Over the past five weeks, Street Roots, The Portland Mercury and KGW Channel 8 have done investigative reporting of the Portland Patrol Inc. (PPI), a private security group contracted with the Portland Business Alliance (PBA) to provide security downtown and in public parks.
As reported by Street Roots ("Uniform Accountability," April 15, 2007), the PPI has the power to enforce public policy by issuing park exclusions to individuals with no public oversight or transparency on how they enforce the law. More than 300 park exclusions have been handed out since November. Many more exclusions are expected during the summer months with the spike in tourism and festivals downtown.
Street Roots has requested a myriad of documents from the city surrounding its relationship with the PPI, with no results. The city doesn’t work directly with the private security firm, but instead with the PBA, which contracts for services downtown for more than a half a million dollars.
And after five weeks, Portland citizens still do not know what kind of training and directive the PPI gets to enforce laws.
Are officers directed to target people for the way they dress, because they are poor and/or homeless, sleeping and/or camping, minorities, political activists?
We think having a private security group that is funded by the city through the PBA is a conflict of interest. Legally, we realize private security officers are actors of the state, but policy is a different story.
We have been told that the PPI has no more authority than the average Portlander. That’s strange. It doesn’t seem like the average Portlander carries a loaded weapon, dresses like the police and is funded by a group that has a long history of calling for crackdowns on homeless panhandlers, street youths and other underserved groups of poor people that live in our city.
According to the PBA, the PPI has a mutual relationship with the Portland Police and Central Precinct. Four police officers (three of whom are paid for by the PBA) are assigned as liaisons to PPI and provide on-call services to security officers. Those four officers are able to write citations and take subjects into custody based on interactions with PPI officers. Again, conflict of interest.
The whole thing reeks of insider politics and a paranoid culture surrounding public safety on the part of the PBA and City Hall downtown. Who are we scared of, ourselves?
If the PBA is not willing to work with everyday Portlanders to put in place a complaint system that is transparent (right now individuals with complaints about PPI are sent to the PBA) the public can.
More so, if the PBA continues to refuse to be transparent about how it manages the PPI, the organization should have the contract taken away and the city can reopen the bid process for downtown security.
We have been told by people at the Police Bureau that the future of community policing lies in the private sector. That’s something that should have labor unions, individual citizens, civil rights activists, and policymakers as concerned as we are.
