The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-02-25
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (22,740 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Community and Public Safety Committee met on February 25, 2025, opening with roll call and a statement of conduct before hearing a presentation on the Bureau of Emergency Management and Portland Police Bureau operations and costs. PBEM staff described budget constraints, staffing reductions, and risks to programs including planning, alert and warning, and duty officer coverage, alongside details on the Portland NET volunteer program and community partnerships. Police Bureau leadership presented organizational structure, staffing and vacancy figures, call-priority categories, response-time data, and budget trends, fielding questions on red flag law implementation, retirements and promotions, body-worn camera costs, and historical funding comparisons; figures on total vacancies were stated inconsistently before being clarified. The committee then took up a resolution directing the City Attorney's Office to seek approvals related to the Department of Justice settlement agreement and city code changes concerning the Community Police Oversight Board's nominating committee, covering proposed changes to bias standards, committee composition, and appointment processes. An amendment to the bias-standard language was introduced, discussed, and voted on, with the outcome recorded in the vote ledger. Extensive public testimony followed, reflecting a range of views on police accountability, oversight board composition, and public safety funding, with several speakers unable to testify due to time constraints before the meeting adjourned.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
Procedural markers in this session
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0 Sometimes, which is not hard to believe, but.
1 She did flip to the back.
2 Yeah. I thought she was stuck there for a little bit.
3 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have another user name?
4 There?
5 Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. I'm okay with council of safety. I'm on.
6 Attempts from.
7 Out to the speaker. So it's highly important. So it has.
8 To do with something that.
9 Was submitted. Don't worry about. That someday. I don't want to do that.
10 This year.
11 Okay.
12 Now I didn't get that right. Yeah, it's not posted yet.
13 Let me double check. One second. Thanks so much. Yeah. No problem. Sorry for interrupting you. What was their name again? Women are probably trying to get it, but I know, I know, I know what we're doing here.
14 Okay, cool.
15 I'm searching in the inbox, but, yeah, probably searching on the agenda as faster.
16 You said. Sorry. Written or oral discussion.
17 Great.
18 Okay. Okay.
19 I'll check on that. She submitted it as an attachment. I know, yeah, she had a hard time. It was w I women I can't see.
20 There should be a written testimony. Smartsheet. I was going to go on rebecca's laptop right now.
21 Yeah, I'm on the agenda and I don't see it, so. Smartsheet, check out the smartsheet. Oh, sorry. I'm going. Joe. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, you don't mind? I don't to come up with new ones, so they still have to covid-19. Yeah. Okay. So here's the latest. Okay. So. Yeah. Thank you. Lisa. Lisa here. Yeah. Written testimony. This position sheets.
22 No.
23 It's not this one. Is it? Here. I'll let you navigate.
24 You. No. And you said you looked on.
25 The web. Let's. We can check it one more time. Okay. Yeah. I got I understand that zero did session time.
26 Yeah. When you checked. Oh, wait. Sorry. Wrong one.
27 I'm on.
28 The resilient one.
29 Community. This one.
30 Thank you.
31 Yeah. Can you do that? Thanks for the invite. I have no.
32 You clicked on this one.
33 Yeah.
34 And you didn't see it on there?
35 Let's try that. This is the same. I did check it already, but. It's not my w I'm e r.
36 Okay. Christine.
37 Lori. Lori. Lori. Okay.
38 L a u r I.
39 R e.
40 No. Looks like it wasn't submitted. For which.
41 Agenda item? Do you know which one it was for?
42 I know.
43 Yeah, I think.
44 You're talking about.
45 Taking written testimony.
46 101 where I.
47 Just work under.
48 Lori. So if somebody were to submit something as an attachment.
49 For this.
50 Estimate, where would.
51 That end?
52 To written testimony?
53 Yeah, they.
54 Were submitted. It does accept attachments. Yeah. That's not the issue.
55 What might have happened to the.
56 Meeting because.
57 She submitted on Sunday. I.
58 Could yeah.
59 Yeah. You might have to open up the smartsheet rebecca. Because it's not on here.
60 So just know. And that's. That is the problem. I have to say, I appreciate what you guys do. Okay.
61 Yeah.
62 On Sunday.
63 Your your laptop back. Yeah.
64 Oh, good. I'm like, maybe I need my laptop. Thank you. Yeah. Hi, I'm diego. Diego. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Rebecca's working, but I'm kind of helping her out with zoom. And then I'm also taking on some other committee helping eventually. So I'm just kind of sitting in on this, and I plan to do, like, shadowing on the spot. Yeah. So you might see me around. Well, let's do this. Do you have any questions for me? Well, it was more. I just always just write this, you know, like making sure you're good to go. Yeah. So I'll be slides now as the for that.
65 For item two.
66 For item two, which I think is it this. Oh no I see. So there's just the two items. So first one.
67 Is going to be this presentation we have. And then the second one is going to be a resolution. And so that one is introducing it is when I'll need to share slides that he has for them.
68 Perfect. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. You should be good to go. Good afternoon. Chair. Like this. Good afternoon.
69 This is the February 5th.
70 Councilor. We need one minute for the audio.
71 Okay.
72 We need one minute for the audio. Apologies.
73 All right.
74 So just unmute it. And muted. I need it.
75 I muted.
76 Okay. Sorry. We're good to go.
77 Thank you. Good afternoon. This is the February 25th, 2025 meeting of the community and public safety committee. Rebecca, will you please call the role.
78 Sorry, we're not quite set up. Smith. I canal present. Morillo here. Zimmerman. Here.
79 Novick here. Christopher, could you please read the statement of conduct?
80 Welcome to the meeting of the community and public safety committee to testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at ed.gov. Council agenda. Slash community and public safety dash committee. Or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In person, testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item. Individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise. Your microphone will be muted when your time is over. The chair preserves order disruptive conduct such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, state your name for the record. If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent and virtual testifier should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
81 Thank you. Today we have a presentation on the operations and costs of the bureau of emergency management and the police bureau, and introduce a resolution to direct the city attorney's office to seek required approvals related to the settlement agreement with the united states department of justice. The clerk, please read the first item.
82 Item one. Overview of bureau of emergency management and police bureau operations and cost.
83 You may proceed. Thank you.
84 Well, thank you, counselor. Good afternoon. Councilors. For the record, my name is mike myers. I'm the deputy city administrator for the public safety service area for the city of Portland. Two weeks ago, we heard from director bob cozzie with the bureau of emergency communications and stephanie howard with the community safety unit and her team with the office of prevention and ceasefire. This afternoon, you're going to hear from the Portland police bureau and their director, police chief bob day, and the director of Portland bureau of emergency management, shad ahmed. We'll start with director shad ahmed. Welcome. And I'll turn it over to you.
85 Good afternoon. Councilors. I'm shad ahmed, director of Portland bureau of emergency management. You'll hear from several members of the team today who introduced themselves individually as they come up. We are seeing some of our time to pb, so we'll just dive right into content and go to the next slide. Really quick introduction to pbem. We have two sources of revenue and expenses on the city side. We're funded with general fund discretionary and general fund overhead dollars to support emergency management programing for the city services and for our community on the regional disaster preparedness organization, or rtpo side. We're funded by locally contributed funds and federal grant dollars to support regional frameworks serving five counties, special districts and other jurisdictions, as well as to distribute homeland security funds for regional response equipment for rpo. We serve as a host agency, but we don't have control over the programing or spending, so we're just going to focus today on the pbem side of things. Next slide. Pbem is budgeted at $4.97 million, probably among the smallest bureaus that you'll hear from our budget structure. As you see before you here on this slide, doesn't really reflect the reality that we have right now for many reasons. We've had a substantial change in our mission, increase in the frequency of emergencies and evolving expectations of our bureau to align with national standards. Additionally, we have cuts that have been taken over the last couple of years that are such that we no longer have personnel that are dedicated to singular functions. So everyone supports everything all the time. And it's hard to parse out individual programs with those ftes. And lastly, we're no longer able to sustain critical day to day, or what we call blue sky day functions like planning. And we're forced to kind of choose which fires we're going to put out by allocating the dollars that we can from wherever we can find them in our budget. And we'll come back to that in just a minute. On the pbem side, on the next slide, we're about 50% of our budget is personnel. About 25% goes towards city overhead services, internal services, and another 5,025% goes towards contract supplies and things of that nature. As you can see also on this slide, for regular filled ftes from 24 to 25, we went down from 15 to 11. And if you include the vacancies, that's from 17 to 15. On the next slide, this chart shows a recent trend we've experienced where we see increases in the overall expenses. That's both city internal charges as well as external supplies and a reduction in the amount of general fund that we've seen to added to cover those. As a small bureau, that generally means we have to make larger fte cuts than what is required of other bureaus simply because we can't absorb non personnel cuts into our supplies and services line. In 2025, you can see is showing an even larger disparity that we'll have to account for. I'll turn it over to our chief resilience officer, richard norell.
86 Good afternoon. I'm richard narwhal, chief resilience officer at pbem. I've been with the bureau for about six years. What? You next? Yeah. As the previous slide, as what you see in front of you is an example of skyrocketing, skyrocketing internal charges. The rent increase we have seen is about $100,000 for this year, which is disproportionate compared to other bureaus as a percentage. On the next slide, you will see why that matters. Next slide. This this slide highlights sample operating costs associated with the emergency operation center, excluding regular salaries, but including overtime that we incur. While the costs are relatively low considering the scale and complexity of these incidents, we often have far reaching positive impact at very low cost. You can now see why an amount of $100,000 rent increase can be limiting to us in effectively managing large scale emergencies across the city. Next slide. Emergency management is a continuous everyday function. However, you may only see our work when we are activated for incidents that are listed on this slide. On the slide deck, you see some of the several complex incidents that we have responded to in past two years. These are successful eoc emergency operation center activations for incidents and events ranging from no notice events like k-mart fire debris response to a slow burn event like camp creek fire response that threatened the city's water supply. Pbem also conducted city wide and regional exercises for cascadia subduction zone earthquake and last year's presidential election. For these events, pbem led the city in collaborating with several internal, internal, and external partners and stakeholders, which included over 40 city, regional, county, state, and federal and private sector agencies. Please note, what you see in front of you does not does not include any routine events like flood and wind storm risk that in the city over the past few days that we all experience. Next slide please. As director emmett mentioned, our staff count reducing. With our limited staff, we have seen a diminished capability compared to when compared to emergency management accreditation program imap national professional standards. These are these are emergency management standards. Based on these standards. Several programs programs are critically at risk. Key examples of these programs include planning with one. With our one remaining planner up for a cut next year, we will have zero in-house planning capabilities left. This includes mitigation planning, evacuation planning and contingency planning. A similar, similarly alert and warning. While we can handle routine alerts such as low complexity fire or police activity in partnership with boec, our ability to issue timely and effective public warning during our non routine incidents such as impact to cei hub or urban wildfire as was seen in maui and la is at risk. Proactive common operating picture or in term watch command. Cities of similar size across the country have established consistent methods of sharing common operating picture with leadership in real time. This is currently handled informally by pbem leadership, who sends these updates to city leaders via email. Similarly, we have duty officer program, which we are operating with minimal staffing to maintain a 24 seven coverage for threat and hazard monitoring, putting significant significant strain on existing staff and jeopardizing program sustainability long term. Further staff reduction will severely impact our ability to meet these essential functions, maintain accreditation standards for planning and implementing program like watch command that are common in cities of similar size. For next slide, I'll pass it to my colleague jeremy vancuren.
