No Reason to Trust Portland Police

Two weeks ago, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) grilled Iran-Contra-era official Elliott Abrams about his veracity in light of his conviction for lying to Congress, stating flatly “I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony you give today to be truthful.”

People of Portland, this is the hard-nosed approach you must take with the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) in its recent collaboration with Vancouver-based neo-fascist hate groups Patriot Prayer and the local Proud Boys. We are already seeing the official PR spin but things have only just begun. Already a troubled department, 2019 has not been kind to PPB, but the brass are calmly consulting a well-tested playbook on how to minimize damage to their autonomy.

First, an investigation is promised. Of course, it will be internal which is self-evidently ridiculous. Any external evaluation will likely be performed by “experts,” which usually means former law enforcement officials, like the Margolis Healy consulting firm Portland State University hired to review its public safety policies after campus police killed a man last year. Next is the call for more training. Sure enough, almost immediately, city officials announced a training effort for identifying white supremacy, as though PPB had not already demonstrated its tolerance — and even reward — for such behavior in the past. Last Thursday was the community policing piece — a public “listening session,” where the public was allowed to vent its anger, while police took quiet notes on the size, strength, and identify of the opposition.

What will be next? It depends — the playbook is nothing if not flexible. Likely is some combination of: A doubling down on trainings (provided by a specialist firm composed of former law enforcement), promises of changes to protest policy (difficult to verify and enforce), a few ambiguous technocratic fixes (under the control of the department), promises of yet more listening in one capacity or another (no mechanism for police responsibility).

If the opposition is sufficiently organized and sustained, two things become more likely. First, a “bad apple” will be publicly offered up as a sacrifice even though it will become abundantly clear that everyone at the highest levels knew what was going on. Lt. Jeff Niiya, the figure at the center of text-message-gate, is the current fall guy, but it will take significant pressure to see him actually fired without a taxpayer-funded golden parachute. Second, given an extreme effort, some version of the community policing playbook will be emphasized, expanded, or enacted. Here, citizens will be asked to expend yet more energy toward community collaborations in which officers entertain complaints and other venting and yet still suffer no accountability whatsoever. Another, better version (with more training!) of protest liaison will be proposed. Little or nothing will be done regarding the neo-fascists to the north.

What invites this level of cynicism, you may ask? Before arriving in Portland, I spent five years watching the refinement of this playbook by the Los Angeles Police Department, the department which incubates law enforcement executives for the entire West Coast (e.g., in Portland, recall former Chief Mark Kroeker). From 2008 to 2013, my research partner and I attended community-police meetings large and small, observing and interviewing cops and residents. What we saw was the large-scale enactment of the post-Rodney King public relations strategy organized to insulate the department from consequences and channel anger at police into harmless venting sessions and provide yet more intelligence and support to police.

For example, command staff hijacked several meetings with prepared narratives regarding “officer involved shootings” intended to absolve LAPD of wrongdoing (once, officers brought pictures of a Tech-9 for attendees to share with stubborn neighbors). Another meeting saw anger about a police shooting of a Guatemalan man in Silverlake channeled into the police “use of force” simulator to convince residents that policing is essentially a shoot/don’t shoot video game. When LAPD finally broke free of the federal consent decree regulating their behavior in 2009, police commanders took over area meetings with a tightly scripted set of talking points to suffocate alarm. These were meant to sound organic but the presentation appeared mysteriously outside of the meeting agenda, the brass brooked no pushback, and identical presentations appeared at other meetings across the city.

Controlling the narrative and channeling dissent into such forums is a way to siphon off anger, smother critique, and exhaust those pushing for change. Community anger surrounding police reaction to Chris Dorner’s private war on law enforcement in 2013 was managed in exactly this way — meetings held, promises made, investigations chartered. The subsequent investigation report, released to little fanfare some months after exhausted activists had outrun the community’s attention span, simply reiterated the police line.

We cannot expect police to engage in good faith. Police have broad latitude to do as they like under the cover of public safety — who comprises the “public” of course, is up to them — and are interested first and foremost in self-preservation and autonomy. During the Dorner incident, police shot wildly at people and vehicles, ultimately shooting at nearly as many people as Dorner himself. Police believe that they can act as they like, with impunity, and their efforts in the coming weeks will absolutely aim towards continuing in that capacity, with or without Lt. Niiya. They will quietly fight accountability at every turn while pretending to invite criticism. They will listen. They will promise better training. They will promise to investigate. They will even, if pushed, fire an officer or two (with a severance pay, who will go on to police elsewhere). But what they will not do is provide transparency or accept oversight. Without that, there is no reason for the public to trust that the testimony they give will be truthful. We should not stand for that.