No unnecessary police stops. Giving someone in a mental health crisis help, not jail. Investing in communities with programs that create safety and healing.
Oregon was on track this year to meaningfully transform our public safety and criminal justice systems by passing House Bill 2002, an anti-racist bill that would have reshaped state policies on police stops and arrests, community supervision and crime survivor services.
H.B. 2002 was a thoroughly crafted and heavily negotiated bill. It should have passed, yet the BIPOC-community-led effort fell short by the smallest margin because of a Senate leadership failure to back it.
The bill is the most urgent piece of unfinished business from the 2021 legislative session, and advocates of racial justice, true community safety and healing will be back in 2022 to get it across the finish line.
H.B. 2002 was developed by a coalition of racial justice and public safety advocates, including Partnership for Safety & Justice — the workgroup-centered visionaries of true public safety who have lived experience in the criminal justice system as people who have been convicted of a crime and who have survived harm and violence.
Centering people with lived experience who would be affected by the policy was an uncommon approach to criminal justice reform policymaking in Oregon. It was such a noteworthy shift that Rep. Janelle Bynum, one of the bill’s chief sponsors and chair of the House Judiciary Committee, remarked on how significant the process was.
“A lot of times, people can be so far away from the realities of other people’s lives that they miss opportunities to make change,” she said during a committee meeting. “I’ll take a moment to recognize the proponents of this bill, and the efforts they’ve made to create workgroups … and to really bring the interests of the people forward to (the Legislature.)”
It was noteworthy because our policymaking process was the opposite of the usual approach that marginalizes BIPOC people and communities to their overwhelming harm. By and large, Black, Indigenous and Latinx people are expected to just accept the usual process of policymaking imposed on them — a legacy of policymaking that established Oregon in 1859 as a whites-only state, puts Oregon in the top 50% in the rate of disproportionate incarceration of BIPOC people by nearly every metric, according to the Sentencing Project, and created a public safety system that causes more harm than healing for crime victims of color, according to the Partnership for Safety and Justice.
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People talk about the system being broken, but the system is actually working exactly the way it was designed to. It’s the policymaking process that’s broken. As long as BIPOC people and communities are sidelined from policymaking, people of color will be sidelined from the services, resources and opportunities they deserve.
This goes beyond criminal justice reform. From transportation to health care to education to housing, when BIPOC communities are centered in the policies that are supposed to serve them, all of Oregon’s diverse communities are more effectively served by our cities, counties and the state.
That’s why the coalition that developed H.B. 2002 did it differently. By centering people who are most harmed and least helped by the criminal justice system, we developed a bill that would keep more Oregonians safe, more families together, more communities strong.
When H.B. 2002 was introduced, it had other criminal justice reforms in it as well, including finally ending Oregon’s destructive Measure 11 mandatory minimums, and instead allowing elected judges to determine a prison sentence based on the circumstances of each unique case.
A robust negotiation followed. Public safety stakeholders from every faction were consulted in the process, and a considerable number of recommendations were integrated into the bill. After about a dozen amendments, the bill became H.B. 2002A.
Over 50 racial justice and community-based organizations ultimately endorsed the bill. It was a priority for the Governor’s Racial Justice Council, House Speaker Tina Kotek, and Oregon’s Legislative BIPOC Caucus, all of whom fervently rallied behind the community leaders who developed the legislation. Rallied behind them.
Still, there were cries of “lack of process,” even though the bill went through the exact same process that every bill goes through in the Oregon Legislature. The process was actually vigorous; it was just led by and centered on the people who best know what BIPOC people, families and communities need to be safe.
Between today and the next time this bill is introduced, there will be months of conversations and negotiations. But there will be a next time for this bill, and it will probably have many of the same policies. It will:
• Limit unnecessary police stops and arrests like the ones that led to the deaths of Sandra Bland and Daunte Wright.
• Reduce jail admissions for people who need urgent medical or psychiatric care.
• Require law enforcement to notify drivers of their right to refuse to consent to a search.
• Direct investments to communities that have been most harmed and least helped by the public safety and criminal justice systems.
This was a good bill in 2021, and we believe it will pass in 2022. When it does, it will lay a solid foundation for true safety, opportunity and justice for all our communities across the state.
This question about the process remains, however: Will BIPOC community members be at its heart, with valuable stakeholders providing important input along the way? Or will the bill be controlled by the same stakeholder agencies that created the systems we’re fighting to reform?
While those answers are unclear, one thing is certain. For Oregon to live up to our values of equity, justice and opportunity, it’s not enough to reform the system. We also have to reform the policymaking process into one that centers people who know what Oregon’s diverse communities need to feel safe, to heal and to thrive.
Talia Gad is communications director at Partnership for Safety & Justice, a nonprofit advocating for public safety and justice reform.