87 Thank you richard. Good afternoon. I'm jeremy van buren, pbem community preparedness manager. Our Portland neighborhood emergency teams called Portland net, is a success story. We would like to highlight and net. We train portlanders how to respond safely and effectively in their communities after a catastrophic disaster. Net volunteers also conduct community engagement around disaster preparedness. Right now, we have 1450 volunteers. By comparison, new york city, a city that is 13 times the size of Portland, recently reported they have 741 active volunteers. So we have one of the most active and largest programs of its kind in the united states. Nets are organized in 84 Portland neighborhoods. The heat map indicates where we have the most members. We also manage one of the only spanish language volunteer disaster response teams in the country called unidos. Next slide please. Nets log an average of 31,000 volunteer hours each year in Oregon, the value of a volunteer hour is set at $32.37. At that rate, the return of investment from net to the city of Portland is approximately $1 million a year. Portland net is a program of public engagement, but nets are also a key part of pbm's response efforts. In fact, just yesterday evening, nets deployed during the storm to assist firefighters with downed power lines. Their work during COVID 19 is another example. From 2020 to the end of 2021, net volunteers logged over 20,000 hours supporting their communities through the pandemic. Right now, we have almost 3000 net applicants. These are portlanders who are waiting in line to get net trained and become members. Next slide please. Pbem is also networking with community based organizations and faith based institutions. These cbos are critical civic infrastructure, delivering social services to portland's most vulnerable residents. Their role is crucial in the aftermath of a disaster. And yet, according to a 2018 Portland state university study, 50% of all of oregon's nonprofits are not prepared at all for a catastrophic disaster. This is where our code comes in. Code stands for community organizations active in disaster. We collaborate with these community organizations to prepare them and the people they serve for major emergencies and disasters. We provide response training to their staff and help them plan through continuing their operations after a disaster. And our hope is to continue expanding the code that concludes pbem slides. And so with that, we'll go ahead and turn it over to Portland police bureau. Thank you.
88 Actually, can I quickly ask a question? Could you just elaborate a little bit on on the pbem capabilities compared to map standard? One of the things that you have as critical is alert and warning. So if you could just take a minute to talk about, what would it take for us to be up to immaf standard on alerts and warnings.
89 Yeah, I can I can take lead on that. And please chime in if I miss something. So councilor Novick the short answer would be more people. City currently lacks a program that allows for proactive monitoring of threats and hazards, and aid in quick response for notice events such as la fire. These are quick events. We. There are plans in place, but proactive monitoring is missing. A program like this will require an fd count of at least five people, in addition to a dedicated fft to do alert and warning, strategic planning, policy management, data management and training and exercise on alert warning. We don't have that right now. The duty the duty officer program, the 24 over seven coverage program that we have in place is reactive, so we are alerted. We are not proactively monitoring hazards all the time. Everyone at pbem wear multiple hats. A person are one of our colleague who is responsible for warning right now has four key programs in her portfolio in past. To just give you an example, these four programs were distributed among three different individuals. And so there's a lot that we can do with increased fte count to boost our capability to do that. And I think that's what we would need more training and strategic planning on a blue sky, clear sky day when there are no emergencies happening would boost would help us boost our capability. More training to folks outside the bureau and help in getting them trained, and anything else that I might have missed.
90 No, I think I think what it comes down to is just we're doing the best that we can with the efforts that we do have. So if you think about it, the as richard said, the 24 over seven program we have is on call. That means if a fire happens at, you know, maybe 10:00 in the morning, we might be able to get something out the door in a decent amount of time. But to truly be 3:00, there's a fire. We need to let everyone know. We need to have someone who is up and actually working at that time. So we don't have that right now.
91 Thank you.
92 Can I actually ask one question before you go? Sorry. And this is a it's a it can be something that you follow up with us on later. Which is the slide that was just on screen. Could you show us what that would have looked like three years ago before we started having these cut budgets? And I imagine there would be some greens and yellows on here. And I would love to know, because you've taken cuts for a few years now and would love to know what it would have looked like then.
93 Absolutely. Yeah. We can get back to you on that. That was before I was here. But if you have any off the cuff comments, I'll ask.
94 We can we'll yeah.
Procedural episode · turns 95–103
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95 I'll just.
96 I can give a quick example of, for example, contingency planning, resilience planning. And so planning team was four folks and now it's, it's just me and one colleague who's position is up for cut last year. So we can take that into account and give you and present something to you later today.
97 Thank you. And I'll also ask for some info on continuity of operations planning as well. I'll follow up. Thank you.
98 Sounds good, counselor Zimmerman.
99 Thanks, gentlemen. You have on this. I'm going to go out of order because we're on this slide. The severe weather shelter support. So I'm curious why we have that as a as obviously a critical, necessary thing. You've identified it on your slide. You said we're at risk, which is at risk means second from the lowest. And yet the county's role in emergency management is mass sheltering. So I'm just curious why this has risen up to be on our list as one of our duties.
100 That's a fair, fair question.
101 Councilor try to be fair.
102 I think where we are right now is we're in a position where we know that the severe weather shelter program isn't quite where we'd like it to be. We're working with the mayor's obviously goals to have that kind of squared away for the next season. So even though you're very right in terms of you are familiar, I know with emergency support functions and where that falls, we don't own a city agency that has what we call esf six mass care and shelter as the primary role. We do work with the county, and we've elevated it to this slide just to show where we are with everything that we're currently engaged in. That doesn't mean that in the future, there's a different model that we work towards.
103 Okay. Thanks. Just for the record on this one, I think you guys are doing better than what you're giving yourself credit here for. I'm actually right now in the imap standards because I, I'm going to go along with this with you as well. So with respect to what is the standard, I'm curious. I really appreciate, chad, that you started with that. You're not really the money keeper, right? You've got the small group here and you're a coordinating function, right? In so many ways. And I think that the grand public and a lot of city officials forget that emergency managers don't prevent emergencies, and you don't own almost everything that it is that you use to mitigate those emergencies later on. So what are we requiring of bureaus when it comes to down trace certifications for nims and ics? At what level are we trying to achieve training in bureaus and not just fire and not just police, but our other bureaus who will contribute to an incident management team?
104 Yeah, that's also a great question. And something so this is kind of a select few programs that you see on the slide. There's also a credentialing program that we have zero bandwidth to pursue at the moment. In the past couple of years, we've tried to put things together to do some trainings. We've offered trainings, we've encouraged trainings. So we have folks across the city that have taken us up on those voluntarily in the past. We'd love to get to a program where we have a citywide incident management team that's fully credentialed. We know that police and fire are colleagues over. There are kind of building something within their bureaus as well. So we'd love to see that expanded citywide. That's something that hasn't even come up on this chart, just because we're not able to spend bandwidth on it.
105 Sure. Thanks. I'll keep a look for that in the budget. And I think that a if not you, then what it would cost to contract out would also be an important, helpful point when we get to that point. I am curious, you know, oftentimes when we have an emergency and actually we just experienced it where we had multiple public works bureaus putting out multiple messages, I find that ridiculous, frankly, meaning that I can only imagine trying to be an incident commander and having to have seven different twitter voices to put out there. Right. I think that's bizarre. And I think it's uniquely a Portland thing. I am expecting or I guess I'm I guess here's what I'm asking. Are you going to contribute your professional advice to the city administration team as they look at the reconsolidation of this city and how we speak to our public with one true voice, with the communications professionals that haven't been right sized since this transition in government. Are you going to or have you been asked to help craft that more towards a singular voice for Portland? And I recognize a couple of bureaus have a deep need to always have a voice, a communications voice in. But I find it strange in how we communicate with the public in Portland.
106 Yeah. Councilor. Absolutely. It is something that is not only on the radar. We're thinking about ways where we can move towards that one voice. I can share with you that even on the departing days under mayor wheeler, we had this conversation with the city's executive leadership and the leadership team where, you know, the city administrator and the mayor both said, we need to move towards that very, you know, as quickly as possible, because portlanders cannot be expected, as you shared, to go to seven different channels to figure out what's happening during a singular event. So we have we have made. We've taken steps towards that. We have a joint information center that is continually getting improved and strengthened. Every time we are engaged in emergency response, but we do devolve down to the lowest common denominator and communicate out through those separate channels ultimately. So we've seen some improvements. We're continuing to engage in that conversation with laura.
107 I really appreciate that. You said we devolve to the lowest common denominator, which is important about muscle memory. Meaning we're here talking about about emergency management. However, our day in and day out practices of having a PBOT twitter, a police twitter, a fire, twitter, water, twitter, a bts twitter. This is ridiculous insofar as when we are in crisis, you always go to the move, you know, and I think that this is important for us to take back, because when we don't have time to talk about what is next, which is the time when you rise up into the chair, we shouldn't be reverting back to muscle memory. That is bad muscle memory. So I really appreciate that you said we devolve to the lowest common denominator. And then last question, just in terms of regional, regional exercises, when and I mean and I'm not talking us and Gresham and I'm not talking us in Multnomah county, but but on the fringes of when I look at our Portland map. So maybe that, you know, it's great that we have 1400 net volunteers. I'm just thinking about those areas where we're having to bring in Clackamas county. Marion county, Washington county, those places where we would work regionally. How often do we engage in that kind of training?
108 Exercise fairly regularly. And that's actually something as a benefit of hosting the regional disaster preparedness organization and our participation in that program. So even today, I believe chris carey was our preparedness and response manager. Sitting back here, came here from Clackamas county working on an exercise with them. So it is fairly regular that we do that.
109 That's good news. Thank you. That's all my questions, chair.
110 Thank you.
111 Thank you very much.
112 John. Thanks.
113 I saw how quick you tried to move out of the way there. Shelby. Good afternoon. Chairs. Canal and Novick, fellow councilors. I'm bob day. I'm the chief of police for the police bureau. And I'll allow chief jovic to introduce himself here in a minute. We're going to tag team this presentation. Appreciate the opportunity to provide the overview today. Also grateful for a phone call I had this morning with councilor Kanal. We talked a little bit about the best way to get you folks the information you need. And there's been a series of requests, including comments that I made last Wednesday, things that we would bring back to this committee. So today's presentation is going to be pretty high level. I anticipate that we'll probably miss some things and have to come back and do some cleanup, but hopefully it will be a good starting point and we'll be able to get you the information that you need for not only your committee, but to support the rest of the council. I really see this committee as an opportunity to, you know, really be able to have some of the more candid discussions as we move forward, whether they be budget related, staffing related or personnel related, etc. So I'm really looking to each of you to help guide me and guide the bureau in that and understanding that we have a responsibility to show up in that case. And you don't have a slide on this because it's literally just been in the last 24 hours. But I did want to touch on the red flag law. We mentioned last week that we'd get some information on that. So I want to introduce himself and give you a heads up on that, and then we'll go into the presentation and then certainly the q and.
114 Good afternoon everyone. Chris jovic deputy chief. So there was a couple a couple questions kind of wrapped in the one question that you had about the red flag law. One, why do other places do it better? And I had the opportunity to reach out to the bend chief, who was deschutes county, has issued the most out of any county in the state of Oregon. And I also had a chance to discuss the matter with our behavioral health unit, who takes the lead on all of our mental health training? What it comes down to internally comes down to a training issue, and it comes down to a capacity issue. We have everybody that's exit certified, which is over 100 officers trained up on this law. Right? We have everybody that's in the behavioral health unit trained up on this law. What we don't have is our general street officers trained up on this law. And there's some process pieces that really necessitate more capacity in b.h.u to take these on the process of getting an erpo requires somebody to sign an affidavit and testify to that affidavit on the same day. Right. We work 24 hours a day. We need to be able to have somebody that is dedicated to hand off this affidavit to, so they can be the defiant and testify to get the ball rolling. Right. It's incredibly difficult if that person is a street officer working afternoon shift, find somebody at midnight and then has to stay through the entire day to see that through. It's just it's not cost effective. It's not good for our employees. It's just it's a it's a bad process. So ultimately we have five co-responder units in b.h.u. It would be completely appropriate to increase that, to increase the capacity to serve more, not to serve more of these, but to apply for more of these. As far as bend is concerned, ben did just that. They formed a co-responder unit that was primarily dedicated just to erpo. Right. So everybody that they contacted that fell within the parameters of being able to apply for erpo. They contacted these two teams, and these two teams sought all the way through the process. So they got very, very good at it to the point of almost having not necessarily a template, but they were so familiar with the process that it became ingrained. And once you practice something you can get through it, it becomes easier and, you know, less challenging. So that being said, our b.h.u is actually started and started well before this time, developing curriculum for the entire bureau. Right. And that that consists of video training and an in-service training to get everybody up to speed. Now, again, it's a daunting process for a person that doesn't use it all the time. So those people are still are subject matter experts to get it done. But creating that that awareness piece throughout our patrol officers will definitely help get applications in.
