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THE BULLETIN • TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 2021 A13 Alisha Jucevic/Washington Post photos Willita Ross pays her respects before the funeral service for Jalon Yoakum, her cousin, at Mannahouse Church in Portland on May 22. Twauna Hennessee, the mother of Jalon Yoakum and an elder at Manna- house Church, prays during her son’s funeral. Portland Continued from A1 Now cities such as Port- land, considered among the most ambitious in moving to reshape its police force, have retrenched. So have Oakland, California; Berkeley, Califor- nia; Los Angeles and several other influential cities on the issue. Through April, the po- lice reported 348 shootings, more than double those re- corded over the first four months of last year. Loss of trust A city of about 650,000 peo- ple, Portland has long experi- enced the push and pull of its stridently felt politics. By many measures, particularly on so- cial issues such as marijuana legalization, the environment and gay rights, the city has been at the vanguard. But there has also been a historical strain of violent in- dependence in some of its res- idents, a trait that has helped small groups of self-described anarchists overwhelm the year- old push for police reform and social justice. From the assessments of the white mayor, Ted Wheeler, and the Black police chief, Chuck Lovell, this smaller faction comprises mostly white, mid- dle-class students and others, who have made places such as churches, public libraries, small Black-owned businesses and a Boys & Girls Club the confounding targets of their vandalism. On May 25, police declared a riot when one of two groups that had gathered to mark the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder broke windows, set fires and threw objects at po- lice. Five people were arrested; all were white. “We’re a city of two popula- tions. Even though we’re not in the 1950s anymore, many of the people leading us seem to think so,” said Teressa Rai- ford, director of Don’t Shoot Portland, one of the larg- est long-standing civil rights groups in the city. Raiford’s nephew, Andre Payton, was fatally shot in 2010, at 19 years old. In his memory, she founded Don’t Shoot as a “nonviolent, direct action” movement to bring community members and po- lice together against gun vio- lence. But Raiford, 50, said there is so little trust right now be- tween the social-justice move- ment and the police that it is nearly impossible to make progress. She believes that some of the vandalism is caused by police informants — plants paid to discredit the wider movement. Portland’s once-vibrant downtown, the heart of a world-class food scene, is still marred by boarded-up win- dows and closed businesses, the aftermath of a year of pan- demic and fear of random assault and vandalism often committed under the name of the police reform movement. “You have more and more African American leaders coming out to say that this is not helpful,” said Kris R. Hen- ning, a professor of criminol- ogy and criminal justice at Portland State University. “But when you look over the longer history of what’s been going on in Portland — there’s some- thing else happening. It’s not just the protests. It is not just COVID-19. There is some- thing else going on in Port- land.” Henning and others say crime was rising in the city be- fore the pandemic shut it down and before Floyd died in Min- neapolis with a white police of- ficer’s knee on his neck. From 2019 to 2020, the number of homicides nearly doubled, “You have more and more African American leaders coming out to say that this is not helpful. But when you look over the longer history of what’s been going on in Portland — there’s something else happening. It’s not just the protests. It is not just COVID-19. There is something else going on in Portland.” — Kris R. Henning, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Portland State University. Pictured above, a demonstrator is arrested during a September protest outside the Justice Center in downtown Portland. Joshua Lott/ Washington Post file something Henning called “unheard of” in Portland. This followed years with some of the nation’s lowest crime rates for a city its size. “So these perpetrators, my guess, were coming of age, were in elementary and middle school right around the Great Recession,” said Brian Renauer, director of the Criminal Jus- tice Policy Research Institute at Portland State. “Now they’re in their early to mid-20s. So what we’re seeing is the outgrowth of a breakdown in the fam- ily, in the economy, in those neighborhoods they came out of, if this is very much a home- grown phenomenon.” Police and prosecution The Portland Police Bureau is authorized to have 1,001 sworn officers. At the moment it has about 900, a shortage that city officials blame on a lack of urgency in hiring and police leaders attribute to a lack of support and funding. Lovell, the police chief, who took office in the hot early days of the demonstrations in June 2020, said more than 120 sworn officers have left the department in the past nine months. The city council last year cut about $27 million from the roughly $200 million police budget — about $11 million because of a pandemic-caused budget crisis, and $15 million as part of the “defund” effort to shift some police resources to other agencies that