Two members resigned from a Portland police oversight panel this week, one criticizing the city’s “failed” response to ongoing protests and the other citing lack of city accountability for bad policing decisions.
A third member also resigned because she’s moving to Seattle.
“It’s disappointing to lose valuable help at this time,” said Candace Avalos, the chair of the Portland Citizen Review Committee, a 11-member volunteer group that hears appeals of police findings on complaints made against officers.
Avalos read the members’ resignation letters to other committee members at the start of the group’s meeting Wednesday night.
Hillary Houck, who joined in 2018, stepped down because she said she felt the mayor and police chief had undermined police accountability. Houck cited Mayor Ted Wheeler’s position at a May 2019 meeting, when he didn’t agree with the committee that police had retaliated against a woman who was taking officers’ photos by citing her for jaywalking. Danielle Outlaw was chief at the time that case was heard.
“I was dismayed by the Mayor’s reaction and the ultimate consequence for the officer involved in a case our committee and the rest of City Council saw as clear retaliation,” she wrote. “Mayor Wheeler questioned why we would even have a citizen committee that could overturn decisions made by the Chief of Police.”
Seven-year committee member Adam Green said he was fed up with the past weekend’s violent clashes on the streets of Portland, calling them a “tipping point” in his decision to step down.
“We continue to witness excessive force used by officers on the streets. Members of the media continue to be threatened. Armed Trump supporters are allowed to parade through downtown Portland while pointing guns at people that aren’t wearing Trump gear. These are just a few examples of a failed system with failed leadership,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “I can no longer support this system in any way.”
Green didn’t reference the fatal shooting of a 39-year-old man, Aaron S. Danielson, who was killed on Southwest Third Avenue near Alder Street on Saturday when another man opened fire shortly after a pro-Trump caravan of cars had left the city’s downtown area. Police have made no arrest.
Video and photos taken of people in the caravan showed some shooting paintball guns and mace or pepper spray at people on the street. Some on the street threw objects at the line of trucks and cars. Fistfights broke out along the route as traffic crawled downtown and people tried to block the caravan. It was the third straight weekend that competing groups have faced off in the city’s core.
A third committee member, Carol Johnson, is moving to Seattle, according to Avalos.
The citizen panel has struggled with high turnover for many years, and the changes come as a ballot measure heads to voters in November that would overhaul the police oversight system.
“A lot is up in the air,” said Ross Caldwell, director of the city’s Independent Police Review office, the intake office for complaints made against officers.
When pressed if the city will work to recruit new members, Caldwell said he didn’t know.
The citizen committee’s former chair, Kristin Malone, resigned out of frustration in January. She said she was frustrated by the lack of response from both the mayor’s office and the City Council to many of the committee’s proposed changes that would have given the group more power to challenge police findings.
Wheeler said in June that he wanted to overhaul Portland’s civilian oversight of police, plainly acknowledging that the confusing system doesn’t have “any real teeth.”
“The structure we have right now isn’t pleasing anybody, isn’t doing what we want and it doesn’t have the public’s trust,” he said then.
Wheeler added the oversight system to his reform list as a wave of widespread public support for police accountability washes over the city and the nation after the killing of George Floyd, spurring a sudden resolve to fix what in the past have seemed like intractable problems mired in political opposition or inertia.
Portland residents will vote this fall whether to revamp the city’s police oversight system in a way that proponents say will lead to more accountability and transparency in investigations of officer misconduct, though the details of that system would still have to be ironed out.
The Portland City Council voted unanimously in July to refer the proposal to the Nov. 3 ballot, despite objections from City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero, who oversees the existing Independent Police Review, and the Portland Police Association union, which represents the majority of the city’s officers.
If the measure passes, the City Council would have to form a commission to address how the new oversight system would work.
