Leanne was worried. Her daughter lived in a bus and struggled to manage her mental illness. After the 114-degree heat that resulted in hyperthermia deaths in Oregon, Leanne feared what might have happened to her daughter.
Leanne lived hours away, out of state, and her option was to call the police for a welfare check, but she didn’t. She was afraid of what might happen to her daughter should armed officers show up. So she dialed up grassroots organizations, hoping someone could check. When she reached us at Street Roots, she talked about how she wished that Portland Street Response were a citywide infrastructure that would send people out, unarmed and with a focus on supporting people in crisis.
Instead, she had to rely on sheer hard work. Thankfully, after numerous phone calls, she reached Cascadia outreach workers who found her daughter alive and well. But this all took extreme advocacy from a concerned mother and extra work among nonprofits.
As the weather disasters from a disrupted climate increase, more people need street-side medical care and welfare checks. Already this summer, too many people died alone in sweltering apartments.
But instead, forces of the status quo prevail. Willamette Week reported last week that Portland Police Association blocked a city request for Portland Street Response to respond to calls inside private residences — which could include welfare checks for people suffering from extreme heat.
Portland Street Response hasn’t been made available to the vast majority of Portlanders under the vast majority of crisis situations, including this one. This, despite a near universal understanding across the city that we need a humanitarian-based, street crisis response system that doesn’t involve police. That’s why Portland Street Response, or PSR, exists.
It’s why the model PSR is based on, CAHOOTS in Eugene, is now a national standard in cities across the U.S. for crisis intervention. CAHOOTS has been a proven, non-police first responder for more than three decades.
So much so that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) is leading a cohort of U.S. senators who support creating financial incentives to communities that move forward with similar models.
STREET ROOTS PODCAST: Sen. Wyden on the Child Tax Credit, CAHOOTS Act, wildfires and more
Yet in Portland, despite council and public support for PSR, the city can’t seem to commit to anything but a minimum of operations, with limited hours, that barely reach beyond the Lents neighborhood in far Southeast Portland.
The excuses for this tepid commitment are myriad, politically crafted obstacles, the most stubborn of which is the authority granted to the Portland Police Association over any PSR expansion and the program’s place in the current police contract negotiations. Why should the police have authority over a program intended to replace the police? For that very reason, apparently: PSR would supplant what was previously police work in mental health crisis response — work that so impressed the U.S. Department of Justice that it sued the city for unconstitutional use of force against people with mental illness. The settlement reached in that lawsuit is still in place, and the city has been repeatedly out of compliance.
The negotiations are behind closed doors. We can only hope that pleas to remove PSR from the police union contract will be acted upon by the negotiating city commissioners. PSR was created specifically to adapt to street-level crisis, which knows no neighborhood boundaries, operation hours or contractual bargaining chips.
EDITORIAL: Crisis response shouldn’t be a bargaining chip
We’ve stated many times on this page the need for putting street crisis response not in the hands of the armed police but in trained, peer-led teams who are recognized by people in crisis as benevolent, supportive outreach. But it still must be a civic responsibility.
Leanne’s situation — reaching out to any nonprofit and grasping at straws — makes it clear that crisis outreach has to be as universally recognizable as our traditional emergency response: 911. Farming out the labor, management and cost to a nonprofit won’t work for a crisis of this size, and accountability is paramount.
STREET ROOTS NEWS: If not 911, this is who responds to Portland street homelessness (from March 2019)
We receive phone calls from people who hope that through our know-how, Street Roots might be able to help with welfare checks and crises, but we are still in the same place where we were when we described the need for Portland Street Response more than two years ago. We need Portland Street Response too.
It’s time the city acted boldly and abandoned this wait-and-see, piecemeal approach. The crisis is now.