PORTLAND — Chief Danielle Outlaw, who led the Portland Police Bureau for two years and two months, has accepted a job to become Philadelphia’s police commissioner.
Outlaw, 43, informed Mayor Ted Wheeler on Friday and asked to stay at the helm of Portland’s Police Bureau through Jan. 1.
That wasn’t accepted. Starting Tuesday, Portland’s deputy chief Jami Resch will serve as interim chief.
Outlaw, who was selected in October 2017 as Portland’s first African American woman to lead the nearly 1000-member city police force after a national search, is leaving to run a much larger metropolitan 6,500-member police department in Philadelphia.
The Philadelphia police department has been rocked by recent scandals in the past year, including a sexual harassment lawsuit that led to the abrupt resignation of former Commissioner Richard Ross.
Outside observers had long suspected that Outlaw, who rose quickly through the ranks of Oakland’s Police Department before arriving in Portland, would use the Portland job to leapfrog to a larger, metropolitan police agency.
Outlaw has been active in many national policing organizations, including the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Police Executive Research Forum and the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. While Portland’s chief, she continued to network and travel to attend these group’s national police conferences across the country, often taking some command staff with her.
Her tenure in Portland had been a rocky one. An outsider from Oakland, she struggled to gain acceptance and support within the Police Bureau, within City Hall and in the community.
Tasked by Portland’s mayor to build trust between police and a skeptical and outspoken community, she said in an interview this fall that she was still working on that goal.
The chief and the bureau struggled with how to respond to major protests, continued police shootings of people in mental health crisis and a serious staffing shortage. She also struggled to gain support among city council members.
A few months ago, Outlaw said she was most pleased that the city-hired team of overseers examining the 2014 Justice Department settlement with the city recently found the Police Bureau in “substantial compliance” with the agreement’s provisions.
The settlement followed a federal investigation that found Portland officers had a pattern of using excessive force against people with mental illness. It required changes to police use-of-force policies, training and oversight. A judge still needs to agree with the city overseers and community members have voiced concerns.
“I think it’s a huge achievement for our organization and our members here to show the work that’s been done since the inception of the agreement in a short period of time,” Outlaw said.
Yet members of a community group formed to oversee the reforms have been skeptical of that compliance finding, pointing to police officers’ continued use of deadly force against people struggling with mental illness. At least three of the five people killed by police this year were suffering from a mental health crisis.
After police shootings, Outlaw often has voiced dismay that by the time people in crisis encounter police, they often have fallen through the gaps of an underfunded mental health care system.
“It becomes extremely frustrating when we know that by the time we’re called to the scene, many, many systems have already failed them, two, three, four times over, and we get the headline obviously because the ultimate happened,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive in October.
“But no one is questioning in the same manner we get questioned (about) what happened before this happened. Who failed this person? Why didn’t they get the services that they need? How do we even get called in the first place? Where is the same level of accountability?”
Members of the Police Bureau were dismayed and discouraged when the mayor and some city commissioners immediately blasted text messages made public between a police lieutenant, who served as a crowd control liaison, and Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson, before an investigation got underway. An investigation ultimately found Niiya was doing his job, but the bureau adopted more stringent standards for such communications.
Under Outlaw, the Police Bureau lowered its hiring standards to try to attract more applicants to fill the growing number of vacancies in an authorized force of 1,001. As of October, the bureau had 110 sworn officer vacancies, leaving the bureau scrambling to fill patrol shifts each day.
Police supervisors are considering refiguring patrol shifts early next year to better align officers to hours when emergency calls are more frequent. Lowering the educational standard for new officers, the chief said in October, has resulted in an increase in applications this year – 965 eligible candidates so far this year compared to 809 last year.
Under Outlaw, the bureau added a deputy chief to command staff and worked to focus enforcement based on crime data, having precinct commanders set priorities each quarter dictated by problems in their districts.
With a deputy chief, Outlaw sought to leave her deputy with running day-to-day operations while she sought to control strategic policy and work to improve relations outside the bureau.
After protests dissolved into violence, Outlaw called for an anti-mask law for protesters and changes in state law that would allow police to video record demonstrations from start to finish. But she received little support from the city’s elected commissioners or mayor for either. She said in October that she’d also still like to see a pilot project for body cameras get council approval. That hasn’t happened yet.