115 Thank you. I appreciate that and want to give you time to get on to the main presentation, but I appreciate that response. We'll follow up.
116 Okay. Thank you. Go ahead. First slide please. Thank you. Just quickly a little bit of the organizational structure. We have three branches in the organization broken down. And throughout the history of the bureau we've had varied between 3 and 4 branches. Currently these branches are held by sworn positions. We have historically had civilians. And some of these high executive level positions as well, primarily around the services branch. Next slide. We don't refer to the office of the chief of police as a branch, but essentially it operates as such. And the folks, all those folks ultimately report to me, you know, either through the deputy chief, the blue boxes report directly to me. So professional standards, office of inspector general, equity, inclusion, chief of staff, comms, cio, criminal intelligence unit. They all report directly to me and then the deputy chief as well. Obviously, it's a real collaborative effort in terms of, you know, communication. But I do think we are changing some of our thinking around the branch office of the chief of police. And is that the best model? There's some real benefits to reporting to the boss, and there's also some real drawbacks in terms of time and ability to really invest in those. So we're looking at some different potential organizational structures down the road. Next slide please. As we talk about the different branches. And I'm sure you're familiar with it. And we can provide you an overlay. But with you have the three precincts. We've had as many as five precincts. There's three precinct model we've now had for the last several years. And the downside going to this new form of government is the precincts don't line up with the districts. And so, for example, north precinct has districts one, two and three that it touches. So we're going to have to find some ways hopefully to better support each of you and your districts. And so you're not getting sort of shuffled around as to who to talk to, neighborhood response teams, public safety support specialists are assigned in each precinct, and the direction has been given, and we've been working on it prior to last week. But to rectify some of the challenges we identified last Wednesday with ps three, specifically ownership being placed on the precinct commanders to really begin to maximize that resource and understand it better. The neighborhood response teams excuse me. We started a program last year where at least one, at least one day a month, sometimes more. We combine all three teams and we will go into a precinct to address a problem that that precinct has. So that's maximizing our resources, really trying to stay out of a siloed response, even though that each precinct serves a different constituency, different needs, different assets. Next slide please. This gives you kind of a high level overview. We talk about calls for service as well as self-initiated calls. This also is a slide in response to councilor Novick questions around police calls priorities and the ranking of them. I'm going to excuse me, excuse me, ask dc jovic to just walk through these quickly so you have an overview. I think they'll probably be some q and a on this when we get to the end. Also, I've mentioned the director cozzie who's present that we may punt to him on some of these if we need a little bit more detail. And this also ties into the call study that was mentioned last week in the previous hearing. So chris, do you want to just take them through those real quick.
117 Yeah. These are these are fairly self explanatory. And you folks can read them as we go. Obviously priority one top priority that we would that we have generally priority one through three get the same response. They're just categorized different. So they're still getting two officers or two cars dispatched or two officers dispatched immediately going typically lights and sirens to get to those calls occurring, imminent danger to life. Obviously somebody that's that's in great peril, potential threat to a person. So an assault in progress, a disturbance that we might not know of if weapons are involved. Three potential threat to property. So these are, you know, in-progress property crimes. Somebody is actively getting their car stolen. Somebody is having their business burglarized right now, expedited response. So these are kind of and I'll I'll phone a friend here if I if I get this wrong, but not quite to the level of a of an emergency response. But we need to get there and get things handled, you know, in a in a more expedited manner than just a routine response. But they don't have the danger potential as the top three escalation priority is pretty simple. So you have priority six and seven every 30 minutes. Those get bumped up to the next priority level and they they top out at five. So nothing gets dispatched at a priority five. But sevens after an hour will turn into a56 after 30 minutes will turn into a five. Does that make sense? And pretty nines. I'm going to punt to our friends at dispatch.
118 And we can bring them up during the q&a. If you want to talk about priority nines, and one of the things around call response that when we talk about one, two and three is priority calls. And currently I think the data shows we're about 19 minutes to a priority call that includes all three of those. And one of the things we're working through is sergeants have discretion to change and lower. So boec may assign a call at a two or a three. And it comes out and the sergeants look at it or they gain information, and then they may lower that call. But it came out as a 2 or 3. And so sometimes that impacts the accuracy of our response times to priority calls to the number one life safety. About 4 or 5 months ago or three months ago when I testified before council, we were about eight minutes roughly to get to the to the highest possible threat level call.
119 And it should be noted, those when those calls are prioritized, when they get cleared, we don't lower them to a to a lower priority to a question. Commissioner Novick asked. So if we show up and it's a reported stabbing, if there's not a stabbing, we don't lower it to a priority for. Right. It's still a stabbing. The call was cleared.
120 I generally want to hold the questions till the end, but I do have to say that I looked at sort of the supplemental material that you sent over, and there is thousands and thousands of level twos, and it appeared that every single traffic stop is listed as a level two. So maybe that's a boec thing, but it's kind of confusing because what the list, the things that are listed in the supplemental materials, a lot of them seem a lot lower threat than the examples you listed here.
121 Yeah, correct. I think that's an accurate assumption that once again, you know, sort of we're rolling into the call study to really be able to reflect, accurately reflect what we're doing. And I'm going to speculate. And when we get into the q&a, maybe director cozzie or his team can speak to it. My opinion is with characterizing traffic stops. For example, is category two is because there is, you know, the potential of risk there. That's substantial. We've seen that on, you know, stops throughout history. But we can all of that is open for discussion because I want us to be transparent and accurate in what we're doing and how we're prioritizing, how we're measuring that. Next slide, please. The investigations branch is seeing some restructuring over the years. Currently there's three primary divisions that are in it detectives and who's major crimes homicides etc. One of the things we did a couple of years ago is we brought the family services unit underneath the detectives branch. Excuse me, the detective division, that used to be a standalone division. I'm considering whether or not we need to go back. And what are the benefits or the costs associated with it? Or family services unit handles domestic violence, child abuse, elder abuse. Those kind of cases. Then our specialized resources division is kind of a catch all for many of those specialty units that exist in the organization. And of course, our property evidence division, which processes thousands of pieces of property a year. Next slide please. And our services or community engagement grant branch, led by chief lavelle, has what we sometimes refer to as a lot of the back of house or the business side of things. And, you know, we have expanded our community engagement efforts a little bit specifically, as well as our personnel division. Records division has seen an increased need. All of these are being impacted by body worn cameras and the advent of technology and public records and so forth. Next slide please. So this slide breaks down our staffing. You know, our total sworn staffing currently sits at 7791. You can see 543 of those are officers. And we broke out there in terms of where officers are assigned, you know officers that are training officers, non patrol officers leave of service. So if you notice at the bottom of the slide, 302 officers are assigned to the precincts themselves. If we go to the next slide. So this tells you where some of the non patrol officers are filling roles throughout the organization. So it's sometimes a little bit confusing. We say well we have 543 police officers. How come they're not all out there taking police calls. Well as we noticed in the previous slide, you know, 90 of them are in training. That's an 18 month program, of which almost six months of that is spent in an academy. We are trying to make some adjustments to get people out a little bit quicker, but because of field training, evaluation, program requirements, you know, they're not allowed to work on their own pretty extensively until the end of their probationary period. So the benefit of having a lot of hiring is we can say we've got a lot of cops in the system. The downside is we don't see the benefit of them. The officers we hired last week, we really aren't going to see the benefit of the impact of their service until the end of middle of next year, probably June of next year, most realistically. So this is where we have officers. And you'll see there's a significant number in the specialized resources division that I just referred to a little bit ago, because that's kind of the there's a big catch all out there for folks. And then a few in our family services. Et cetera. Next slide please. So this just gives you an idea of the other ranks. You know we talk about total number of sworn. And when we talk about having 791 sworn members, that's from my position all the way down to the ten we hired last week. So this just gives you an overview. And then if you go to the next slide, please kind of gives you an idea of where some of the vacancies lie. Obviously the majority of the vacancies lie in the sworn rank. Now you'll notice it says you know officer rank 62 vacancies. Other ranks 28 vacancies. As we discussed last Wednesday, everything starts at the officer level and feeds its way up from that. So, you know, even though we say we're short 62 officer positions, we're really short 90 officer positions because anybody we hire, we're going to use that to offset the promotion that we make into a sergeant or detective rank or whatever that might be. So that's why we'll we'll regularly refer to the importance of hiring so that we can fill those so that we can continue to feed the pipeline all the way through. And then you'll notice we're fully staffed with our support specialists, and we've done a pretty good job over the last few years with our professional staff and recruitment and hiring, retaining a lot of these vacancies right now apply in our records division, which we've increased our staffing and records division because of body worn cameras and public records requests. It's a difficult job to fill and to keep maintain. I think jen holly, the manager there, has done a fantastic job, but we've been really intentional about trying to support our professional staff. And I'm pleased with, you know, we do have some vacancies, but I think we've done a pretty good job keeping those up to speed. Next slide please. I was asked one of the questions over the last couple of weeks was just a little bit more detail about investigations. Our detective division. There's been some restructuring there as well. You can see that, you know, we've homicide unit major crimes. We used to have a robbery unit that's now under major crimes. We have an assault unit that's under major crimes. We've condensed a little bit our family services. We have, you know, heavy emphasis of investigations out there for our special victims unit, which I mentioned is domestic violence. And then we have some detectives that are assigned to the enhanced community safety team and narcotics team, some that are on, for example, the marshals task force, which is a fugitive task force. So they're kind of spread out. Currently, our detective numbers are this this shows not all of them, but there's 80 I believe there's 81, if I'm not mistaken, or 82 total. 50 that are in the detective division, 19 out of family services. And then the others are assigned to kind of some, some other outside programs. Next slide please. You know, big picture on the budget, I believe one of the requests, and I think this is where we're going to have to come back and give you a little more detail is, you know, really diving down into the specific units. It wasn't clear to me how and which units. Those should be. The police bureau, as we're well aware, is a complicated system with a lot of different moving parts. And so I'm happy to get you specifics. If you want to know what you know. What does it cost to run eastnor. What does it cost to run, you know, the human trafficking unit. But it wasn't clear to me going into this what exactly that was and the benefit of that. But I am happy to share those numbers and can and can pull those numbers. This is just an overall high level, high level view of the of the personnel costs. I think there's one more slide if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. So this gives you a little bit of an idea by the branch comparison over the last five years. And, you know, a lot of different factors that we can, you know, kind of speculate and talk about in terms of what what's moving some of those numbers in regards to costs. I've emphasized the council before, and I will continue that. I'm very open to the discussion around budget, and I want to be fiscally responsible with the city's money and the taxpayers money. I think that's absolutely critical for us in this role, and certainly recognize the impact that the public safety budget has on the general fund. So I want to be sensitive to that. But I'm hoping through this. Q and a time on, not only regarding this, but maybe, you know, we can brainstorm a little bit about how to make sure we're getting you the information you need, not just for these meetings, but certainly in the intermediary. We can be sending stuff to you to kind of get you up to speed. Thank you.
122 I don't see anybody in the queue. Counselors, you have questions? Oh, sorry. Counselor Smith.
123 Thank you. Chair. Thank you, chief, for coming before us today. I wasn't quite clear the numbers that you had on vacancies. It was a lot bigger number than I thought because you had 90 at one place. You had 60 at another. I thought it was 133 in total.
124 So we.
125 Have to clarify that for me, please.
126 Yeah. So we have a total as this. We have a total of 90 vacancies. So we have we're authorized 881. And we currently have. Excuse me.
127 81 non-sworn.
