Ethan Knight is running against Mike Schmidt for Multnomah County district attorney. Street Roots interviewed both candidates with a focus on how the office policies and procedures interface with people experiencing poverty and homelessness.
Endorsed by the outgoing incumbent, Ethan Knight is the heir apparent in the race for Multnomah County District Attorney. Knight, 45, joined the DA’s office in 1999 soon after getting his law degree from University of Oregon. He left in 2007 to become an assistant United States attorney, and went on to become the lead counsel in several high profile and controversial cases, including the conviction of Mohamad Mohamud, so-called Christmas tree bomber, and the trial of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupiers.
In fact, prosecuting right-wing extremists is one of the issues at the forefront in Knight’s campaign, with the candidate calling for protecting people’s right to assemble, but also dedicating resources to aggressively prosecuting violent conduct.
Often considered the conservative candidate, Knight emphasizes his experience as a prosecutor and his ability to move policy changes forward rather than radical shifts in how the district attorney’s office does business. He is a proponent of the office’s ongoing work around the current Justice Reinvestment Program, which seeks to reduce prison sentences and focus instead on mentoring, treatment and housing supports. And with an emphasis on prevention and treatment, Knight wants to expand efforts around community policing and community courts, and push for statutory reforms on punitive fines and fees applied to people who can’t afford to pay.
Personally, Knight is the president of the Oregon Law Foundation, which works ensure access to counsel for people who can’t afford one. He served on the Governor’s Juvenile Crime Prevention Advisory Committee which works to keep juveniles out of the criminal justice system. He lives in Southwest Portland with his wife and two children.
In addition to Underhill, Knight has received the endorsement of John Kroger, former Oregon attorney general; Portland Fire Fighters Association-IAFF Local 43; Joint Council of Teamsters #37 (the paramedics union), Portland Police Association, Multnomah County Prosecuting Attorney’s Association and the Portland Public Safety Action Coalition.
Street Roots: Your campaign focuses specifically on fighting right-wing extremism, which has targeted Portland as fertile ground for violent confrontations with little consequence. When an offense is committed, how will right-wing extremism be prosecuted differently under your office?
Ethan Knight: I would continue to incur the kind of structure planning we had before the last protest in August of last year that involved coordination between federal, state and local law enforcement and a lot of work to set very specific parameters for where folks protest, where they could congregate, and that historically and certainly here, has limited some of the violent behavior, the hate speech, the kind of things that really create a disrupted dynamic for everyone.
I would leverage my own experience —20 years of it from doing these cases years ago and more recently — in managing the intake and prosecution pieces. I would work with law enforcement beforehand to educate them on the types of crimes that may be involved. When you deal with these issues, whether it be right-wing extremism, or any other type of crime that’s different from what you usually see in a DA’s office, you need to educate the police about the types of offenses we have and what we should do.
And lastly, It’s making sure you have a deputy or deputies assigned to deal with those specific cases so it’s not just a stack of reports showing up on somebody’s desk and we’re scrambling to figure out what to do. It’s somebody who knows in advance, addressing some of these individuals, this event, this activity, and you’re working with our federal partners to identify the best charges on either side of the street to make sure people are charged if it’s appropriate.
That multi-faceted approach has worked in the past — I know from my experience it’s worked — and I think deter people from coming here in the first place. And then appropriately respond so we don’t have a situation where we have people coming here really for the attention and then targeting and attacking people.
Street Roots: Your campaign platform says you will work “to address the effects of homelessness on the community and in the criminal justice system by supporting added social services and treatment-oriented approaches to reduce recidivism.” Would people experiencing homelessness who interface with the criminal justice system before forced into treatment to avoid time behind bars?
Knight: If there’s a criminal conviction, to me, there’s always a choice. I think that’s the better option to incarceration. I always think, particularly for low-level offenses, it shouldn’t be about accumulating convictions. It’s about how do you leverage that point of contact to best supervise and get folks connected to services. And these needs are going to become more acute across that board.
It’s easy for people to say we want services not incarceration, just reduce the amount of money you spend on one and throw it to the other and that solves the problem.
It takes really a sustained commitment and resources in a system to support them. On the front end, if somebody’s in the system, there’s always choices. Force is a tough word, but I would prefer we had people going into treatment if it’s needed. And I think we need to spend the time and the money to do it right. And that’s where my view of funding the system comes into play. You can say all these things all you want, but you need probation officers and somebody who can help and assist, and not just lock them up for 30 days and think that solves the problem.
Street Roots: Prosecutors are often seen as the roadblocks to criminal justice reform — the ACLU of Oregon noted that is particularly the case in Oregon in a 2016 report. You’re being characterized as the status quo candidate in some ways — You were quoted in the Portland Tribune as saying, “this isn’t the time to burn the system down.” Why should anyone who wants to move away from mass incarceration vote for you?
Knight: First, that ACLU report, when they talk about roadblocks in the different offices in the state, they acknowledge that Multnomah County is different. They were talking about transparency in Clackamas County and other counties, and Multnomah County both has a different history and record with respect to alternative programming and with rates of incarceration.
What I said in the Tribune, that’s absolutely accurate. I don’t think now is the time to dismantle the entire system because we’re facing an acute budget crisis, and we need to do things carefully and well to respond to the needs of the community.
To the question of why should someone support me if they have concerns about reform, the answer is that I’m the best person to move those policies forward. What the Multnomah County DAs office does is a very different question than what the legislature does or what some of these policies mean. That I’m supported by people in the system, legal professionals who understand what that office does, and frankly all of the lawyers in the office, puts me in a better position to make the kinds of changes to move things forward and to make reforms where needed. It’s a great thing to say I don’t support Measure 11, but the reality is you have to enforce it if you’re in that office until the legislature says something different. When we’re really talking about how to improve people’s lives in this county, I’m the best person to do that. I’ve had a long history and interest in working on specific areas that involve treatment and getting folks who need it to the right place, and distinguishing those cases from the very serious cases that may need a different approach, and I continue to do that.
Emily Green: Just a technical point, I think the report your thinking of is the 2019 report from the ACLU on transparency, in which Multnomah County was pointed out as being different, but in their previous report on prosecutors seeing roadblocks to criminal justice reform, they actually did point to Multnomah County as being a roadblock in that way in some of the things Rod Underhill had done.
Knight: Absolutely, I just want to at least, for what it’s worth, put in a little context that it’s not the same as Marion County, or other counties, both in rates of incarceration or what’s been done.
Street Roots also asked Knight six other questions that were also posed to his opponent. Read their responses to each question.