After year of protests, Portland is ready to move on; but where?
Defund the police? City leaders tried it. A unit in the f ire and rescue bureau, one of the f irst of its kind in a major city, began this year taking some 911 calls about people in crisis, especially those who are homeless.
Instead of police officers with flashing lights and guns, a paramedic and a social worker would drive up offering water, a high-protein snack and, always and especially, conversation, aiming to defuse a situation that could otherwise lead to confrontation and violence. No power to arrest. No coercion.
“Having someone show up and offer you goods rather than run you off is different, and people respond to it — it softens the mood,” said Tremaine Clayton, a burly, tattooed veteran of 20 years at the fire and rescue bureau who helps run the program.
But this spring, just as the project was preparing for a major rollout into more neighborhoods, there was another plot twist: The new policing alternative was itself mostly defunded. The city decided on a go-slow approach, and the promised $4.8 million expansion evaporated.
Portland, the Oregon city of bridges, bike lanes and left-leaning idealists — beloved, abhorred and caricatured in just about equal measure — is wrestling mightily with the question of what it means to make a city safe and, as it gradually opens up from the COVID-19 shutdowns, to feel safe, too. It is an issue that many American cities are addressing as the economic and societal disruptions of the past year linger and resonate.
Violent crime, especially homicide, has spiked in most urban areas during the pandemic, and many police departments are facing new scrutiny about training and bias since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis a year ago.
But here in the nation’s 25th-largest metropolitan area, with about 2.5 million people, there is an additional factor that ripples through every public policy choice. Even the city’s top prosecutor said it has, to a degree, warped the debate about what to do to rebuild a city that Portlanders want and love.
A hardened core of street activists, many of them professing opposition to authority in general, has dug in and shows no signs of going away. (Mayor Ted Wheeler has asked people to stop calling them protesters but rather what they call themselves: anarchists.) Their numbers are now down to perhaps 25 to 75 on any given night, compared with hundreds in late 2020 and the many thousands who marched last summer
in protests after Floyd’s murder.
But they have shown themselves at times to be violent — one was charged with attempted murder after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the police — destructive of property and highly adaptable, using social media tools and other strategies to divert the police from the targets they select.
Direct actions are promoted on social media with the phrase “No gods, no masters,” a 19th-century anarchist term that indicates a rejection of all forms of authority. More traditional protesters from Black Lives Matter and other movements who try to curtail violence are now ridiculed as “peace police” by the anarchists, who mostly consist of young, white men.
Demetria Hester, a member of Moms United for Black Lives, continues to push for defunding the police but disagrees with the current call for dismantling the entire political system.
“Breaking windows is performative,” she said. “That satisfies them at night, but they don’t have a plan.”
Some prominent Black leaders have been distancing themselves, with some calling the anarchists’ rejection of gradual progress just another symbol of privilege that Black people do not have.
“Being able to protest every night is a white privilege, being able to yell at a police’s face is a white privilege,” said Gregory McKelvey, a prominent Black organizer who ran the mayoral campaign last year for Wheeler’s opponent, Sarah Iannarone. “Most Black people across the country do everything they can to avoid cops.”
Still, McKelvey has empathy for those who feel that taking to the streets is their only outlet.
“These are people who have felt like they’ve had no agency or power in their life or in the political system,” he said. “They want to feel powerful, and when you can have the mayor talking about you every single day, and hundreds of police officers show up to fight you every day, you feel more powerful than when you’re sitting at home.”
The protests have led to vicious finger-pointing over who was to blame for the serial destruction that has left so many downtown storefronts shattered and covered with plywood.
Wheeler, heeding the demands of downtown residents and business owners, said the protesters themselves must be held accountable for their destructive attacks.
Protesters say the police have escalated the situation. This year, the Justice Department said that the city’s Police Bureau was violating its own use-of-force policies during crowd-control operations and that supervisors were not properly investigating complaints.
Not so fast, the city shot back. The problem was at least partly created when former President Donald Trump sent in federal agents last summer, escalating the violence, the city attorney, Robert Taylor, said in a vehement response.
The Portland Police Bureau declined repeated requests for comment.
As the George Floyd protests waned elsewhere in the country, demonstrations in Portland continued almost nightly, for months on end. Video clips of burning trash barrels, broken windows and police in riot gear populated YouTube.
“You see images that make it seem like ‘Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,’ ” said Phillip Atiba Goff, a professor of AfricanAmerican studies and psychology at Yale University who co-founded the Center for Policing Equity, an advocacy group that works to reduce bias in policing.
The rise in gun violence in the city — there were 891 shootings in 2020, more than double the number the previous year — has created what Goff calls a “correlation fallacy,” that protest equates to rising violent crime. Many big cities have seen a recent spike in violent crime, with little direct connection to street protests or law enforcement philosophy, he said.
“Portland is a dangerous potential distraction,” he said. “If you look at where progressive prosecutors were elected, homicide jumped; if you look at where they were defeated, homicide also spiked.”
But even as Portland’s streets shook with anger, they also were filled, more and more, by the victims of disruption in the city’s fabric — people without a place to live, rendered homeless by social and economic dislocations of the pandemic. The spiraling problem is obvious throughout the city’s downtown, which is sprinkled with sidewalk encampments of tents.
The rising numbers of homeless people turned the new fire and rescue unit, called Portland Street Response, into a leading front in the effort to quell the crisis. Like several similar programs that have recently started or are in planning in Denver; Rochester, N.Y.; Oakland, Calif.; and San Francisco, the effort is modeled after a project begun in Eugene, Ore., in 1989.
Portland’s new team, as well as the city’s 911 dispatchers, had to learn as they went. What calls were too dangerous, and therefore would still require a police response? Some were obvious — a person wielding a firearm warranted an officer on the scene. In more uncertain circumstances, dispatchers developed a series of triage questions to the 911 caller: Is a weapon present?
“The dispatchers are learning it as they go,” said Britt Urban, a clinical social worker on the response team.
City leaders initially planned a major expansion of the program, but after vigorous debate the City Council last month backed the mayor’s plan to evaluate the effectiveness of the pilot effort before expanding it.
Many people here say that the battle over what kind of city Portland will be is now coming down to the question of fatigue — on the part of the police, city leaders, business owners and downtown residents. After 2020, the old status quo has started sounding pretty good.