Portland protests account for extraordinary increase in complaints against police, annual report says

Complaints against police in Portland surged last summer after the May 25 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, overwhelming the city’s independent police oversight office, which struggled to keep up with double its workload.

The office, the intake center for complaints against police, initiated 125 protest-related cases since May 29, 2020, through this past April 21. Of those, 89 involved police use of force, according to a report released Thursday by the Independent Police Review office.

Of the 125, 42 of the cases were closed, due to either lack of misconduct alleged, the person who complained wasn’t available or the officer couldn’t be identified or wasn’t a Portland police officer, according to the office.

Last June, for example, the office received 112 protest-related complaints, more than the 72 complaints that didn’t stem from police actions at protests.

The number of complaints “swamped” the office and its ability to meet the federally mandated 180-day timeline set for completing police misconduct investigations, the report said.

The office further was hampered because it had no idea which law enforcement agencies were assisting Portland police on any given night and also because Portland officers were allowed to cover their name tags.

The office’s “lack of direct access to police records and data systems – while always a problem – became a rolling burden given the volume of investigations required by the police response to the protests,” the report said.

Investigators from the office would request Police Bureau reports from the protests, but the reports often weren’t done on time and often were incomplete when turned in, the report said.

“The officers did not specifically describe in their reports who was struck by the munitions, which made it difficult to match an officer’s actions to a particular complaint,” the report said.

The increase in complaints came at a time when the oversight office was dealing with a staffing shortage and a switch to remote work due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Workload surpassed capacity in July and never returned to a manageable level,” the report said. “By the end of 2020, investigators carried an average of 6.5 intakes and 2.7 full investigations per person, about 2.5 times the optimal workload per investigator.”

From May 29 through Nov. 15, during the height of the social justice protests in Portland, Portland police used force more than 6,000 times, according to a U.S. Department of Justice report.

The Department of Justice in February found the city and Portland police have failed to adhere to reforms mandated by their 2014 settlement agreement over police use of excessive force against people with mental illness.

The Independent Police Review faced a double workload last summer, as it fielded a large number of protest-related complaints against police.

The Justice Department found the Police Bureau failed to meet four key reforms under the settlement, citing inappropriate police use and management of force during protests last year, inadequate training, subpar police oversight and a failure to adequately share an annual Police Bureau report with the public as required.

According to its 2020 annual report, the police oversight office received more than 3,000 “communications” from community members last year who were “upset with police policies or actions” and City Council budget decisions but the majority were not “about officer misconduct” specific to a Police Bureau directive.

Twenty Portland police officers were disciplined last year, and three resigned or retired before discipline was issued, according to the review office.

The report doesn’t identify specific cases or officers who were disciplined, or how many, if any, stemmed from protest-related misconduct.

It only notes that 11 officers received the lowest form of discipline called “command counseling,” three received a letter of reprimand, five were given a one-day, unpaid suspension, one was given a two-day unpaid suspension and three resigned or retired while facing potential discipline.

Twenty-eight officers were named in three or more complaints made to the office in 2020, the report says.

From the city’s Independent Police Review office’s 2020 annual report.

“There are still a lot of investigations from the protests that need to work their way through the recommendation and discipline decision process,” said Ross Caldwell, director of the Independent Police Review office.

For all of 2020, community members filed 335 complaints against officers, resulting in 707 separate allegations of misconduct. Of those, 222 allegations involved use of force. Other allegations included complaints about police procedure, alleged unprofessional or inappropriate conduct or discourtesy or rudeness, disparate treatment and police controls used.

During the last year, Police Bureau members filed 66 complaints against other officers but the report doesn’t detail the substance of the complaints.

Voters in November approved a ballot measure calling for the creation of a new independent police oversight board that would investigate complaints against officers and discipline officers.

It’s unclear when the future board will start and what it will look like, but it could take two to three years, according to the mayor’s office.

Jason Renaud — a member of the Mental Health Alliance, which was approved as a “friend of the court” party in the Justice Department settlement case with the city, said the alliance endorsed the new independent oversight board measure.

Yet he echoed the city auditor’s concerns that there is no concrete plan on how to maintain the current Independent Police Review office, which is expected to be eliminated some time in the future, while the city prepares for a future board to take over the investigations of police.

“While the members of the Mental Health Alliance endorsed this initiative, in seven months city leaders have yet to produce a plan for the transition between its current system of accountability and a new one,” he wrote to the City Council on Thursday. “While the current system of accountability is in transition, without a detailed transition plan the city could wind up with no system of police accountability in Portland while we wait for the new system to come online.”

The alliance is made up of Disability Rights Oregon, Mental Health Association of Portland, the Oregon Justice Resource Center and Portland Interfaith Clergy Resistance.

— Maxine Bernstein

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

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian

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