Testimony before a legislative panel turned emotional — and for many, it was personal
A slew of bills before the Oregon Legislature this year come under the heading of “equitable policing.”
Angela Foster of Milwaukie told lawmakers Jan. 27 she would find policing more equitable if officers didn’t beat, kick and laugh at people they have at their mercy.
“One Indigenous person was refused medical care numerous times,” she told members of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Equitable Policing as she testified on what she and others call the “fed wars” of last summer.
“She’s been refused an ambulance even after having a seizure,” Foster said. “An Indigenous veteran was punched in the face, begging not to be hurt, and said she was met with brutal, excessive force, hit with batons and knocked off her feet. When she asked for an ambulance, an officer laughed.”
While other people offered testimony on the nuts and bolts of legislation, Foster cried as she spoke to subcommittee members. “I’m crying right now because I’ve personally been abused just recently,” she said. “I was also not offered a medical assessment.”
Foster said she offered testimony to the Legislature because she hopes lawmakers will listen to her when all she receives from the police is derision.
“I don’t feel I’ve been heard at all,” she said. “I feel like they were laughing at me when they were hurting me. If I had a medical assessment, then maybe I might have felt a little bit heard, and I wouldn’t be crying over the phone with you guys right now.”
Foster and other Indigenous people were detained Oct. 17 last year after protesting at the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) office on South Macadam Avenue in Portland. She was detained again Jan. 21. Foster told Street Roots protesting ICE is essential, especially for Indigenous people.
“My heart brings me there,” she said. “It doesn’t really feel like a choice to be there. That’s where my culture brings me to be.”
Rep. Janelle Bynum (D-Clackamas) co-chairs the subcommittee and started its first meeting Feb. 20 by saying she wants to keep the process free of emotion as much as possible.
“While this can be emotional for a lot of people, I want to stay away from that and just really get at the work that needs to be done and set us on a path for the next 25 years or so,” she said.
Q&A: Bynum is determined to improve police accountability in Oregon
Dr. Karen Mularski of Clackamas, who specializes in internal medicine, said she never considered herself a political activist. She holds strong moral and ethical convictions, but she never thought she would take them to the streets.
That changed when President Donald Trump sent federal agents to confront protesters in July, she told Street Roots.
“I’m comfortable calling myself anti-fascist, but that’s not something I would have called myself a year ago,” she said. “It really opened my eyes to police brutality and the ways law enforcement officers are trained.”
She testified to the subcommittee Feb. 3 on House Bill 2928, which would limit the use of tear gas and other chemical weapons against political demonstrators. Mularski participated in a clinical study on the medical effects of such weapons, but it was far more than a clinical issue for her.
“When the feds arrived, I got even more angry and went down initially as part of the Wall of Moms,” she told Street Roots after her testimony. “I was on the front lines a couple of nights when feds put up metal gates. The most horrifying night when I was there was one of those July nights when the Wall of Moms was trying to make a line.”
A teenager started banging on a sheet of plywood at the federal courthouse on Southwest Third Avenue. “That was enough to cause the police or whoever it was to come out,” Mularski recalled. “All of sudden, there was tear gas everywhere.”
The gas came from holes in the plywood, she added.
“It was unreal,” she said. “This line of cops or whoever in black grabbed a woman next to me. She was just standing there, trying to hold the line. I tried to help her stand up, but they pulled her to the ground. At that point, I was pretty scared. I got into a ball and tried to scoot away. So many people with batons, hitting and pushing, it was disorienting and painful. You can’t see or open your eyes.”
If police use tear gas and strong-arm tactics to discourage people, Mularski said, they failed. Rather than falling back and staying home after her first experience on the streets, she returned multiple times through the summer and received training to work as a street medic.
“I felt sorry for the officers actually, who were only doing what they were told by some pretty evil higher-ups,” Mularski told Street Roots. Trump sending in agents from the Department of Homeland Security and other federal forces made the situation exponentially worse, she said.
“I am pretty sure if the feds hadn’t been called in, this would have continued to fade as hopefully productive real change and progress were made involving the city government and police department,” she said.
