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.”