128 Oh. And then then of course. Yeah that's right. That's a good catch. So the 90 sworn and then the 36 non-sworn. That's what puts us at 128 or 27 or whatever. Total vacancies. Because the total vacancies for the bureau includes the sworn and the non sworn. There it is right there 90 total vacancies. If you add officer rank and other ranks that comes to 90. So 90 sworn vacancies and 36 professional staff puts us at 126 total vacancies for the bureau.
129 So you don't consider the officer ranks and other ranks as part of your vacant ftes?
130 Yes. I mean, I'm grouping them all together simply because it has to start. It has to start with the officers. So I'm just sort of putting everything into the sworn ranks and saying everything starts with a patrol officer. But those other, other ranks where it says 28 vacancies, that includes, I think, about 18 sergeants, 4 or 5 lieutenants, you know, a couple other three detectives and so forth.
131 Okay, okay, I see, I see you added the 62 and the 28 together.
132 Yeah. There you go. Okay. Thank you.
133 Councilor Morillo.
134 Thanks for pulling that up.
135 Thank you. Chair. Thank you both for being here today. It's good to see you again. I was wondering if at some later date. I know you won't be able to pull this up. Now, if you could give us a breakdown of who is up for retirement or promotion in comparison to the staffing chart that you just showed, just to see how many of those positions are going to actually move and not exist as officers that are currently patrolling or doing other work. Thank you.
136 Okay, so to be clear, and I appreciate the question because we wrestle with this all the time. And I know that I was just briefed this morning that, you know, we anticipate in 2026 having about 150 members eligible for retirement. So specific to your question, retirement versus promotion. Are we looking at that number that I just mentioned? Do you want a little bit more detail about kind of the number of people we anticipate being eligible for retirement and the, you know, current 6 to 8, you know, nine, 12, 18 months or as it relates to promotion in you also want to maybe broken down by rank. So we know who those people might be and where those spots might end up being and sort of, kind of anticipate that way. Is that helpful?
137 Yeah, I think that'd be super helpful. I think just having a clear breakdown, because you were mentioning that some folks are going to retire, some folks are going to be promoted, which means they're not going to be on patrol anymore. So if I you know, I know there's an overall list of who's going to retire, but you might not know who exactly is choosing to leave and when. But if there's any more details that we can get on that. So we have a more concrete number on how many officers will actually have on hand versus the vacancies. That would be super.
138 I see okay I see yeah. Yeah. And that makes sense. Thank you. And that will be fluctuating as we go because as we have people complete probation, they enter into the system to be able to support those retirements and promotions. So for example, right now we're people that are completing probation between now and June. We are simply putting them into the operations branch, into patrol. We're not doing any promotions. Even though we have vacancies. We'll have another group that will complete probation in the fall, and that's where we'll draw from to promote into some sergeant ranks. So it'll kind of be a wash. We're building up a little bit. And then, you know, it's kind of alternate, but I get where you're going. Thank you.
139 We also have a sergeant promotion process that starting in may. So we don't have an active promotion list to pull from at this point. So it's very fluid as the year goes on.
140 Councilor Kanal thank you both for being here. I have a couple questions. The first relates to your first point about the red flag process. And if it's possible, you mentioned that that a lot of the training related to that is in the asset side. Is it possible for that to be in the regular cit training that all is that is that what you were referring to or.
141 No, it will be above and beyond that curriculum. It will be a separate block of training, it sounds like.
142 Okay. And would it be similarly applied to all. Would everybody go through it?
143 Yes. This is the training that's being produced now is going out to the entire membership.
144 Got it. All right. Thank you for clarifying that. Secondly, can you speak a little bit more to the non-departmental side? You have it in a couple of the charts on the personnel costs.
145 Can you pull up that slide from.
146 Cbo proposal.
147 Was that.
148 Right for this one.
149 Oh, what can we call from a friend and ask Ryan to come up from csd to help us out here a little bit?
150 You may.
151 Thank you.
152 Slide. Which slide is that?
153 I think it'd be helpful to have the slides back up. What we're talking about.
154 Yeah.
155 We got it. We're getting there. Okay, sure. Great. Well good afternoon. My name is Ryan zubieta. I work as a budget lead for Portland police within the public safety service area. A lot of those non-departmental costs are tied to the way police tracks its overtime through use of these internal orders. So usually if, say, there's a unit that's performing work outside of its home base of operations, those codes could be allocated to a couple cost centers like patrol operations, overhead, investigations overhead. And it's sort of a neutral bucket that's not tied to a specific unit to show somebody worked outside of their normal scope of operations.
156 One of the things we're learning, councilor, and I think it will become more apparent unfortunately, but hopefully it'll get us in a better spot with these, with your questions for us, is the tracking piece and just really being able to show off? No doubt that the work is being done. I have confidence in that, but our ability to show our work is a weakness of the police bureau in terms of that attention to detail. And I think, you know, this format, these conversations are going to challenge us to, to get better in that.
157 Thank you. And thank you, Ryan. Other question I had, and it's okay if you need to kick this to a follow up. We're about I think we followed up with two written questions, one about the cost of implementing the pccep recommended contact survey program from October 2023, and the other on the body worn camera program, which is both its budget, but also how it's, you know, we're in this context of a of a lawsuit with the federal government trying to understand what percentage of those costs are. We're reliant on the federal government for right now with relation to the body worn camera program, but also just some general insight would be helpful.
158 And I have some info on on the body worn camera. I'll take that first. Although in full disclosure, I'm really just quoting Ryan, who I talked to about it earlier today, so thank you for that. But you know we've 2024, we budgeted 800,000 from the general fund. But the program costs about $2.2 million. And the difference was offset because there was some one time funding that was given about 2.65 million. That was given around implementation. I have spoken with the team. Doesn't appear like we're going to be purchasing a lot of new equipment. We're looking at some specific to traffic because of weather and things like that for our motor officers. But but we are going to be looking at this ongoing $2.2 million cost. And we and the $1.35 million burn grant covered quite a bit of that for us. But with the certainty of that going forward, yes, we are going to need to look for a way to absorb that potential, absorb that 1.3 million. How did I do?
159 Sounds about right. All right.
160 So right now it's about 0.85 million that's coming from non burn grant sources towards the ongoing cost.
161 About 800,000 is in the general fund or non burn grant. Yes. Yeah. That's in regards to the. What was the other. The contact the contact survey. Yeah. So stephanie howard is working with us on that. I think it'll be going out to RFP soon. I've had conversations with some of the vendors about it and some of the conferences I've been at. I think it's long overdue, really important, important tool that we should be implementing. And my conversations with chiefs around the country, they're really appreciating having that resource. So I know that stephanie is working on that, and we're supplying her with the names and contacts of people that we're dealing with. Try and have that out for RFP sooner than later so we can get some numbers, see what we're able to do.
162 Thank you.
163 Counselor Zimmerman.
164 I'll keep my first question related to cameras. Do we have the intent to eventually have patrol based cameras, patrol vehicle based cameras that we've seen in other places?
165 I have not seen that. You know, we had a pilot for years. We kept it forever. It wasn't really a pilot. It just something we kept for a long time. Or we had cameras in patrol cars. I think it's really just a cost and a bandwidth issue. You know, the opportunities in technology are incredible. And of course, the market in law enforcement is high. So there's always something out there to take a look at. But right now we're just focusing on really shoring up our body worn camera policy. Make sure 100%. But I'm certainly open to the conversation.
166 I am encouraging you to stay on the body worn camera mission. I think it's important. I think I'm glad we're finally there. It's been too long, chief. I'm curious, you know. It's hard to hear the 19 minute. Statistic. And so, relative to I have two questions. I think they're interrelated, which is what is the optimal percentage hiring over what you're currently authorized for. So a new authorization level so that you can maintain a staffing level that you think has worked in other agencies of a similar size and a similar. Acreage or square mileage, if you will, for the city of Portland. But then also just in terms of what is your estimation in terms of numbers overall that we would need to get to so that we can have a number to be more proud of for response times?
167 Yeah, I appreciate that. I'm just looking for a document. You could tell I'm kind of old school because I still bring paper to these things. We did a study at.
168 All mine in paper two here, chief. It's okay.
169 We did a study in 2014. Here it is. We did a study in 2014. We hired an outside firm, matrix, and it was one of the most comprehensive staffing studies that the bureau has done. We're really they just took a deep dive into all this. We looked at things, not just response times. We looked at officer wellness. We looked at community engagement. And they came back with some recommendations. And frankly, we were hoping they were going to come back and say, oh, you need 500 more police officers. You know, they didn't do that. They came back and said, oh, you probably need about, you know, 30 or 40 more police officers in some specific areas talked about shift alignments, you know, gave us some, some good feedback. The difference is at that time we had 1143 total fte in the precincts alone. And I mentioned earlier today that, you know, we had 302 in the precincts. The precinct staffing then was 300, and I didn't do the math before. I came in about 371 in the precincts. So they certainly weren't suggesting any kind of reduction. They were encouraging us to build on that a little bit. But we had 371 in the precincts in 2014 when that study was done, and they said we needed a few more total calls in 2013 was including self initiated, was, you know, 199,000, and last year it was 288. So that gives you a ballpark. We've sort of long held to the fact that really to get the numbers where we want them to be, that we estimate we need 400 patrol officers in the precincts, I want to caveat that, you know, that comes with some challenges. Excuse me. Because when you grow, there's other things that grow cars, lockers, equipment, body-worn, camera, etcetera. So but I would estimate right now, conservatively, we need about 100 more officers just in patrol. And that's where, you know, we came up with the staffing projection that I made last year about trying to get to 1050. And we can dig into this more deeply, but that allows us to a couple hundred, and that allows us to get a couple 300 more than where we're at, so we can fill all those vacancies and we can have that, you know, 100 plus in patrol.
170 Okay. Thanks. I think as we. As we wrap our head around that number and then understanding what an over percentage staffing looks like to for the maintenance and then what goals we would set by having an over staffing would be helpful. I want to be a partner for that chief. I I'm making an assumption when I see the. The vacancy numbers, the vacancies that exist above. Officer. My assumption here is that you are making a departmental choice to keep some folks at the patrol level and giving up areas that the organization has identified that this is a key position that should be filled. Sergeant, lieutenant, captain. But you're making a choice to keep it vacant as a way to not rob patrol in order to fill the higher ranks. Is that a safe assumption that I'm making when I see those numbers?
171 There is some to that. It's not 100%. We do have people working out of class, so we will sometimes, you know, we're we're sort of talking out of both sides of our mouth. Right. Because we'll take we'll leave the position vacant, but then we'll take an officer and have them fulfill an acting sergeant role. Right. You know, we do, particularly in the operations branch, have a minimum number of supervisors we need to have on duty at any given time. So that's where we see it. Primarily, there are sergeant positions that are currently vacant that we don't have anybody filling, as well as lieutenant positions. That and there's a need for us in this restructuring to create some new supervisory positions. I know there oftentimes will be criticism of, you know, sort of being quote unquote top heavy. But Portland police bureau, comparatively, is very lean when it comes to supervisory ranks, including even up to the executive branch. And I recently converted a couple of vacant officer positions to create an additional lieutenant job. And I think we need to also be looking at increasing some of our sergeant positions as well for some of the units, but with not being able to fill them anyway, it's not, you know, so it's about.
172 What I want to I guess I want to I'm not I'm not making any sort of accusation about top heavy here. What I'm trying to get at is in terms of if you're a line officer and you've decided you're 5 to 10 years in and you see you see a path, and potentially that path involves stripes or bars that a career path matters. And in when we are when we are short staffed. And you've got to make choices to keep patrol officers. I'm wondering how much that is. Taking away from potential hiring paths and promotion paths for an organization this big, there should be a fairly regular churn, right?
