Mayor Ted Wheeler slows down $2 million plan to bring back Portland police team to target gun violence

Mayor Ted Wheeler pledged last week at a news conference to move quickly to seek $2 million to bring back a uniformed police patrol team to help stem a significant wave of gun violence in Portland, but this week he acknowledged he needs more time.

Wheeler told proponents of the plan that he must provide additional information to fellow commissioners to gain support.

“What I proposed to my colleagues is to slow this down. It’s not going to happen as quickly as this group has envisioned it might,” Wheeler said Wednesday, speaking to public safety representatives from the city, county and federal government and community representatives.

“This is politically controversial,” he said. “My colleagues will need to know the community is standing with them as they make these decisions. … As mayor, I am not an island. I am one vote out of five. I need at least three votes.”

The mayor told the group that he believes he eventually will get the votes.

The proposal calls for $2 million in one-time funding to allow more proactive policing on city streets with greater civilian oversight and data collected and publicly shared on police stops and arrests.

The plan would bring back a uniformed team of two sergeants and 12 officers to try to intercept and seize guns and work to prevent shootings and retaliatory violence in the city. The team also would respond to shootings, do follow-up investigations and engage with people who are at risk of gun violence.

During the same meeting, Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty criticized the Inter-Faith Peace & Action Collaborative for unveiling the plan with the mayor before telling her and other city commissioners about it.

Hardesty went further, calling out the collaborative’s representatives, Pastor J. Matt Hennessee and Antoinette Edwards, alleging that the fact that they have “stood with the police” in the past has made them less legitimate leaders in the eyes of the public.

She made the remarks in a meeting of nearly 40 people, including Multnomah County’s district attorney, the police chief and sheriff, the new acting U.S. attorney in Oregon, the county chair and the head of the county’s Department of Community Justice.

“I want to be as clear as possible…Having people lead this effort who have stood with the police in a midst of a racial justice reckoning around police misconduct as it relates to Black people in our community also gives people pause,” Hardesty said.

She said she respects both Hennessee, chair of the collaborative, and Edwards, who led the city’s Office of Violence Prevention for 10 years before retiring in 2019.

But then Hardesty added: “You are the only two Black people that stood with Daryl Turner to say you would march with the police at the height of a racial reckoning on police misconduct and the community has not forgotten.”

Her remarks referenced a July news conference that Hennessee and Edwards attended outside the police union office in North Portland when Turner, the president of the Portland Police Association, called for a moratorium on violence and vandalism that often erupted after dark at social justice protests. About 20 religious leaders, business owners, police and neighborhood residents stood with Turner that day.

Edwards, Hennessee and Gina Ronning, a local activist who is part of the collaborative, took offense at Hardesty’s comments and said so.

They said they’re focused on what’s best for the city.

“It feels extremely invalidating and dehumanizing to be labeled a name like a police apologist because it invalidates the experiences and feelings that we have, and it’s just not helpful,” Ronning said.

“Making things really personal doesn’t help get us to where we need to go at all,” Ronning said. “It’s unprofessional, and I just feel that it’s disrespectful for the people who are dying on the street.”

Edwards said she won’t be deterred by the commissioner’s “negative energy.”

“You know, Sister City Council, you went low,” Edwards said, “but I’m going to go high. I’m not going to be distracted from the urgency of this call, of this crisis and this time. … I’m not apologizing. I will work with anybody to do right. We’re here because we care. And this negative energy, I’m not going to be deterred by it.”

Hardesty responded that she didn’t mean to disrespect anyone.

“I’m not here to just be a rubber stamp. … I bring the reality of the constituents that I work with,” she said.

Hardesty said she wants money to go into boosting community-based programs, such street outreach workers or Healing Hurt People, which sends support workers to help shooting victims and their families in hospitals.

Hardesty said she was disturbed to first learn of the $2 million proposal for police the day after the City Council approved a $2.1 million settlement in a wrongful death suit filed against the city in the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Quanice Hayes in 2017.

She urged Wheeler to hold off on any spending plan for the police gun enforcement team before he attends a Black Male Town Hall with her on March 30. Hardesty was the main proponent of the successful push last year to eliminate the Police Bureau’s Gun Violence Reduction Team, citing concerns about its disproportionate stops of people of color.

Wheeler told Hardesty that he reserves the right as police commissioner “to allocate” police resources but said: “As always, I hear your larger point.”

Edwards said the collaborative’s proposal for the $2 million – which includes money to cover increased community oversight and more police stop and arrest data — was first discussed in late December. Police Chief Chuck Lovell submitted the plan to the mayor on Dec. 23.

Edwards said she’ll not apologize for working with police to respond to an alarming proliferation of fatal shootings in the city that have largely claimed the lives of young Black men and women and other people of color.

As of Wednesday, Lovell reported 236 shootings so far this year in Portland, including 61 that resulted in injuries.

A person of color was wounded in more than three-fourths of the 61 shootings, the police chief said.

Following Wednesday night’s fatal shooting inside a WinCo, 21 people have died in homicides so far this year across the city.

Quoting abolitionist and social reformer Frederick Douglass, Edwards said, “I would stand united with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”

Hennessee said, “How many shots have to be fired? How many people have to be injured and killed before there’s a plan that’s adopted and we move forward to interrupt this horrible spate of gun violence?”

— Maxine Bernstein

Email mbernstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-8212

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