Portland restores police funds
City ups spending amid spike in homicides, staffing shortage
PORTLAND, Ore. — Night after night, hundreds of people marched the streets of Oregon’s largest city, demanding racial justice after the murder of George Floyd by a white officer.
Among the rallying cries were “defund the police” — a call for elected officials to reallocate some law enforcement funding elsewhere. In June 2020, the Portland City Council answered by cutting millions from the police budget.
Now, a year and a half later, officials partially restored the cut funds. On Wednesday, the Portland City Council unanimously passed a fall budget bump that included increasing the current $230 million police budget by an additional $5.2 million. The added police spending is occurring amid a year of a record number of homicides, the city’s greatest police staffing shortage in decades and reform recommendations made by the U.S. Department of Justice.
“Many Portlanders no longer feel safe,” Mayor Ted Wheeler said. “And it is our duty, as leaders of this city, to take action and deliver better results within our crisis response system.”
Although the three-word call to action was the jumping-off point for communities to talk about how they want to be policed, experts say the goals of “defund the police” are debatable.
To some it means abolishing police departments, for others it is about cutting law enforcement budgets, and to others it is about reform and accountability.
“The defund-the-police movement spearheaded an opportunity for historically disenfranchised and historically under-resourced communities to express their continued discontent with policing,” said Howard Henderson, director of the Center for Justice Research at Texas Southern University.
During last year’s protests, Portlanders called for $50 million to be cut from the department budget, with the money going to community-driven initiatives.
The City Council responded by cutting $15 million. An additional $12 million was cut because of pandemic-caused economic shortfalls. As a result, school resource officers, transit police and a gun violence reduction team — which was found to disproportionately target Black Portland residents during traffic stops, according to an audit in March 2018 — were disbanded.
Henderson says some of the loudest voices of the “defund” movement weren’t people in neighborhoods most riddled by crime.
“The folks who live in these highcrime communities …. they don’t want to get rid of police altogether,” Henderson said. “What they want to do is get rid of bad policing,”