Over the past 20 years, Portland has seen its share of committees, blue ribbon panels and workgroups created to take on difficult issues facing the city. Many reports have come out of these efforts with policy recommendations and plans of action. Unfortunately, as many veterans of these various committees can testify, their work has often ended up on some basement shelf collecting dust.
Racial Profiling Committee co-chair Jo Ann Bowman, who is also associate director of Oregon Action, has been part of previous efforts and has learned the hard lessons of working with the city and its bureaucracy. This time, the Racial Profiling Committee’s work will be backed by a community campaign to pressure the city to implement whatever policy changes the committee recommends. As a community organization with a seat on the committee, the Northwest Constitutional Rights Center is committed to seeing forthcoming recommendations become a reality on the ground.
The committee, which was appointed by City Council in early January, has already convened twice. The results so far are modest but are a clear indication of some progress. For instance, the committee has brought the community, police and the police union to the table to openly discuss these difficult issues. To many, this is a victory in and of itself. One concrete issue that has surfaced is how the police bureau collects and analyzes stops data, which includes both traffic and pedestrian stops: Whether this analysis includes individual officers’ records and reports will be an important discussion around data collection.
Another issue of concern to community members in the committee is the fact that the police do not typically record every single “stop” of a civilian. In the case of “mere conversations,” that is, when an officer engages a person in conversation without detaining them or restricting their freedom, the officer has discretion to determine whether the interaction with a civilian should be captured into the stops database. Engaging in conversations with members of the community can be a positive and necessary element of community policing. But this interaction has the potential to turn into something more than a mere conversation. If a person stopped by an officer does not ask whether she is being detained, the officer can continue to ask questions that have the potential to become more intrusive than a mere conversation.
More importantly, the motivation to stop and talk to a person in the street could be motivated by the person’s race or ethnicity. But because this interaction is not always recorded, we do not know if and to what extent officers are using this small loophole to target people of color. On the flip side, this shows how difficult the work of the committee will be because, while we want to have an accurate reflection of what officers are doing in the streets, we don’t want to make their jobs so burdensome or so scrutinized that they don’t even talk to the public.
While the committee is making progress, there are some unresolved issues. At the February meeting, committee members learned there are some gaps in the stops data released to the public in May 2006. One glaring omission is an analysis of the pedestrian stops data. The Police Bureau has been collecting these data but for some reason they have not yet analyzed it. We await the results of this analysis to see if they are consistent with the automobile traffic data.
Another outstanding issue is that the committee lacks a staff person to facilitate the meetings, take care of logistics, and communicate with committee members. Hiring staff for the committee is a responsibility explicitly assumed by the Mayor’s staff when the group was appointed by the City Council but, after three months since its creation, there has been no progress in addressing this need.
Moreover, some members of the committee have yet to be notified by the mayor’s office that they have been appointed to the committee. (The organizations and individuals originally recommended by the Northwest Constitutional Rights Center, Oregon Action and others to serve on the committee had been notified that they were being nominated to serve but the official notification was to come from the mayor’s office.) Things need to move along more efficiently in order for the committee to focus on the substantive issues that lie ahead. If things continue to drag, committee members and the community should be ready to question whether eliminating racial profiling from the Portland Police Bureau is as much a priority to the mayor and the police as it is to the community.
Despite these set backs, Chief Rosie Sizer will present an outline of her implementation plan to end racial profiling within the Bureau at the committee’s March meeting. Committee members will be charged with reviewing the plan, monitoring its implementation and making recommendations whenever the policy changes appear to be ineffective. The Mayor’s staff must stop dragging their feet so the Committee can get on with the business of dealing with racial profiling in the police bureau and avoid the fate of previous committees.
