Street Roots Podcast | Rep. Janelle Bynum pushes to change police culture

On the latest espisode of the Street Roots Podcast, Oregon Rep. Janelle Bynum (D-Clackamas) discusses a plethora of House bills on policing that are being considered during the 2021 legislative session.

“The bills that kind of get my heart is one regarding a police misconduct database which basically makes sure that the public can see which police officers have had misconduct attributed to their service,” Bynum said. “This helps in the criminal defense arena. People are going to make mistakes and that’s normal, but who is making a lot of mistakes and really bad mistakes and who needs to be put into an early warning system.”

Bynum also had concerns with House Bill 2929, which would make it an officer’s duty to report misconduct and would require the law enforcement unit to investigate reports of misconduct.

“We do have the duty to intervene right now,” she said. "What I asked about was, did we get the bill right? … We have the case of Mr. Elijah Warren, who was just a citizen standing out on the street who was clocked upside the head by an officer. And I asked the city of Portland — and I still haven’t gotten a robust response — about whether the officers who were standing there and saw that who responded in the moment like, “he’s not a protester,” if anybody reported it. And is the law working?”

When asked her thoughts about bills aimed at changing the culture in police bureaus, Bynum said: “It’s already happening. You can feel it from where we started back in the early summer to now and how I’ve guided the conversations. You can see where there was once a lot of fear from law enforcement that things were going to be done to them. Now you start to see the people who were very concerned about the trajectory of the profession really starting to step up and say ‘well here’s the problem.’”

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