173 And I know, I know, you weren't, you know, being critical of the of the of the number of people in promotions or in promoted ranks. And absolutely it's challenging. Right? There's a window of time people make these decisions. If you're going to go from officer to sergeant, you're going to give up seniority. You're probably going to go to night shift. You're probably going to have Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday off, you know, and typically, you know, where people are at in their personal lives there. Now, they've probably married. They may have kids, you know, they're trying to make some decisions. And we oftentimes there's a window of opportunity for them to make that decision. And then we say, hey, we're going to be on hold. One of the things we implemented last year to try and change that is we have set up a regular testing schedule. So, for example, when I came on board, some of our lists had been active for over three years. And that to me, that's just too long to have people sit on a list, you know, kind of with this hopefulness. And then there's people that are coming into the system that should have an opportunity to compete. So we've gone to a two year cycle with everything. And we've also told the membership, here's when we're going to test. We're going to test for sergeants in the spring of odd years. We're going to test for detectives in the fall of odd years, so people can begin to plan and strategize. And then from an equity standpoint, what we're trying to do and we're not there yet, but my desire is to actually chart that career path for them. If you come into the police bureau today and you say, I want to be a sergeant someday, or I want to be a detective someday, still very reliant upon the old school sort of rabbi system. You know, if somebody takes you under their wing, kind of helps you out. If you're in the in crowd, if you hear this or you hear that, I want to put as much information out there as possible, way ahead of time. You know, here's the books. Here's the things to anticipate. Here's the conferences, here's the things to go to. So when people show up and they go through the testing process, essentially you have a really well qualified pool already to draw from. And so when you're making your decisions, it's not so much based upon how people performed on that day, but more about their body of work. And I think that's going to help us. But this sort of fits and starts and frankly, we had this all laid out last year, and we flip flop detective and sergeant this year because our sergeant vacancies have increased at such a rate. We're now doing sergeants in may and detectives in the fall of this year. But when I told the organization last summer it was going to be the other way around. I hate making changes, but in this particular case, it was critical to make that. But hopefully we're in a good place.
174 Thanks. And then just my last thing I'm just noticing, I want to make sure I'm reading the graph correctly, that it's showing the budget. It looks like the fy 25 budget graph is about a third less than the fy 24, and that is the money we are operating under today.
175 Are we looking at the last 20 to 25 year to date personal cost per branch. Is that right?
176 Branch.
177 It was a bar graph perhaps the next one. Yep. There we go. Next.
178 Yeah that one I think.
179 Did it go?
180 The other direction.
181 That one. So I just you know significant decreases in this year I want to I want to make sure that I'm grasping what contributed to these. Or if this is just a to date number. But this is a significant change from the previous fy. And as we enter into a new budget season, I'm just making sure I understand the gravity of this graph.
182 Yes.
183 Yeah. Fair question. The fy 25 bar is just year to date costs. Yep.
184 Got it. All right. Thanks. That's all. Chair.
185 Yeah. Two.
186 Counselor Smith.
187 Thank you. Chair. Chief, I want to go back to the reports that you identified. You said that you got those numbers in 2013 and 2014. Do you think it's time for us to get another report so that we can accurately account for what we need in, in terms of, of new officers? Because we're I think we're repeating incomplete information that's 11 years old. And I think we need another study.
188 The short answer, yes, I think there is a need for that. The other part of that answer is we're working on that and we may be able to do that internally. It's a major, major lift because as we've already identified in some of our conversations around really being accurate about what the calls for service are, what's the need? You know, we've added new programs since this study was done. I don't know if you want to touch on that. I know there was some reference to ssd maybe working on something. In fact.
189 Our strategic services division is actively working on modeling that that addresses your concern. Quite frankly, it's so early in the process right now. I can't compare it to the to the study that was done in 2013. But you're 100% right there.
190 There's concerns that and I'll tell you, you've heard much of this that you don't need any more. You have enough and you can't fill what you have right now. And so in order for me to have a clear understanding of what is exactly needed in this moment, at this time, with what's going on, how many do we really need? Because when I'm using old data, it's easy for folks to try to talk me down from from saying that we need to maintain the current 133 and we actually need a few hundred more. If I'm using old data.
191 I appreciate that, counselor, and thank you for thinking further out. My encouragement to you and your conversation with constituents around that argument is, you know, right now we need to be focused on the vacancies we have. And when that statement, which there was some accuracy to that statement historically about not being able to fill the ones we have. So I've been very intentional about not coming back to council and saying, hey, I want 200 more vacancies, right? But I do anticipate over the course of the next 18 months, and this is based upon our current trends. There's certainly no guarantee, but I would anticipate that in 2025, I hope to be able to hire 100 officers. That's the goal. And we see on average of about 3 to 4 separations a month for a variety of reasons retirement terminations, people quit, whatever. So if you do the math, roughly, if we hire 100 cops, we're going to lose 50 this year. So we're going to net 50. That's the goal. So I can sit before you today and say, hey, you know, we need, you know, 200 more officers. But I know this year, if we do well, we're probably going to get about 50 to, you know, maybe 75. The concern I have and the reason that I'm pushing, I'll be pushing in the budget for that is I don't want to get to a ceiling. I don't think the ceiling of 81 is accurate. And I think we can articulate that whether we use old numbers or new numbers, which is to your point about getting better numbers. But my concern is that if we do have success going into 26 and suddenly, you know, in, in the 2526 budget cycle, maybe March or April of next year, we've had an exceptional recruitment time period. And now all of a sudden, you know, I'm at 881, but I have 150 that are in training that don't count towards that. Bottom line. We're still we're still dependent upon, you know, the excessive funding and overtime and other costs to do the day to day. So I'm with you. I think you're right. We do need to have a better look at it and better understanding what's the 3 to 5 year in the immediate. I just want to get these these 100.
192 I do understand. And also you need to add that 150 that's supposed to be eligible for retirement next year too. So then we're even steven again.
193 Yeah. Exactly right. You're recognizing that.
194 We had asked and I apologize. We actually have to take up another item in about six minutes. But we'd sent along some questions in advance. They were basically designed to figure out how much time do officers spend on issues of various like severity and urgency, like take us through the nine priority levels of calls and estimate how much time the bureau spends in each level, and then address how much time the bureau spends on self-initiated versus boec initiated calls. And I think it's important for people to have a sense of, you know, if, god forbid, we had to cut police how much unimportant stuff or less important stuff could, could go by the wayside. So I don't think you can do that now, but I would like to be able to present something to the public saying, here's how much time the force spends on issues of varying priority. And I am really concerned about what I see about the priority two calls, because you would think priority two is like a really big deal. But then when you look up at what's included, it includes 21,000 traffic stops, thousands of welfare checks. Et cetera. So you'd sort of, like, get the impression that every track of stop is more important than a vehicle theft in progress, because that's level three. So I would like for you to be able to see something approximating a breakdown of how much time for each level of severity, and in the context of that, divide up the level two priority two calls, because they really aren't one level of severity. Does that make sense?
195 Yeah, absolutely. We've been talking about that. We're working on it. The team was given that assignment, but they couldn't produce that by today. But I think we can have that in the next couple of weeks hopefully. And I think we just keep touching on what's already been raised. And councilor is there's a lot of nuances to this call assignment. And, and, you know, recognizing that, as we said earlier last week, a lot of calls are over by the time we get there, you know, really. And then it's but I also think it really is a customer service conversation for the community to have in terms of expectations of response from their police when they are the victim of a crime, whatever level of that might be. So I'm with you on that.
196 Let's see. Councilor canal or do you take yourself out? Councilor Morillo.
197 Thank you. Chair. Are there any budget people in the room that can answer some questions? I okay, I think something that I'm curious about is that it's my understanding that apart from 2020, the police bureau's budget has only gone up. There was a reallocation of funds back in 2020, and ever since then, the police bureau has received more and more funding, including the fact that it's at a record high. So I'm kind of curious if we could get some sort of analysis about what we're doing with that funding. And, you know, most of our bureaus are facing cuts. It's a really brutal and horrible time. Like, we're we're not having any good discussions right now behind the scenes. And I would just like a comparison of, you know, the past, I would say at least seven years or so to see how much extra funding has been given and what that funding was for and why in a time of record funding, we're struggling to maintain basic services. I guess that's not really a question as more of a request, but I just think we need that long term data because we're talking about things. You know, we're saying this is really drastic. There's no funding, but this is one of the only bureaus that continuously gets more money in a way that no other bureau in the city does.
198 Yes. So there's a pretty like, well documented history, and I'm happy to provide that going back. You know, the seven years of just these cost pressures that outpace the amount the bureau's budget grows, for instance, in these percentages might be a couple points off, you know, the internal materials and services. That budget was increased about just shy of 3% from the current fiscal year into next. But those actual costs increase closer to 12%. Similar to health care benefits. You know, we see about an 8% year over year increase, but the actuals are closer to 24 or 30%. And so even though the bureau's budget continues to increase year over year, these pressures sort of offset the available dollars for things like precinct patrol or overtime.
199 Thank you, I appreciate that. And I know that police have a different health care benefits package than most of our other bureaus because of the line of work that you do. And so that makes sense to me as far as the different costs. But this is a conversation that's happening for all city employees. As far as some of those health care costs, they are going up across the board. So I would love to see a detailed analysis. I think that's something that this committee is really going to need. If we're going to make an informed decisions about any budgets moving forward. And I need those cost comparisons for the past few years and why, you know what that extra funding has been used for and why it's not enough.
200 Absolutely.
201 And I and I do agree, and there has been an increase in the budget, certainly in the last year, and the efforts around crime reduction and the crime reduction plan we shared with you demonstrates the cost associated with some of those mission and crime reduction efforts. So we can get you all of that feedback. Thanks.
202 Thank you very much. Really appreciate your time. And we'll of course be following up.
203 Great. Thank you.
204 Read the next item.
205 Item two direct the city attorney's office to seek required approvals related to the settlement agreement with the united states department of justice and comply with any mandatory collective bargaining obligations for amendments to city code related to the community police oversight board.
