Site Navigation

Citizen Review Committee Examines Transition to New System
"Independent" Police Review Finds New Police Review Board Volunteers

The current police oversight system has two bodies with community volunteers which can review cases of possible misconduct. The primary body, the 11-member Citizen Review Committee (CRC) is empowered to hear appeals of investigated cases, but hasn't had such a hearing since 2021. The other, the Police Review Board, has only one or two community members on it at a time, along with one staff person from the "Independent" Police Review (IPR), which houses the CRC, and three to four police officers of various ranks. As noted in PPR #91, the CRC is down to just seven members, one of whose terms technically ended in February after nine years. The PRB pool, according to available records, had no members whose terms went past early 2023. So although the IPR got City Council to approve four new PRB members in February, that's not a large enough number to handle all of the deadly force and other serious cases that might lead to officer discipline (also see PRB information in the shootings article and the PRB article). Apparently, the City believes that when they updated City Code about the PRB in 2023, they empowered CRC members to act like other PRB community members, so there can be-- and have been-- two CRC members sitting in on some PRB hearings. Even so, that means the entire pool is just ten people. Meanwhile, CRC has started a Work Group to look at the transition from the existing system to the new one embedded in the City Charter and expected to start running this year.

At CRC's February meeting, Deputy City Attorney Heidi Brown made a nearly hour-long presentation about the new Community Board for Police Accountability (CBPA). However, because the City is negotiating the structure of that Board with the Portland Police Association (PPA), and then has to get a final proposal approved by the US Department of Justice, most of her answers were vague and unhelpful. Nonetheless, the CRC's Work Group held their first meeting in March to look at issues involved in wrapping up the IPR's work conducting intake of complaints and getting the new system up to speed. All of these efforts are in flux due to the PPA filing a proposed ballot measure to further gut the CBPA (see oversight article).

At their April meeting, the CRC heard from Chief Bob Day that he is committed to accountability, but struggles to impose discipline on officers found out of policy years after incidents such as those at the 2020 protests. That's mostly due to how long it takes for the PRB to consider potential misconduct and discipline.

For what it's worth, one of the new PRB members is Pastor Robin Wisner, who had been a co-chair of the Portland Committee on Community Engaged Policing but left that group to have more time for PRB cases (a good thing, as deadly force cases can be 1000 pages long). Another member, Leslie Brunker, was on the Training Advisory Council from 2019-2021. Still, the old pool had 15 or 16 people in it and the City was only able to recruit four new members. As of mid-March, they claim that applications are being taken on an ongoing basis both for CRC and PRB memberships.

For its part, IPR continues to make inadequate reports to the community and CRC, including that the monthly Director's reports:

a) contain the names of officers and the people they shot/shot at, but do not explain the various review levels where the cases are reported to be,
b) often contain very little information other than the deadly force cases and statistics on numbers of investigations,
and
c) rarely prompt any questions or comments from the CRC.

As noted in our last issue, IPR also failed to present its 2022 annual report, released in August, to the CRC by the end of 2023, and appear to have no plans to do so in 2024.

May, 2024
Also in PPR #92

Portland Copwatch
PO Box 42456
Portland, OR 97242
(503) 236-3065/ Incident Report Line (503) 321-5120
e-mail: copwatch@portlandcopwatch.org

Portland Copwatch is a grassroots, volunteer organization promoting police accountability through citizen action.

People's Police Report #92 Table of Contents
Back to Portland Copwatch home page
Peace and Justice Works home page
Back to top