shearer
of the Portland Police Bureau
feels that eliminating the gang
lists has already increased
community trust, and he said
the new policy has not nega-
tively impacted law enforce-
ment efforts.
Shearer said the bureau’s
decision came as the culmi-
nation of conversations in the
past couple of months with the
bureau’s Tactical Operations
Division, which Shearer leads;
the Gang Enforcement Team,
many of whom also advocated
for the change; and newly ap-
pointed Police Chief Danielle
Outlaw, Portland’s first Afri-
can American woman police
chief.
Though a gang designation
database was a police tool
once thought to help solve
crimes, newer technology has
rendered it largely obsolete,
Shearer said. He cited tech-
nological advances in foren-
sic shell casing analysis that
can now link bullet casings to
specific parts of the city and
to specific weapons as one ex-
ample.
“In the previous year,
we’ve only had about seven
gang designations leading up
to this. So it’s not something
that’s really used as much as it
once was,” Shearer said.
Gang designations were
also once thought to increase
officer
safety.
However,
Shearer said police endanger-
ment is now mitigated by flag-
ging individuals with a violent
or weapons history, instead of
simply using a gang affiliation
by itself, as an indicator of a
potential threat.
“The reality is there are
people who are involved in
some of these organizations
who may not be actively in-
volved in criminal activity.
And we need to focus on those
that are.” Shearer said.
Police reform advocates
for groups like Black Male
Achievement are looking for
more progress in terms of ex-
gang members who are now
peace-abiding citizens tran-
sitioning back into society,
since many of them report
having difficulty meeting their
needs, like finding gainful em-
ployment and shelter.
“I think, you know, our view
in the future will be towards
meeting those needs, towards
making sure that the policies,
practices and procedures that
need to be addressed for them
to be thriving [will occur],”
Robbins said.
According to a 2016 Racial
and Ethnic Disparities Report
of Multnomah County, Afri-
can Americans are six times
more likely than whites to be
jailed. African American un-
employment rates were also
seven percent higher than
whites from the years 2010-
2012, according to Poverty
in Multnomah County report
from 2014.
According to national statis-
tics from Center for American
Progress and Crime & Delin-
quency, African Americans are
2.5 times more likely to be ar-
rested than whites and 49 per-
cent of black men will be ar-
rested at least once by age 23.