206 Councilor Kanal you. I'll give everybody a moment here.
207 I'll try to address this.
208 All right. Thank you. Councilor Novick colleagues, I'm introducing a resolution today which relates to the community board for police accountability, the police oversight board, which was authorized by voters in 2020. Christopher, you could share the slides, please. And the resolution would begin the process. It's got a very long title here of discussing three small changes to city code, related specifically to the work of the nominating committee. I also have requested that city deputy senior deputy city attorney heidi brown be here to help answer questions as well. Next slide please. One more action. Thanks. So a couple of clarifications just for the public, the difference between the community board for police accountability and the nominating committee. The board or cba is the actual police oversight board. It's governed by a lot of different sets of laws. You can see here. And it is also governed by city code. And that's what this resolution would, if adopted, begin a conversation about altering. The nominating committee is a temporary group of 10 or 11, as we'll talk about in a moment, people who review applications from portlanders who want to serve on the board. The first nominating committee is in the process of being appointed and seated. Right now, like everything else, it has to follow federal, state and local law. But its work is primarily defined in city code. Next slide please. Second clarification. Why is this a resolution if it's about a city code. And that's because to change anything about the board in city code, the city has to discuss or bargain with other entities. And eventually after that process, it comes back through the form of an ordinance which would either change city code, the settlement agreement, or both. There's some additional processes on the settlement agreement side. In this particular case. The proposed changes would be discussed by the city attorney's office if the resolution was adopted with the department of justice and the Portland police association, and if those discussions or bargaining processes are successful, there could be an ordinance later on to change city code with this document. Does is effectively have the city commit to a starting position for those discussions. And I want to be clear, this is not a dogmatic thing. This is a we've identified a problem with the help of community input. And there's a starting point of text which will hopefully become a solution through that process. Next slide please. The document would initiate a conversation over three small changes to city code, one creating more clarity around the bias which would preclude a community member from serving on the board. This bias standard is applied by the nominating committee when reviewing applicants, some of whom they'll send on to council for council consideration and appointment. In the event that there's a question over whether or not an appointed member is too biased to serve, the standard is used by council when deciding whether or not to remove someone. To create clarity. The language proposed is derived from Oregon state law for juror bias, a standard which is widely accepted and used. It would also alter the number of community members on the nominating committee from the current law, which says five community members on the initial nominating committee and four on subsequent ones to the inverse, four on the initial nominating committee and five on the subsequent ones. So we'll ensure we'll able to be complying and compliant with our law this year without delaying implementation of the nominating committee. It will also increase community representation. Finally, it would change the rule that council must appoint community members in trios, with the three councilors from each district picking one community member each, and allow council to change how to appoint community members. In the short term. It wouldn't change how those committee nominating committee members are selected, but would allow council to come up with a system later. And it doesn't change anything about the fact that community members have to live in the districts to serve on a nominating committee. Next slide please. Before I get into the reasoning, I just want to be super clear that the current code would hold until and unless everything changes. This does not delay anything, and I worked with the city attorney's office on that part as well. Next slide please. So why are these changes necessary for this to be a truly community led process? Having enough community members on the nominating committee who aren't city employees is really helpful. Adding an additional community member for a total of five will give the public more of a voice. It also creates a total of 11 members which will prevent tie votes. It was already bargained to have five community members on the initial nominating committee, which is currently being seated, before dropping down to four for subsequent nominating committees. But as the council does not have a process in place right now for appointing a fifth community member, that could create confusion or delay. And so this would again invert it, removing the fifth from this year's nominating committee and letting it go forward and adding it for subsequent ones. Next slide please. District by district selection. I won't spend a lot of time on this, but basically it doesn't change the community members who want to be on the nominating committee. There need to be at least one from each district, but it just says that council can decide if they want to do a different process than for subgroups. The current process would hold until and unless council changes it. One more please. All right. Bias. So the current bias standard as we've heard from community members, is vague and inconsistent. And one place in the code, it says objective demonstration of bias for or against the police. In another place, it says any individual who has a demonstrated bias for or against law enforcement. We've received advice, city attorney's advice, that the inconsistency being resolved so that the same standard is used to determine if someone is appointed, is the same standard used to decide if someone is too biased to continue serving and needs to be removed. Next slide please. We've also heard from community members that significant concerns. So clarity how would one determine that someone has a bias. Are we asking the nominating committee to read an applicant's mind applicability to the actual work? The oversight board's primary a primary function is to determine, based on investigative reports, if an officer committed misconduct, when that's alleged, and if so, what the appropriate discipline is. It's not an oversight board that makes big decisions about the police budget or the appropriate role of police in society or anything like that. So having a bias standard that's about big picture issues, not about the actual functional role that the applicant will play on the board is not in alignment. And next slide. The third big issue we heard is that it's overbroad. We don't know how it would be interpreted by the nominating committee. And some of the nominating committee members themselves have mentioned this. As it stands, it can potentially result in a situation where a community member can be found ineligible to serve if they've ever posted blue lives matter or black lives matter on social media. If you have a thin blue line sticker on your truck, you should be able to have your city council consider whether to appoint you. On the other hand, if you're voting to find a police officer committed misconduct or not based on your biases and not the facts of the case, that should be ruled out. And so the current definition focusing on the broad idea, not the specific task, has the potential effect of discouraging community members from applying. So we basically I would say if you want to serve your city and you're able to be impartial, we want you to apply. Next slide. One other thing I'll add here is that the charter says and this is the exact text, the board shall make provisions to ensure its membership includes representation from diverse communities, including those from diverse communities and with diverse lived experiences, particularly those of experienced systemic racism and those of experienced mental illness, addiction or alcoholism. People who've dealt with systemic racism, mental illness, addiction, or alcoholism are more likely to have interactions with police statistically positive or negative, ruling them out because they had a good or bad experience, and that might theoretically make them biased, will make it impossible to fulfill the charter requirement of representation. Two more slides next one please. I want to be clear. Oh, I think I skipped one. Yeah. So this resolution would start a conversation which includes labor partners. It does not mandate anything. I have seen suggestions, including in the written testimony, that suggested a different way of doing this or that, with the argument being that we would then not have to bargain the change. I think I want to be very clear here. We bargained it originally we would need to bargain a change to it. The document is not suggesting changes to that in any way. It's ensuring that community members are not ruled out because of a vague, overbroad, hard to implement definition and also ensuring that the city if it if we decide to pursue that change bargain that change with the relevant organizations, including the unions whose interests are affected, basically allows us to stand up for the little guy here, the person who might be unfairly excluded from public service because of a bad definition. Last slide. One last note on this community members need to trust this board. When government wants to be trusted, we have to take the first step, not simply demand trust. When an officer is found to have acted in or out of policy, community members need to know that the board wasn't biased in a way that meant they couldn't be impartial, or that people who might be generally supportive or not supported supportive of police sorry weren't excluded because of that, but based on impartiality and their ability to be. We've had several conversations over the last few years in this room and the previous council as well, where the conversations about trust in government, trust in the city both broadly and the police specifically. And I'll simply say that accountability breeds trust. So in conclusion, I introduced this document to have a board that can be implemented as rapidly as possible, fulfill the will of the voters and not slow anything down and have a system of oversight that's legitimate, truly unbiased, and one that's able to be clearly understood and implemented, including by the nominating committee. And I'll ask if chris, you can I'll stop here. But if you could pull up the text, I'll ask you to scroll later.
209 Thank you.
210 Thank you. Councilor Kanal. We are operating under severe time constraints here, and we have a hard stop of 445. We have a whole bunch of people lined up to testify. Councilor Kanal and I concluded that we probably need to reserve all the time from 425 to 445 for committee discussion. So I have an amendment that I want to put out there before the testimony begins. Councilor Smith councilor Morillo. Oh, actually, counselor Smith, do you have a question that you want to a point you want to make now.
211 What should you finish?
212 Okay, my amendment is I moved to replace subsection 35.2 .01 0f3 with the, which is the eligibility to serve on the bpa with the following. Any individual who displays a state of mind that indicates the individual could not reach decisions as a member of the cba impartially, without prejudice, and without a basis in bias. In order to determine whether the individual has such a state of mind, the nominating committee will consider, among other factors, whether an individual's prior statements regarding law enforcement demonstrate an inability to be impartial. Period. May I have a second?
213 Second?
214 The motion has been moved and seconded. Now we'll hear from a couple of invited speakers and then hear public testimony. I hope we have doctor leroy haynes here to give invited testimony.
215 He's remote.
216 And he should be on remotely.
217 You can hear us. Oh.
218 We're promoting him. He should be able to accept and speak. Doctor haynes, you should be able to speak now.
219 Okay. To the distinguished members of the Portland city council. I am the doctor, leroy haynes, junior chairperson of the albina ministerial alliance coalition for justice and police reform and president of the Elana ministerial alliance. I come at this time after spending some 17 and 20 years on this issue, to give testimony on the agenda. Item two. To change the current language to the proposal is from an individual who has an objective demonstration of bias and to their ability to hear and make decisions on the matters before the cbo, the community police oversight board. I want to thank the councilors for grappling with this issue. We have the last year or so been grappling with it in federal court, but we believe that this definition as being proposed, we are both reasonable, a fair and just, and it is equated to our present state law in the jury system. We believe that we should not. Bring this to be a major wage, and holding back on the implementation of the actualization of the oversight board. And so what we are saying on behalf, as the lead amicus in the brief with the federal court, is that we are supportive of the proposal that has been put forth. Amen.
220 Thank you, doctor haynes.
221 Thank you.
222 Let's second invited testifiers. Testifier, we have speaker is aaron schmaltz. Welcome.
223 Thank you all. Aaron schmaltz and the president of the Portland police association. I want to open by saying it's against my nature to have this conversation in this setting. I've met with all of you and told you that I really do feel like having these conversations before we get to this setting is a better way to navigate with my members. They're concerned, they see these things, and they ask that I act. I know I need to be brief so that today I will simply state that for any fair minded portlanders, and particularly for all those who support labor and bargaining rights, the. Put simply, if the city's handshake at the bargaining table is as good as the changing whim of the next election, the no contract is safe. This proposal is an unlawful attempt to force the ppa and its members back to the table at the stroke of midnight. It is, on its face, an unfair and unjust attempt to force a presupposed outcome. This is clear language in the language. It demands that the city bargain something substantially similar to its desired outcome, that is, not bargaining, that is, informing the ppa and its members that it shall accept a demand. Even worse, it closes by stating that the desired outcome is that proposed discipline is upheld, not correct, not just upheld. This is, of course, ironic because over the last 15 years, the ppa and its members have had discipline proposed over approximately 300 times. We have taken those cases to arbitration 14 times 4% with a 75% win rate. Why? Because we don't arbitrate cases unless there's evidence the city broke the law. What does that mean? Over the last 15 years, 97% of the discipline proposed by the city has been completed without any arbitration or argument from the ppa. This is not evidence of a broken system. This is evidence that we're breaking a system which works. And it would appear that some would stop at nothing, including break with breaking faith with labor to do so. In a recent interview, the author of this proposal stated, constitutional, equitable, accountable policing is effective policing. I couldn't agree more, which is why the Portland police bureau's members provide it every single day. Our members are held to an extremely high standard every day, and the only certainty is that beyond that is this if the city chooses to engage in performative brinksmanship in detroit, destroy even the hint that it is bargaining in good faith, and continue to move the goalposts at every possible turn. Our highly trained, professional, constitutional, accountable police officers will be hired by other local agencies. We've walked down this road before. Our police officers are no different than any other city employee. They're human beings. They have failings. They have strengths. They have weaknesses. They're confronted every day with the greatest tragedies that our city sees in this system, in which they provide service, has been built by, molded and reformed by all who were here and all who have come before them. You will not find any group in America more willing to grow, change and transform the dynamic between themselves and those they serve. The thesis that they are root and stem. The source of a problem is simply untrue. Our community, the whole community is crying for more connection, more relationship, and more support from our public servants. Even as we speak right now, dozens of calls are waiting.
224 For. An answer. I apologize, we've got we're going to have to really enforce strict time limits in order to get through this. I apologize.
225 Excuse me, chair, could we have just about 30s to configure the audio?
226 Okay.
227 And then we'll you won't have to announce. Thanks.
228 And what and then 30s configure the audio and then what?
229 And then you won't have to announce the time every time the chime will sound.
230 Okay. And I just want to let people know sign up to testify. We are only we can only accommodate 1.5 minutes per person, and we're going to have to be very strict to let as many people as possible speak to cut it off. Exactly. There, I apologize. We can't give people extra seconds.
231 Chairs the intent to vote today.
232 Yes.
233 Okay. Thank you. We can go ahead.
234 And, rebecca, can you call the people signed up to testify in order?
235 First up.
236 Isaac mcclymont.
237 Welcome.
238 I want to speak to this resolution specifically because of the impacts to our community and our ability to do our jobs effectively, save lives and property. You know, as firefighters, obviously, we respond after. 911 calls. And our job is to really reach the community where they are at in their time of need. And we do that as really a joint service with the with police nine-one-one psr chat. We're all all services together. My concern is that our city right now is really at a stress. And your new time here in council is really to address that stress. And I think using our time in this manner to put forth this pressure in an already settled agreement is really not time well spent. And for my part, I think this council is well suited to address and heal this city and put us on back on a path where people want to move here, live here, feel comfortable, feel safe. You know, this resolution is really it's got a lot of strengths to it.
239 I've heard council.
240 Sir apologize.
241 Next up, Dan handelman, Portland copwatch. Dan will be joining us virtually.
242 Excuse me. Is there.
243 Are you able to hear us okay. We can hear you.
244 Good afternoon.
245 Yes. Good afternoon. Committee. My name is Dan handelman. I use he him pronouns. I'm a member of Portland copwatch as a group that has two former members of the police accountability commission. We agree the oversight board needs to be set up as soon as possible, but it needs to be set up right. We support better defining. What's my bias? Unfortunately, by striking the language that's in the settlement agreement, you're just going to delay implementation and make it harder for the committee to use a good definition when they're choosing the members of the board. The suggestion we had is to leave the language, even though we find it distasteful. The language about bias for against the police and say bias for or against the police refers to board members acting in their official capacity and failing to make fair, reasonable, objective and lawful decisions, and instead basing those decisions on a predetermined opinion. I wrote out a longer version in the written testimony. In other words, we don't support the proposal. By councilor Novick. And, you know, while we understand the other ones based on state law about juries, it really needs to be very specific about law enforcement. The concerns of the police association is very unfortunate because their members are the ones who are going to be under scrutiny from this board. And we would hope they would want there to be neutral people on there. But you need to make it so city council can remove people who don't deserve to be on the board. But if they use the vague, the vague original language, they won't be able to put back in people who are already excluded because of the vague language that exists. We have a lot more comments. I hope you read them.
