August 22, 2018
Page 15
Focused on Issues
C ontinueD from P age 4
be just 10 percent of what the city
currently spends on their handling
of homeless people using police,
Hardesty said, and was inspired
by similar programs that have tak-
en place in other cities.
“If we allowed people to
self-manage themselves, we’d
have a whole lot less trash, and
we’d have a whole lot less com-
plaints from other community
members. Everybody needs a
safe, affordable place to lay their
head at night,” Hardesty said.
Hardesty also supports rent
control, tenant protections, res-
ident relocation assistance, and
working with realtors to create
housing options at all income lev-
els. In addition, she wants to nix
monthly pet rental fees for hous-
ing.
She called the current state of
Portland’s law enforcement record
involving homeless people “inhu-
mane,” citing a recent report that
stated over half of all arrests by
city police last year were of home-
less people.
Hardesty is calling for sweep-
ing changes in Portland’s law
enforcement policies in light of
officer-involved fatal shootings
of people with mental illnesses in
recent years, including using fire-
fighters as responders to those ex-
periencing a mental health emer-
gency.
“The police are way out of their
lane,” she said. “‘I don’t know
about you, but when I see fire-
fighters running up the step, help
is on its way. And they have nev-
er killed one person because they
didn’t do what they told them to
do.”
She also criticized police’s
profiling of African Americans
through the guise of gang enforce-
ment, as was recently revealed to
have occurred in an independent
police review by the dispropor-
tionate number of traffic stops
they performed, which resulted in
few gang-members being appre-
hended, Hardesty said.
“I think it’s the community’s
responsibility to decide how they
want to be policed and it is the po-
lice department’s job to be respon-
sive to communities’ needs. And
I look forward to working with
Chief Outlaw to fundamentally
change how we do policing in the
city of Portland,” she added.
Hardesty also derided police
crowd control tactics used earlier
this month during a right-wing and
counter left-wing counter-demon-
stration, downtown, in which
flash-bang grenades were used to
subdue counter-demonstrators and
injured some of them. She sug-
gested removing “war weapons,”
from police such as the offending
flash-bang grenades, which were
temporarily suspended by police
from their arsenal, after the recent
protest.
A top-to-bottom audit of the
police department, pulling out of
a federal law enforcement partner-
ship, and providing more funding
for 9-11 responders are also on her
agenda. She said she also wants to
re-train 9-11 responders so that they
can differentiate between “a real
She and the other demonstrators
were barricaded from City Hall
by riot police. Hardesty eventual-
ly made her way inside, but said
she discovered later that if just one
city council member had opposed
the barricade, it could have been
dissolved. That’s when she knew
she had to run, she said.
“I went to Dan [Saltzman]
and looked him in his eye and
as a board member of the NARAL
Pro-Choice Political Action Com-
mittee and the housing non-profit
Human Solutions, among several
other advocate organizations.
Though she did not raise the
most money of all the candidates
in a crowded primary, she did
have the largest number of indi-
vidual donors, over 1,200, who
contributed “from $5 to $5,000”
with the largest being from her ex-
mother-in-law, Hardesty said. She
scored a dramatic 20-point victory
over Smith, her closest opponent.
answer that doesn’t sound flip. For
example, I got in trouble earlier on
because I called some people idi-
ots because they thought that us-
ing a jail for houseless people was
a good approach,” Hardesty said,
referencing her disagreement with
her opponent, Loretta Smith, who
said she supported re-purposing
the unused Wapato Jail in north
Portland as a homeless shelter.
In the historic election that
will seat Portland’s first black fe-
male city council member, I asked
Hardesty her thoughts on being a
by D anny P eterson /t he P ortlanD o bserver
Portland City Council candidate Jo Ann Hardesty (center) meets with her volunteers and poses for a campaign photo Saturday during
door-to-door canvassing in southeast Portland. The longtime Portland activist and former state legislator uses a grass-roots style as her
main campaign strategy.
crime in progress and houseless
people who are an inconvenience in
[the caller’s] neighborhood.”
On the matter of preventative
mental health care, Hardesty said
she’d like to work with state and
county agencies to increase the
number of mental health providers
“so that people have choices avail-
able in their local community.”
Hardesty said she was inspired
to run for the City Council back in
2016 during a public protest over
police union contract negotiations
under then-Mayor Charlie Hales.
said ‘Dan, you’ve been here too
long and I’m going to run against
you.’”
Two weeks later, Saltzman re-
tired, she said.
Building coalitions of people to
back a cause is the basis of Hard-
esty’s political experience and
foundation to her current cam-
paign. Besides leading the Port-
land NAACP, she was executive
director of the nonprofit Oregon
Action and currently serves on
the executive committee of the
Albina Ministerial Alliance, and
When asked how she would toe
the line between being a public
official and an activist, Hardesty
responded that her activism back-
ground helped inform her time as
a state legislator, and expects the
same this time around, too.
“I don’t think an activist and
policymaker are mutually exclu-
sive. I think you can be both.”
When asked whether anything
about her campaign or herself
could’ve been improved, she re-
sponded: “Sometimes I probably
don’t take time to not provide an
role model for others.
“I hope somebody sees a work-
ing class person could have a cam-
paign that was people-focused and
have people give them money and
support them, not because they
were rich, connected, special in
any way, just someone who did the
hard work of doing the things that
the community needed done. And
so if I’m going to be a role model,
I hope that’s the role model. But I
don’t want anybody to think that I
think I’m perfect, ‘cause I am very
flawed.”