may be able to handle nonviolent calls more effectively. But the police bureau also disbanded a unit in July that focused specifically on gun violence, a high-profile initia- tive that had been designed to make the agency less reactive and more attuned in advance to rising gang- and gun-related crime as the protests began slowly fading. “What I know is that being chief, and being a Black chief in particular, this movement to really exclude police from some facets of enforcement or community interaction, it re- ally bears the brunt on the Af- rican American community,” Lovell said. “These shootings have an outsized impact on people of color.” The chief’s goal to reestab- lish a larger uniformed pres- ence on Portland’s streets and in its most dangerous neigh- borhoods appears to be sup- ported by many residents, who just a year ago were very much opposed to the city’s police practices. Some of those practices have changed — in particular, mass arrests during demonstrations have eased — but the confron- tations have persisted. A recent poll conducted by The Oregonian found that three-quarters of Portland-area residents did not want police of- ficer levels to decline more than they have. Just more than half said they favored an increase in the number of officers. The data that landed on Mike Schmidt’s desk in early August 2020, when he took over as Multnomah County district at- torney, was a carry-over from the early demonstrations and broad arrests. His predecessor had resigned some six months before Schmidt was sched- uled to take office, so Schmidt stepped in before he planned. Most pressing were the 550 cases related to the protests that prosecutors hadn’t yet en- gaged during the rapid transi- tion in the DA’s office. Nearly all involved first-time offenders charged with interfering with a police officer, which usually carries a public-service penalty but also results in a record. Schmidt, who interned in the same DA’s office years ear- lier, did not see a public safety benefit in taking the cases to court, a move that he said would “simply throw fuel on the fire” of public sentiment against law enforcement. Only those charged with serious property crimes, among other major offenses, would be pros- ecuted. “These were people who are out here in the streets for the right reasons, to have this system changed, to have their voice heard, people who had felt like the criminal justice system had lost their faith,” Schmidt said. But Schmidt, who was elected with 77% of the vote, said the “message I was send- ing got twisted,” and the public began to think that no cases associated with protests would be prosecuted. Vandalism and property crimes spiked — and at a time of rising vi- olence against young men of color, Schmidt was making the rounds to explain that peo- ple who broke windows and burned buildings would be prosecuted. So would police officers, a pledge he ran on. Within months, Schmidt will bring two cases involving shootings by officers to grand juries for possible indictments. He will hire outside counsel to pres- ent the cases, a change in pol- icy designed to strengthen the public’s sense of independent accountability for police action. “The work of this office is re- ally ramping up to handle the surge in gun violence,” Schmidt said. “And sometimes, to be frank, it has been frustrating — when I’m at meetings and I’m talking about broken win- dows and I know that there are bodies in the street, Black and brown bodies disproportion- ately, and there I am talking about broken windows.” “Not that I can’t walk and chew gum. I can,” Schmidt continued. “And you know, both things are true and were happening simultaneously, but the violence didn’t seem to be getting that same attention.” Wheeler, the mayor, said he believes that the city has be- gun to recover, at least from the demonstrations that have left downtown largely empty on most days. Over the past year, he said, the city has recorded an 85% decrease in downtown foot traffic. The result has been eco- nomic despair and more crime. Now, the pandemic is eas- ing, as are the intensity and fre- quency of the demonstrations. Over the spring, the group of self-described anarchists, usually masked and dressed in black, has shattered windows at the Oregon Historical Soci- ety, at a Boys & Girls Club, at a public library and at many small business, including some owned by Black merchants. Wheeler made a public plea for Portlanders to “take the city back.” At City Hall, Wheeler and the rest of the council are de- bating ways to increase police resources, a shift for a symbol of the defund movement. The mayor plans to triple the number of unarmed officers in the police bureau, from 11 to 33, to help manage reports related to mental illness and mounting homelessness while freeing up armed police for more serious calls. “I think other people are just understanding that this is a really challenging time to be a police officer,” Wheeler said. “And we are finally putting ra- cial disparity and institutional racism front and center in our society. This is an opportunity for us to be honest about its ex- istence, to call it out for what it is and to change it.” “The legacy of George Floyd is that he gave us this opportu- nity to address these issues that have been with us for hundreds of years,” he added. “What he gave us is the conversation, and we’re not going to waste it here.”