246 Okay.
247 Thanks, Dan.
248 Next up, sandy chung.
249 A quick request for the clerks. Could you name the next person on deck as well as you go?
250 No problem. After sandy chung is brian orndorf.
251 Good afternoon. Committee chairs and committee members. My name is sandy chung. Pronouns. I'm the executive director of the aclu of Oregon. I'm here on behalf of our more than 42,000 members and donor supporters. I'm here in support of agenda item two and starting this testimony. I want to remember the people in Portland who've been harmed by Portland police officers and their actions, though some of those folks are in my written testimony, I believe it's important to remember the people who have been harmed because ultimately, this agenda item is about making our city safer for all people. The proposed bias standard is more fair, it is more robust, and it addresses not just how law enforcement related bias may impact the oversight board members and applicants, but all types of biases that may impact their decision making. So this these changes will help effectuate greater fairness and impartiality for the oversight board and its processes and decisions. Regarding the concerns about delay. The last paragraph of the resolution does address that, so we urge you to adopt this resolution. Thank you.
252 Thank you.
253 Next is brian orendorff, followed by.
254 I'm sorry. Go ahead.
255 Followed by alan combs.
256 Good. Going fast because I thought it was three minutes. We got a minute and a half. So two weeks ago I presented a study to the committee which factually showed Portland has the lowest percentage of overall city budget allocated towards police for 12 comparable cities. The study was provided to mayor wilson, all city commissioners and over 10,000 elected officials. Residences and businesses. We in 2020 for over 270,000 calls were made for assistance to pbb, with 38,000 ending up in face interactions. The use of deadly force was used on six occasions, that is, 0.000158% de minimis number. I understand councilor Canal proposes a resolution to the already executed police contract and doj settlement, which deals with defining when a community member can be excluded from the community police oversight board for bias. Mr. Canal is attempting to retrade the police contract, which does not expire until June 30th, 2026. This is known as a forced reopener. What was bargained for and signed for is in the books. You cannot reopen a labor agreement because you disagree with the terms. The attempted change, the definition of the bias, and adding an at large seat to tip. The balance of the selection committee is a naked attempt to create an unfair system to punish public servants if changes are needed after the oversight committee is in operations, changes, if any, should be sent back to the taxpayer or to the voters, as this committee will receive in excess of $12 million annually of taxpayer money for the 21 members of the oversight committee. I'm out of town. I just this this with what's.
257 Sorry sir.
258 Right now this is insane. We're going backwards on this.
259 Next up, alan combs, followed by Loretta guzman.
260 All right. Good afternoon. Councilors. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. I have lived in Portland in district three for 25 years. I'm fortunate to have a time to serve on portland's training advisory council, or tac on tac. I get a lot of feedback from the police bureau. Indeed, I get the police line on things, but tac and other volunteer opportunities has given me a window into the community and the stories I hear that leads me to what is needed with policing and training issues. The overarching thing I hear is not the claim or view that Portland is. Policing is fundamentally broke, but instead that the community wants to be heard and understood by the police. They want regular engagement. They want police officers that reflect the diversity that exists in their community, and a phrase they want community policing. Portland is far from far from being able to deploy community policing. Staffing is simply too low. Take a ride along and you'll find out why. But the budget that has been requested of you makes important. The experimental results you're going to get from the pba or its ocpa. So I know I don't have much time left here, but I'll recommend that if you go forward. I don't support the motion in front of you, but if you do go forward, you need to look at both. Oversight of the budget is going to be more than $15 million to fund this new experimental oversight, and that you.
261 Also do.
262 Thank you. Mr. I'm sorry. We really have to enforce the time limits.
263 Counterproductive.
264 Next up is Loretta guzman, followed by jay ashlee albies.
265 Jerry, I'm troubled, frankly, by the technology issues, the cutting off. I feel like the temperature in this room has skyrocketed on an item. I feel like we need ample time to get into. I don't know how we vote when this is already. We're three testimonies in already.
266 I appreciate that. Unfortunately, we were told that we have. We are not allowed to continue past 445. I had hoped that we would, that we would have additional time. But when we're told the, you know, the mics all go off at 445 and I want to reserve some time for discussion.
267 My point is, I think that this can be heard again at this committee with ample amount of time. That's my point, chair.
268 Well, I will leave it to councilor Kanal to explain his urgency in getting through it today. Go ahead.
269 And raised here in the city of Portland, I own bison coffee house. Since the fall of our city, we went from public safety to no public safety. In 2019. We had 36 homicides. In 2020, 57, 20, 21, 90. That's a 207% increase in 2022. We had 101 homicides in 20 2373 and 20 2471. In 2024, I testified that we made it in the top ten most dangerous cities known as the murder city, on October 27th, 2024 at 2 a.m, I was awakened by the sound of gunshots and immediate banging on my front door from my nephew's girlfriend screaming. My nephew had been shot. This is my nephew, me and my father raised from a baby. I was immediately in the worst nightmare of my life. I ran as fast as I could with his girlfriend to try to save his life. I felt like I was going to lose my mind while praying to god to help me, not to lose it. As I ran, I called 911 to only get a recording during a life and death situation. I had to run back to my car to try to get him myself to the hospital, and I pleaded with those standing around, I need help and no one helped me to get him into my car. I looked at him and saw and saw he was dying, and all I could do was lay my hands on his chest. I prayed as hard as I could and I screamed for my dad, who has already passed away, to come and get my nephew. I prayed to the point I felt like I was going to throw up, and I felt my favorite nephew start turning cold as he turned blue and died. So I plead today that you do not cut our public safety or our officers who serve our community. If I call 911, I want a real person, not a recording. I'm a real person. I'm a real person. With grief from this, I do not want anyone else to feel the pain from the failure of our city. Give us life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness which is in our constitution. Public safety is a fundamental right. I'm a law abiding citizen, and I do not want to take and put things into my own.
270 Dash.
271 Next up, jay ashley is joining us virtually, followed by charlie michelle wesley.
272 Good afternoon council members. Can everybody hear me okay, great. Thank you for taking testimony on this. I'm here to support this clarification of the definition of bias. Frankly, it I don't see it as a change of definition. I see it as a clarification to give more specific direction so that the decision makers can understand what constitutes bias and what does not constitute bias. I heard my colleague doctor haynes describe this as similar to what we expect of juries, and I think that's an appropriate standard. And I do feel like there is performative brinkmanship that we have heard here today, but it is not on behalf of the city or advocates for police accountability. There is a difference between holding officers accountable and punishing them. We are not seeking to punish police officers. We are seeking to them accountable, and that supports public safety for everybody. Thank you for your time.
273 Next up is charlie michelle wesley, followed by karen cherry.
274 Thank you.
275 I'm charlie michelle wesley. Indigenous ancestors are very proud of me. This month as I took my 24 year clean and sober through a 12 step program whose first step principle is honesty. We're not always the worst thing we have ever done, and ultimately we get to be of service to others. And just as the core values are imperative to the integrity of the city, so are my recovery principles. To me. I have integrity and am trustworthy person who is a fierce defender of our marginalized and most vulnerable community members. My entire life prepared me for this moment in history, and I hope you don't oppress my testimony. A life of abuse is unimaginable. There is so much you can learn from our experiences. If you could just see the value of our trauma, our emotions, the gift of our truth to help bring light to why police accountability is so necessary. Yet as an advocate for police accountability, I and others are viewed as anti-police and accountability is somehow a punishment for them, instead of an opportunity for corrective action and to gain our trust. Real accountability is actually real public safety for all the life and recovery and healing has made me more able than ever to help this policing system identify facts. Absolutely be impartial and fair. That's all we ever wanted. But this bias statement is a barrier to our voices and our experience. I for one, support councilor Canales resolution. Although I also hear copwatch handelman's point of view. But it's up to y'all to find a way to get the kbpa up and running as a system that is fair, effective, and doable. Remember, there are black lives and other marginalized lives at stake that depend on this. This is a life or death issue tonight.
276 Thank you, thank you, thank you. Karen is.
277 Next up is karen cherry joining us virtually followed by jerry mccorkle.
278 I'm going to concede my time to somebody else. But I agree with councilor Zimmerman that this discussion should be held at another meeting. And I've submitted my written testimony to the council clerk.
279 Next up is jerry mccorkle, followed by patrick alexander.
280 Good afternoon. The lack of police accountability is the biggest threat to public safety we face in Portland. The latest incarceration of police accountability seeks to disenfranchize all of my friends, neighbors, fellow citizens who have ever called for change. As councilor Kanal has pointed out, anyone who has expressed an interest in police accountability could be made ineligible to participate. People who are passionate about meaningful reforms that could actually make our community safer will continue to be excluded from the process, just like I have been. Do you want to limit participation to people who don't care about community safety, to live in Portland and not have any opinion about policing requires either not paying attention or willful ignorance. These are not the people we want to stand up to. Police abuses. Please enact the will of the voters and make meaningful police accountability happen. Put accountability in the hands of concerned citizens, not in the hands of cops. Police involvement in the community police oversight board is the real problem. For 150 years, Portland police have investigated themselves and found nothing wrong. Pb and p are telling you that hundreds of people killed, thousands terrorized, and millions of dollars in settlements are just the price of keeping us safe from the real bad guys. I don't believe that, and neither does the vast majority of Portland. We can do better. We must do better. Thank you for letting me speak. I hope you are listening. Not just to me, but to all the voters who want to end the reign of unchecked police violence, and to the voters who put you in those chairs once. Good day.
281 Thank you.
282 I'm afraid we only have time for one more speaker.
283 Our speaker is.
284 Next up is patrick alexander.
285 Free title for you.
286 Next up is marie table, who's joining us virtually.
287 What happened I lost audio.
288 We have you marie. Marie, can you hear us? Hi, marie. If you can hear us.
289 Yes, I can okay.
290 You're good to go.
291 Okay. Sorry, I got confused there for a minute. Good afternoon. My name is marie and I live in district four. On the evening of September 28th, 2020, PPB sergeant justin d'aboville assaulted at least three people that I know of. I was the first one he put his hands on. I saw dimitri stoyanov holding his vote register here sign when police surrounded him. As I started recording on my phone, the sergeant pushed me and simultaneously yelled at me to get back. It was pitch black and I did not have a moment to comply before he pepper sprayed me point blank in the face. During this entire time, the sergeant kept reaching out to grab my phone, which I did not relinquish. The sergeant then proceeded to pepper spray dimitri, throw him to the ground, and unlawfully arrest him. The city of Portland settled his lawsuit and paid dimitri $100,000. But clearly dimitri and I were just the warm up act because later that evening, the sergeant assaulted a man in a wheelchair destined ferreira. Dustin suffered soft tissue damage to his shoulder as well as an exacerbation of his disease osteogenesis imperfecta, which dustin said had caused more than 900 bone breaks and fractures in his life. Dustin sued and reached a settlement of $400,000 with the city of Portland. Sergeant d'ambreville resigned from Portland police on may 18th, 2022. In June 2024, the williamson herald announced with fanfare that justin d'aboville was one of two, quote unquote, great hires at the brentwood, tennessee police department. I unequivocally support councilor Kanal resolution because our lives quite literally depend on it. Thank you.