PHOTOS: The concerning progression of police response to Portland protests
However, Zavie Wilson of Portland laid the blame for the government’s response to the protests directly at the feet of legislators.
“The reason we are out here is in grievance of the brutality Portland police have caused, not only to our generation, but to the 178 years Black and brown Oregonians have had to face directly because you have allowed systemically racist, sexist and homophobic law enforcement to play a huge role in oppressing Black people,” the 17-year-old activist told members of the subcommittee Feb. 3.
“You have personally allowed this to happen, and I speak for any Black youth who has been in that crowd when I say I blame you for allowing this to happen to your citizens,” she said.
Wilson said she and her friends went to the protests in peace and tried to leave whenever violence or rioting broke out. “Yet we have been gassed multiple times because the Portland Police Bureau is not willing to care about who is in their crowds,” she said. “I’ve watched toddlers and I’ve watched dogs being gassed. They are innocent bystanders in this, and they don’t deserve to be gassed like that.”
Sen. James Manning (D-Portland), a former police officer, spoke during the first subcommittee meeting Jan. 20 and said he understands people’s frustrations with the police. He remembered what it was like growing up Black in Portland.
“I was in the fifth grade before a police officer pulled up, accused me of breaking into a parking meter, and took me to the police station,” he said. “I was merely trying to go home. So there’s a genuine fear, and we have to recognize it. If we don’t recognize it, we’re not going to fix this.”
He said he became a police officer himself to help correct the system from within.
“There are a lot of great police officers,” he said. “I know. I served with some of them. But we do have some officers who don’t need to be in the ranks, who bring dishonor to the ranks.”
Manning said officers have no reason to dress like soldiers. “I get really upset when I see officers who never served a day in the military dressing up as if they were members of the 82nd Airborne because it makes them look good,” he said. “That’s not patriotic. That is a chance to intimidate.”
However, he repeated that lawmakers are not out to defund or abolish law enforcement this session.
“This committee was not put together to tear police down,” Manning said. “This committee was put together to make policing more equitable. This committee, from my perspective, was to make sure that people who look like me don’t fear the police when they look like me.”
Mularski said a good way to start would be to ban or severely restrict chemical weapons against peaceful demonstrators. She helped researchers at the Center for Health Research at Kaiser Permanente survey protesters about the health effects of chemical weapons.
Researchers posted the survey July 30. In the first four days, it received more than 1,500 responses.
“The data are very preliminary but very concerning,” Mularski told lawmakers. “My concern is that there is very little medical research that has been done on these chemicals, and what we found is very compelling evidence that these may provide endocrine-disrupting capabilities and just basically need to be studied much more closely in many populations rather than just young military recruits.”
Allison Cole of Portland told subcommittee members Feb. 3 that lawmakers have to start by rethinking policing at a core level.
“These chemical weapons and crowd-control tactics are part of a larger phenomena of police militarization, which ironically has made our communities less safe, and it’s also made our officers less safe,” she told the subcommittee.
“Over and over again, studies show the per-dollar value of SWAT investments is directly correlated with the number of civilians an agency will kill in a year,” she added. “So the bigger the investment, the more people who will die.”
Those deaths include police officers, Cole said. “Abandoning SWAT-style policing moves the needle away from danger for both civilians and law enforcement officers, and that’s your singular goal as an agency, right? That everyone gets home safe.”
Safety would be nice, Foster told Street Roots. However, she said she has abandoned the concept. She knows she puts herself in danger on a regular basis.
“You know the risks already because they’ve been doing it to your people already,” she said. “You remember all the broken treaties against your own people. Living through it doesn’t give you a choice. I could just sit back and ignore it, or I could try to do something to help. My people don’t even have clean water. They haven’t had clean water for years.”
She said she found Trump’s sending in agents from Homeland Security particularly bizarre.
“What homeland are you securing right now, and why are you hurting people doing it?” she asked.
All she can do is speak out, Foster said. “It almost feels like that’s the only thing I have, to be honest; that’s the only way I can get some kind of closure, to actually have someone hear me,” she said. “Otherwise, it’s like you’re talking to a wall, and no one’s hearing you.”
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