A2 The BulleTin • Sunday, auguST 8, 2021
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PORTLAND POLICE
Black drivers disproportionately stopped
Associated Press
PORTLAND — Police in
Portland stopped a dispro-
portionate number of Black
motorists last year, even as
they pulled over fewer drivers
overall in 2020 compared with
2019.
Black people, who made up
about 8% of the city’s popula-
tion, made up nearly 12.6% of
drivers stopped by traffic offi-
cers in 2020, according to Port-
land police data released this
week. Latino drivers accounted
for 11.2% of traffic stops in
2020 and make up around 10%
of the population in the city.
Nearly 7,000 — or 28% — of
the total stops made were Black
or Latino drivers. According to
the most recent Census Bureau
estimates, from 2019, Black
and Latino residents make up
about 17% of the city’s popu-
lation.
During the past five years,
Portland police officers have
stopped significantly more
people of color behind the
wheel and fewer white drivers
on city streets, the data shows,
though not all drivers stopped
are necessarily residents of
Portland.
Portland officers made
24,991 driver stops across the
city in 2020, a 24% decrease
from the previous year. The
decline is attributed to fewer
drivers on the road because
of the pandemic, reduced po-
lice availability as resources
shifted to the near nightly
demonstrations last summer
and changes to traffic enforce-
ment in 2020.
The Portland Police Bureau
has since taken steps to reduce
addressing minor violations
in an attempt to address the
disparate effect on Black resi-
dents. As of June 2021, officers
have been directed to focus
traffic enforcement efforts on
high crash corridors, reckless
driving, speed enforcement
and other moving violations
that place people in immediate
danger.
They’re not to focus on stop-
ping motorists for low-level
infractions, such as equipment
failures or expired plates, to re-
duce disproportionate stops of
people of color. And if police
do stop drivers, officers must
explain that the motorist can
deny a request to search their
cars.
As of this spring, the police
bureau no longer has a dedi-
cated traffic division of officers,
as they were pulled to fill va-
cancies in patrol.
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BY ALEX SCHWARTZ
(Klamath Falls) Herald and News
Last month, biologists and
irrigators drained Tule Lake’s
largest unit of open water to
mitigate avian botulism out-
breaks on Tule Lake National
Wildlife Refuge.
Now, record heat and irri-
gation diversions threaten to
undo that work.
Tulelake Irrigation Dis-
trict, Ducks Unlimited and the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
teamed up to move thousands
of acre-feet of water from the
refuge’s larger, muddier Sump
1A to its smaller Sump 1B.
They intended to eliminate as
much shallow water (the ideal
breeding grounds for botulism
in late summer) as possible and
encourage the germination of
wetland plants.
But for the past three weeks,
farmers on federal leaselands
in the southwest chunk of the
refuge have been diverting wa-
ter from Sump 1B to irrigate
grain, alfalfa and row crops like
potatoes. That, combined with
intense, unseasonable heat that
has accelerated evaporation,
has made the sump lose more
than 1,300 acre-feet of water
since the beginning of July.
“It started dropping like a
rock,” said TID Manager Brad
Kirby.
Kirby said the heat was more
to blame than the irrigators,
who according to his calcula-
tions make up 20% of Sump
1B’s water loss at most.
“It’s not our desire to see 1B
dry, but I can’t control evapo-
ration,” Kirby said. “The effect
of diverting the minimal diver-
sions that we are taking out of
there pales in comparison to
the evapotransporative loss.”
Kirby said heavy smoke
from the Bootleg Fire has ac-
tually slowed the evaporation,
causing the sump’s level to sta-
bilize over the past four days.
TID has also put a limitation
on the amount of water that
can come out of Sump 1B to
15-20 cubic feet per second, or
about 40 acre-feet per day.
When Sump 1A began to
drain, TID and refuge manag-
ers didn’t actually know how
much water it held, only be-
ing able to estimate it through
a formula developed in the
1980s. Because decades of
keeping the sump submerged
had caused the lake bed to silt
in so severely, blurring the line
between water and land, less
water was available to pump
into Sump 1B than Kirby ex-
pected.
“We took what we thought
to be an overly conservative
approach to identifying the
amount of water that was in
Submitted photo
Due to this summer’s incredibly hot and dry conditions, a botulism outbreak on Sump 1B at Tule Lake was
probably in the cards even without irrigation diversions.
1A,” he said.
Irrigators and biologists had
initially expected that some
water from Sump 1A wouldn’t
fit into Sump 1B and would
be leftover to use for irriga-
tion. Kirby said the district
gave leaseland farmers a rough
idea of how much that would
be (making no promises), but
that there wasn’t even enough
water to fill Sump 1B after the
chips fell. On top of that, a long
stretch of unseasonably hot
days meant the old formula
underestimated evaporation
from the sump.
Still, Kirby felt the district
needed to provide some wa-
ter to the leaseland farmers in
the Southwest Sump, a signifi-
cant portion of which has been
idled due to the lack of surface
water coming from Upper
Klamath Lake.
“We’re trying to do every-
thing that we can to keep some
water in 1B and keep it from
dropping as fast as it was, and
try to get it to hold, while also
minimizing the impacts to the
community,” Kirby said.
The legality of the diversions
is as muddy as the bottom of
Tule Lake.
The Kuchel Act, passed in
1964, allowed the leasing of
refuge lands for farming as
long as agricultural activity was
consistent with the refuge goals
of “proper waterfowl man-
agement.” Farming grain and
leaving some behind as bird
food generally aligns with that
directive, but some argue that
the planting of alfalfa and row
crops doesn’t contribute to wa-
terfowl habitat or food.
Kirby was not able to say
how much of the irrigated
leaselands are alfalfa and row
crops versus grain.
Rachel Zwillinger, water pol-
icy advisor for Defenders of
Wildlife, said while she under-
stands the drought has been
hard on everyone in the Klam-
ath Basin and farmers need to
make a living, few areas are in
as dire straits as Lower Klam-
ath and Tule Lake National
Wildlife Refuges, which haven’t
received a full water alloca-
tion in decades and rely on the
Klamath Project for water.
Due to this summer’s in-
credibly hot and dry condi-
tions, a botulism outbreak on
Sump 1B was probably in the
cards even without irrigation
diversions. But Zwillinger said
that Project irrigators taking
from what little water Tule
Lake refuge does have cer-
tainly isn’t helping.
“Because wetland availabil-
ity is already so limited, further
diminishing it in any way is a
huge problem,” she said. “It’s
another big impact that further
reduces habitat availability and
increases the risk of disease.”
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