The #secretpublic Process of Hiring Our Next Chief of Police
The new year brought new false promises from Portland’s Mayor, Ted Wheeler.
In his first few days in office, Mayor Wheeler promised that the public would be deeply involved in the hiring of our next Chief of Police. Fast-forward six months: the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) riddled with high profile scandals, several officer involved shootings and continued use of excessive force. The public’s trust in the bureau is continues to weaken. While Mayor Wheeler’s campaign promises, including increased transparency, were welcomed news to a community struggling to cope with Portland’s growing inequity, the Mayor’s touting of public process relies on doublespeak, hardly a credible public process. The people of Portland deserve a visible, not secret, public search for the next Chief of Police: a process which seeks to engage the community and uses our valuable input in a meaningful way.
A #secretpublic Process
On January 6, 2017, a few days after assuming office, OPB asked about the Portland Police Chief hiring process and Mayor Wheeler said:
“When we get down to the top few finalists, let’s say three today as a marker, I’d like to have an opportunity for the public to be able to vet the finalists.”
Somewhere along the way, that promise was mothballed. We are now down to the final six candidates. Instead of the public being able to vet the finalists, three secret panels will ask secret questions and provide secret feedback to Mayor Wheeler which will be used in a secret way against secret criteria. Mayor Wheeler claims the panelists represent the public, but has refused to identify them.
This secret public process has Mayor Wheeler living out an oxymoron.
Though discouraging so far, it is not too late for the Mayor to change course on this process. Here are a few things we think should happen to save the credibility of this crucial hiring decision. The gold standard for public officials (and a fairly common practice in many large organizations) is to hold public forums where the community members and the media have the ability to ask questions of the candidates. Such a forum would allow Portlanders to scrutinize each candidate and establish early on, the understanding that the Police Chief must be accountable to the residents of our city. Candidate names and application materials should be released, encouraging the public to understand why applicants are seeking this position and what each candidate would bring to the city. The public deserves transparency, not secrecy.
Who gets to be a part of Mayor Wheeler’s “public”?
Mayor Wheeler seems to believe the public is being sufficiently represented in this process for a couple of reasons. For one, the public was allowed to complete a non-anonymous questionnaire asking for input on the hiring process. Those who participated will remember that the questionnaire consisted of four overly broad areas, including “what are the most important personal characteristics of a Portland Police Chief?” This vagueness has prompted questions over how the responses would be used during the hiring process. Nonetheless, Portland’s Resistance and other groups encouraged people to complete the survey. We were further discouraged in follow-up contacts with the City asking for alternatives to submitting the survey online and how the responses would actually be used. The City’s response was:
“The Mayor’s Office is using this information, along with other feedback from community members and stakeholders, to inform their process to select the next Portland Police Chief.”
#NotHelpful. Was this information aggregated? Did they perform any kind of statistical weighting to normalize the results to match the demographics of the City? Were efforts made to segment the responses from police officers or their immediate families? Who were the responses provided to? And when? What actions were taken from them (for instance, did they use them to generate the interview questions)? Answers to these kinds of questions would give validity and show respect to the Portlanders who took time out of their busy lives to participate in this process.
The second way the Mayor’s office claims the public is represented in this process is the three secret panels of community members the Mayor’s Office has hand picked to represent the City. It is unclear if these community members are serving in a formal capacity or if they will all be registering as lobbyists per the City’s requirements. Regardless, they have been appointed to represent the broad community that is our city without any kind of process or even nominal accountability. Furthermore, the public does not know what instructions they’ve been given, what processes they will follow, and how their input will even be factored into the final decision.
This is not what a public process looks like.
To rectify these issues, Portland’s Resistance calls on the Mayor’s office to release anonymized responses to the community survey and clearly articulate how the responses have been and will be used. To the extent that the community feedback influenced the questions that candidates will be asked, those questions as well as candidate responses should also be made available. The specifics of the three community panels should be taken out of the shadows. Who are these individuals? How were they selected? What directions were they given? These panels are ostensibly representing the public, so their recommendations should be made public, including the criteria they were instructed to use.
Transparency isn’t just a word
This entire process has failed any measure of transparency. From declining to hold public forums, to refusing to state how community input would be utilized, to hiding the lucky handful of community members who were invited to participate, to withholding the identities and responses of candidates, this process has gone out of its way to exclude meaningful public input. Not what the Mayor promised. This anti-transparency is surprising because, in April, Mayor Wheeler took heat from the police union when he released information about the investigation into Chief Marshman’s suspension. The union felt he had violated employee privacy. In response, the representatives from the Mayor’s Office stated that they:
“determined that the public interest required the release of this information to ensure transparency, given that the matter being investigated involved high ranking police officials.”
Yes! We agree the people of Portland have a huge interest in the suitability of our Police Chief, and what could possibly be more important than hiring the right person?
If Mayor Wheeler is serious about transparency, and we applaud him if he is, then he should commit to principles of real transparency in decision making. First and foremost, the Mayor’s Office should always err on the side of transparency whenever there is a public interest in doing so. Transparency has several aspects, but most critically it means that the public should have access to the information used to make important decisions and an understanding of how that information factored into the final decision. Important decisions such as the (hopefully rare) decision to exclude the public from this process should be publicly justified, including the logical or legal rationale the exclusion is based on. The people of Portland deserve to know why important decisions end up the way that they do.
We had high hopes from Mayor Wheeler for a robust public process in hiring our next Chief of Police, but we worry that without immediate corrections the process will be anything but public. Portland’s Resistance believes in deep democracy. Even though it is sometimes messy or uncomfortable, community voices need to be elevated and the people of Portland must be able to meaningfully engage with their city’s decision making. We believe involving the public is how governmental decisions are best made. Now is the time for Mayor Wheeler to open up, improve this process, and to build community buy-in and support for the next leader (and hopefully visionary change-maker) of our police force.
The people of Portland deserve a real public process, not a #secretpublic process.