292 Thank you. I want to say something about the amendment that I put out there, which is that. Sometimes lawyers feel like you need to try to change the language to make it a little better. Even if it won't, it won't resolve a controversy. I'm not at all sure this this matter is going to get to the full council, because in addition to coming through committees, councilor Can get something considered by the full council by getting three cosigners on it. And I'm quite confident that councilor Kanal will be able to do that, whatever this committee does. I was sympathetic to the idea in the abstract that we should make the standard for participation on the cba closer to that for a juror, which means that if they're capable of acting impartially on a matter before them, that that that's the fundamental question. However, recognizing the existing language talks about bias for against law enforcement. I thought it was important to make clear that people's expressed statements regarding lawns were been are part of the consideration of whether they can be impartial. Now, I might very well vote against this when it gets to full council, among other things, simply on the grounds that we negotiated this language less than a year ago. But I told councilor Kanal that if we can pass my proposed amendment, I would give them a courtesy vote to get out of committee. So any discussion on the amendment I.
293 I have something I was just going.
294 To call. Sorry, you're just going. Oh, councilor Kanal. Okay. Councilor Morillo sorry.
295 I need to process. For a second.
296 Okay?
297 Okay.
298 Maybe in that time. Councilor Kanal you can explain the timing issue.
299 Yeah. Let me just speak to the amendment as well. I think that the last part that you found a way to thread a needle here, that is a very difficult needle to thread. And I think it is it is helpful to clarify that these are, that a person should be able to express broad based political views, but that they're broad based political views. Standing in the way of an impartial decision is the concern. And I think you've you've threaded that. So I'm happy to second it and I'm happy to support it. I think to the timing issue, the goal is that when the nominating committee receives applications after the deadline for applications, that they are able to apply a standard that makes sense from a timing perspective. And I recognize that there's a lot of people who want this document to do a lot of things. It does not do in a lot of different directions. The goal of this document is so that the nominating committee has a standard that it can apply. That makes sense. And I think the issue there is that we're seeing a we have a timeline under the federal settlement agreement to implement this oversight board, and therefore this application process is going to be happening regardless of whether there's any change that occurs to the code or not, regardless if this resolution happens or not. And so enabling the possibility that there might be a it might be possible to have a standard be changed in time for the nominating committee to use that standard when reviewing applications is the urgency. At the same time, I am deeply uncomfortable with cutting off public testimony, and I want to fully recognize that I'm really, really and I am. I got to be honest with everybody here. I did not expect for this to be something that so many people wanted to testify on. It's a technical fix from my perspective, not a not a substantive thing. So there are other substantive factors that are worth discussing here.
300 But time off work to be here. We deserve to have our voices heard. And this is rude. And you said you were going to represent us.
301 I am agreeing with that statement, so I appreciate.
302 It all out. We should have a chance to have our voices heard. That is what you promised us when we voted for 12 members.
303 It's technical, but we wanted to be able to extend this hearing past 5:00. We were told that that because the open signal contract doesn't allow for paying for the broadcasting, it. Et cetera. We could not operate after 445. We think that the committees are where public testimony is supposed to take place. And if in order for that to happen, we need more flexibility in the timing. Today, we were simply told we had no choice.
304 And then you took 20 minutes to talk about your amendment, and then we served ten more minutes from mr. Canal.
305 Thank you. Councilor Morillo.
306 I just want you to know how angry we are. At least I am, murray.
307 Thank you. So. So if I'm understanding correctly, I just wanna make sure I fully understand your amendment. Councilor Novick the language change says that basically it will still allow someone who, for example, posted a black lives matter post as long as they can still prove that they have the ability to be impartial during. Is that correct?
308 That's the idea that if you can be impartial on the matters before you, then you're allowed to serve. However, to be, you know, extreme. If you had previously said all police lie all the time, then probably you couldn't be. That would indicate you probably couldn't be impartial in individual case.
309 Right? Okay. That makes sense. And correct me if I'm wrong as well. So for what councilor Canal has brought forward, it is a clarification of language that was bargained on. And whatever goes say this goes through, it would still go back to police for official bargaining and finalization anyways. Correct. So the concern here is that it's coming back after being very, very quickly from the time that it was bargained. Correct.
310 That's at least part of the concern. Yes.
311 Okay.
312 I do think we need to stick to the point of this amendment and take a vote on this amendment. Chair, we're going to our comments are kind of wavering out. I would just say I would like to put the amendment piece to bed so that we can have the larger pieces. I have some questions.
313 Counselor Smith, do you have a question about the amendment before we proceed to that?
314 No.
315 Could the clerk please call the roll on the amendment?
316 Smith.
317 No.
318 Canal.
319 Yes.
320 Morillo I.
321 Zimmerman.
322 No.
323 Novick I.
324 With three yeses. The amendment is accepted.
325 On.
326 And now do we have any do we? Oh, counselor Smith on the issue.
327 Thank you. Thank you, chair Novick.
328 Act like that.
329 On know who's supposed to be running this. But as as chairs. This doesn't happen in council. And we continue to have this disruptions and nobody's addressing it.
330 Thank you. Thank you. Could I have heidi come up to the because I'm trying to get some clarification here. What I understand is that this would have to be the bargaining contract would have to be opened up again because it was already settled last year. Correct.
331 Good afternoon.
332 Counselor Smith and russell, council members, heidi brown, chief deputy city attorney. So yes, we would have to go to the union and request if they would, they would bargain this language and be willing to do that. They have to agree to it, because we did just bargain this language. And if they say no, we already bargained the language we wanted, then that's our answer. If they're willing to talk about it because they find some benefit in defining bias, then then we'll we'll negotiate it, but it will require us.
333 They could actually say no, and this will all be over.
334 That's right.
335 Okay. There it is right there.
336 Yeah.
337 Councilor Kanal.
338 I'll defer to counselor Zimmerman.
339 Counselor Zimmerman.
340 Thanks, chair. So I think I'm obviously disappointed with with how this is, is going down. If it was appropriate, I'd make a motion to fire opensignal's contract moving forward. I'd also say, I think this might be an example where having co-chairs might not always work. We've got to have somebody who can keep this room in check so that regardless of the council, regardless of the position we are, we are adhering to the rules that we have. That man read at the beginning of this meeting. But first and foremost, I was skeptical, you know, opening this back up, I think we have a chance to move the oversight board forward and our and would be moving forward with nominations. And I think we're introducing a level of risk that that is unknown. And I'm not I'm still very unsure of the why here. I'm left to wonder why language that encourages additional bias is being touted as more fair. I you know, I look at the original language and it's very clear that no bias was what was previously written into code. And I think that sounds like a good thing. I find it alarmingly strange, frankly, that the aclu of Oregon comes to testify in favor of such an incorporation of bias into a city code. I find that very strange. This has made me more skeptical of what is happening here right now. To me, this is coming off as staff who had a bias perspective in the previous exercise, who are upset with the previous council and their decision to make the nomination committee less bias and be more nimble and more respectful of the district councilors to now try once again to change their plan back into what the staff wanted and didn't get their way last year. So I'm not thrilled with that. This appears to be an attempt, frankly, to introduce bias into the nominating committee or nominating process. It creates. Not only the a split nomination decision because of this bias language now being incorporated into it, but by the other, which we haven't talked a lot about, but by the other piece of include increasing the number to an odd number by having the nomination process be a winners and losers on nominations in a very split sense, versus getting broad support across the nominating committee. And I find that strange as well. I think that this is being bum rushed through. I think that I do not welcome this change. I think that this is an attempt, because the previous language would have kept activists and advocates who have a strong position in thought on either side to. They want to get on this, and I and I, I find that deeply troubling. And I find the original language cutting out a lot of the activists, the thing the public was looking for in an oversight committee. So I will be a no vote in this. And I think the whole council should be a no vote on this.
341 Councilor Kanal.
342 Yeah, I, I think it's really.
343 Interesting because one of the things that if one was to serve on, let's say, the I think somebody mentioned the training advisory council earlier, one would ideally hope that the people who serve on the training advisory council are in support of the idea of training. One would ideally hope that the people who serve on the behavioral health advisory committee are in support of behavioral health and the behavioral health unit's work in a in a general sense. And yet, on the topic of police accountability, if one expresses opinions in support of the idea of police accountability, that is interpreted often as bias against the police. The example that I would give is the most recent comment from councilor Zimmerman that proves the point of why this is so necessary in the first place, because arguing in favor of police accountability does not necessitate that one cannot serve on on a group like this. And I think that is the ultimate question here, is whether or not they'll be excluded from, again, the first of two filters on whether or not that that an applicant has to go to serve is this nominating committee, will they be ruled out for expressing support of the idea of police accountability? And that is not related necessarily to one's viewpoint on police broadly, I can speak to the 1500 plus people who gave opinions, including some of the folks in this room, to the to the work in the last few years. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's a conflation and an attempt to divine what someone has in their heart or in their soul, based off of their support for the idea of accountability, and that this aims to address that. I am grateful for the fact that we voted on the amendment, because it clarifies what it is that we're talking about now. We'll know what the proposal is, and the question that will be at some point before this committee is whether or not the full council should be able to take it up. I, for one, have always felt that that the committees are a great place, but not the only great place to have public comment. And I am, I am. I'm confident that if and when it gets to the full council, there will be a full three minutes per person public comment period. And I want to commit to everyone here that I do not want to go through the exercise of going to the full council unless we do that, regardless of when that is. Thanks.
344 Councilor Smith, and we only have a few minutes left.
345 Thank you. I just want to go back for a second and, you know, putting something on the agenda to make an a point, to make a point when you actually know and expect to have a huge number of people here testifying, it's disingenuous to say that you didn't know that this would be this popular. Secondly, to put this on and send it to the full council. After listening to aaron schmidt say that his people, they don't like this, and you get a vote and you're going to put it on the agenda, and all it's going to do is go back to their people and the union, and they're going to say they don't want it. So why are you wasting the council's time if this is only going to be knocked down again? And so I'm not understanding why we're doing this. If it was just to have this conversation again and bring it up and to put people on record, that to me is not a good use of our time. Mr. Chair.
346 I need to ask the clerk, is it a fact that we turn into pumpkins at 445?
347 I'm not sure what you mean. There's a hard stop at 440.
348 There is a hard stop. So we need to do whatever we can do at 445. Yeah.
349 I mean, yeah.
Procedural episode · turns 350–361
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350 Councilor Morillo. Can you say something in like 30s. I'm sorry.
351 Yeah. I'm quick. I honestly feel like I need a second hearing in committee about this. I feel pretty unclear about way too many things to feel confident in a vote about this right now. And if it is just going to go back to ppe so they can say no. I'm also kind of struggling with with some of that here. So I, I do feel like I need personally some more time on this.
352 Councilor Kanal.
353 Yeah, you'll notice.
354 That I did not actually call the question and that's that's deliberate. I wanted to hear from not only colleagues but the folks in this room. I think it's we've had a precedent set in the governance committee and potentially other committees earlier this week that one can discuss a resolution and end without a vote on it, with the intention of being able to add that to an agenda for a future meeting. And I think that that's an appropriate use here. I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that that people would be cut off from from public testimony in particular. We only got through, I think, 12 people, and I want to encourage everyone who testified here, sorry, everyone who attempted to testify here to please be a part of it the next time that comes up, because we'd love to hear from you. And I also want to thank all the people that that wrote in testimony. But I am choosing at this moment not to ask for a vote. And I would encourage us to conclude the conversation while leaving that open the way that the governance committee did.
355 Councilor Zimmerman.
356 I you are one of the co-chairs of this committee. Councilor and I, I do not I don't I don't understand if you want this committee structure to work, but then you don't think that this is where all the conversation on this topic should happen. I just I find that problematic and troubling that you will just move it. Then with the signatures to the full council.
357 I have not done that. I want to be super clear. What we're referring to is the process by which four people can put something on the agenda. I have not done that and I've been told that.
358 Call the.
359 Question the no.
360 I actually my understanding is that since the sponsor does not want to call the question, I don't feel a need for it. And it was it was his request that we vote on this today. I don't see a need to vote. And as to those concerns about maintaining decorum here, maybe I'm a little jaded by the fact that in my last term of the council, people were jumping up and down and yelling and screaming at us, and this didn't seem that bad. But I will do it. But I will take your suggestions as to working hard to maintain decorum for the for the next meeting. We are adjourned.
361 I've not even begun that process.