DIRECTOR’S DESK | The people with the most at stake must continue to guide the process for this program that Street Roots championed
The Portland City Council vote to fund Portland Street Response is a victory for Jim, who told me that when his “brain itches,” he needs a soothing voice — not a badge and a gun.
It is a victory for Mark, who when sleep-deprived would lash out if police officers woke him, often eliciting a punitive response.
It is for Kris, who long advocated for this kind of response while she survived the streets of Old Town, telling me last week, “There needs to be someone to call people trust to make the situation better, not worse.”
City Council voted Wednesday to fund Portland Street Response at $4.8 million after Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty amended the city budget proposal the prior week. The Portland Street Response, a plan Street Roots proposed over a year ago, is a non-police first responder system for street crises. Instead of a police officers, medics and crisis workers will be dispatched.
This funding means that instead of one pilot to test out this new emergency response program in Lents, there can be multiple teams in different areas of the city. And, instead of one-time pilot funding, this is funding the public can continue to defend in future city budgets.
Now it is up to all of us to make Portland Street Response succeed as one way to re-imagine public safety and wellness. It’s not just a line item in a budget and a set-in-stone program.
Yes, the city has figured out key information. Portland Bureau of Emergency Communications developed a method to code calls that come through 911 for Portland Street Response — a key achievement. They are ready.
Tremaine Clayton of Portland Fire and Rescue will run the first pilot. He will dispatch as the medic with a yet-to-be-hired crisis worker in Lents. There are plenty of people in Lents ready to help make this succeed. I recall a Lents Neighborhood Association meeting in February when neighbors discussed how they could support Portland Street Response, such as preparing food for unhoused neighbors to show neighborhood solidarity.
But now we have the opportunity to support more pilots and continue to demand that Portland Street Response help our city move away from a police-based approach to public safety and wellness.
We need to stay engaged and advocate for reimagined public safety in Portland, and the role that Portland Street Response can play in this.
And, Portland Street Response must center the people made the least safe in this society.
Portland police over-arrest unhoused people. Black and Indigenous Portlanders are both disproportionately homeless and disproportionately arrested and imprisoned as well — as are people with disabilities. And there are some brutal feedback loops, so that unhoused people make up the majority of people arrested in area emergency rooms — a situation tangled with the fact that our society overinvests in jails and prisons, which become de facto housing.
We knew from the hundreds of unhoused people who work with Street Roots that Portland Street Response was urgent to pursue. When Street Roots published the framework, we were determined to give some structure to what an alternative could be, drawing from the decades of practice from the White Bird Clinic-run CAHOOTS in Eugene. We knew from CAHOOTS that a healthier response system is one based on listening for the story beneath the story as CAHOOTS crisis worker Amy May described to me last year.
Just imagine if the officer had listened to Rayshard Brooks say he could walk home from the Atlanta Wendy’s parking lot to his sister’s house so he could sober up. It was such a simple solution that he suggested, and if the officer had listened, Rayshard would be alive for his sister, his daughter and so many others.
DIRECTOR'S DESK: Portland Street Response: A democracy that reaches the unhoused
We must advocate that Black Portlanders, as well as unhoused people, have a big role in evaluating and further designing the pilots. Portland Street Response is part of a seismic shift in civic imagination created by people taking to the streets night after night. May all of the shouts of despair and hope reverberate forward into, reimagining a society that is healthy and just. Portland Street Response is all of ours to make succeed.
Just as some of the old monuments need to topple for the new to rise, so do the systems themselves. But it will take great civic engagement to make sure that what we build anew emerges with justice.
Director's Desk is written by Kaia Sand, the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand
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