OPINION | Commissioners Hardesty and Eudaly need one more vote for police budget cuts
Justice is not convenient, but the City Council might need a reminder. It managed to cut $15 million from the police budget — and reinvest some of that into Portland Street Response — in the face of national uprisings against police violence, and after it was quaked with testimony of Portlanders who demanded that the ever-rising police budget be cut.
DIRECTOR'S DESK: Portland Street Response is funded, and its success is up to all of us
But today, in a quieter season of budgeting, the City Council is meeting to adjust this year’s budget, and Mayor Ted Wheeler is protecting the police budget while cutting a portion of the Portland Street Response budget. The move pits it against funding that supports C3P0 camps, villages on city land that were installed as a COVID-19 response and have provided security for a number of folks who were suffering on the streets.
But this must be clear: Funding the police actually increases our struggles around homelessness. This couldn’t have been more obvious than in the deeply researched article by Molly Harbarger and Melissa Lewis in the Sunday Oregonian in which they showed that not only are the rates of policing and jailing of unhoused people suffocatingly high, but that housing itself is part of the solution.
The Oregonian had previously reported that over half of Portland arrests in 2017 were of unhoused people, and Harbarger and Lewis just reported that the same rate held for 2018 and 2019, too. What’s more, the jailing of unhoused people was up to 40% of all bookings in 2019. Two-thirds of all jail bookings were made by the Portland Police.
That’s what we are funding, to the tune of $43 million spent from 2017 through 2019 in order to arrest and book unhoused people.
Jails are de facto shelters — and expensive, trauma-inducing ones at that. That’s absurd — and it’s gobbling up money.
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Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty has proposed cutting $18 million more from the police budget and reinvesting it in Portland Street Response, C3PO camps, and other programs. Lamarra Haynes, the advocacy manager at Imagine Black — formerly the Portland African American Leadership Forum — spoke at a budget forum hosted by Hardesty, reminding us that “divesting from PPB on a yearly basis in fairly large chunks of money” must be accompanied by reinvesting in “non-punitive programming such as programs that house and keep our houseless community members housed permanently, drug and alcohol treatment programming, as well as programs that really invest in those who are predominantly impacted by the carceral state.”
That kind of reinvesting, she reminded the audience, happens when we vote in this election — when we invest in libraries, water, transit, preschools. We are voting for a new form of public safety.
Through that perspective, progress came this week when the Joint Office of Homeless Services and Transition Projects announced a winter shelter in the old Greyhound Station . Progress came when state legislators proposed purchasing motels statewide to provide shelters for unhoused people around the state. These efforts make strides toward public safety.
Because if people get housing, they are less likely to be re-arrested, according to The Oregonian’s reporting. And that makes sense, because so much of what people are arrested for is an aspect of being homeless.
In the Oct. 28-Nov. 3 issue of Street Roots, Joanne Zuhl continues her series Finding Home , and she shows how, on a national level, housing has been poorly funded and executed, and how locally, folks again and again are left with few options. In truth, these failures at a national level drive up our local police budget when that’s how we try to solve problems. And we don’t solve problems; we make them worse.
“Those trapped within the system are not merely disadvantaged, in the sense that they are competing on an unequal playing field or face additional hurdles to political or economic success; rather, the system itself is structured to lock them into a subordinate position,” writes Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow.”
Commissioner Chloe Eudaly has already said she’s voting for Hardesty’s proposal to trim PPB further. It’s time to put pressure on Wheeler, Commissioner Dan Ryan and Commissioner Amanda Fritz to support the change as well, in the interest of public safety.
If we are to keep our eye on justice, we have to try to do the brave thing again and again. Let’s demand the City Council does too.
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 . Street Roots is an award-winning, weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots . Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today .
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