History of the Portland Police Bureau
[2] The first member of the Metropolitan Police Force to die in the line of duty was Officer Charles F. Schoppe, who was shot to death on June 13, 1874, while trying to disarm a drunken saloon patron.
[11] In March 1981, PPB officers (Craig Ward, Jim Galloway) dropped dead possums in front of Burger Barn, a Black soul food restaurant owned by George Powe on MLK.
Stan Peters and the PPA protested the firings, organizing a "Cops Have Rights Too" rally, and demanding Charles Jordan, Portland's first Black city councilor and police commissioner.
PPA hired Ward and Galloway to work for the union in the meantime; months later, the firing of the two was overturned in binding arbitration, which found Jordan failed to follow procedures.
C. T. Vivian came to the city to organize anti-Klan efforts, believing the possums represented a "Klan mentality" in the department and the ruling would lead to further attacks.
A month after the killing, when a grand jury decided to not prosecute the officers, PPA president Stan Peters said people shouldn't "dwell on the past", stating community relations would improve once those angry with the police moved on.
Mayor H. Russell Albee, embroiled in several unrelated controversies, ordered chief John Clark to visibly enforce the prohibition laws.
[10]: 49-50 George Luis Baker became mayor in June 1917; he and PPB chief Leon Jenkins took control of liquor distribution (through bootlegging) and kept speakeasies open.
[10]: 52 In the 1950s through the 1980s, PPB's Intelligence Division, the effective successor to the Red Squad, kept files on hundreds of Portland organizations, ranging from the ACLU, Black United Front, Bicycle Repair Collective, and the People's Food co-op.
[20] Winfield Falk was a member of the right-wing John Birch Society, which had been involved with intelligence gathering in a similar unit of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1983.
Individuals tracked in the files included Bev Stein, Ron Herndon, Neil Goldschmidt, Vera Katz, Harl H. Haas Jr., and Elizabeth Furse.
During an ethnographic study using document theory, researcher Kathy Carbone created an object biography on the files as a whole, noting the concept of "imagined-but-unavailable records" led many to experience strong emotions.
Children (including a 10 month old baby), independent police observers and a TV cameraperson (Beth English, KPTV) were deliberately sprayed from as little as one foot away from their face.
The assistant chief, Greg Clark, put responsibility of the children being pepper sprayed on the parents; complaints were filed with the Bureau but they said no inappropriate behavior had occurred.
While denied by the officers, the episode was caught on a nearby security camera, showing him being repeatedly punched in the head and tazed four times in 30 seconds.
After documented aggression against English and another woman the following year, friends began to speak out against him, stating he had been collecting Nazi memorabilia in the early 1980s and that they would drive through the city, yelling racist and homophobic statements at people.
The city attorney's office tried to quash the Nazi details in a lawsuit, stating it violated Kruger's free-speech and privacy rights.
The resulting 2014 settlement expunged his past disciplinary records and provided him a complimentary letter from police chief Mike Reese.
After several internal reviews, Police Chief Michael Reese terminated Frashour in November 2010, indicating he had acted in poor judgement, that Campbell was instinctively responding to pain from the beanbag, was only displaying passive resistance, and had not put officers or the community in immediate threat.
PPA president Daryl Turner said the firing had been politically motivated, and said 25 officers had stated the deadly force was reasonable during Frashour's arbitration.
On the incident review side, we were disappointed when two of seven commanders failed to write a substantive analysis of fatal shootings, discouraged when a Training Division Review did not engage in any analysis or identify any issue worthy of reflection, and disquieted when we learned that in three cases Training staff stepped out of their lanes and vouched in the grand jury for the appropriateness of involved officers' use of deadly force with only a passing familiarity of the facts.
And we worry when we see the application of the “action/reaction principle” as a reflexive justification for the officers' use of deadly force, in a way that recalls how the reference to “furtive movements” was uncritically used in the past to justify officers' actions.In a 120-page independent review of police-involved killings in 2020, the auditors noted that despite an improvement in transparency and outreach related to the killings, they noted the lack of a "reservoir of goodwill" from the department and called out the failure of timeliness in the investigations and review process.
Chief Mike Reese demanded the officers remove the images, calling them inflammatory, noting it was against policy to imply such a political endorsement using their badges.
Alt-right demonstrators such as Todd Kelsay and Tusitala “Tiny” Toese assisted Department of Homeland Security officers detain and arrest counter-protesters.
ACLU of Oregon described the kettling as a "counterproductive and constitutionally dubious response to protesters", and opened a class action lawsuit against the police in November 2017; the case was still ongoing as of August 2020.
[75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][excessive citations] After 2017-2018 confrontations between the alt-right and anti-fascists, Lieutenant Jeff Niiya's close conversations via text with Joey Gibson, head of Patriot Prayer, was published.
Center for Investigative Reporting's Reveal documented his ties to extremist groups during his time in Burlington, including the anti-government Military Patriot Oath Keepers and the anti-Muslim Voice of the American Infidels.
In what Rolling Stone reporter Tim Dickinson called "with no remorse or sense of irony", the PPB has been widely criticized for their violent tactics to dissolve the protests including tear gas, flash bombs, impact munitions, and use of force without warning.
The PPB were supplemented with federal agents deployed by President Donald Trump who have reportedly arrested rioters and antifa off the streets from unmarked police vehicles for detainment without reading Miranda Rights, providing cause, or identifying themselves.
Days later, Wheeler emailed the police chief and staff, admonishing them for the apparent insubordination in the press release, and later called it "serious breach of protocol and an inappropriate use of City communications resources".
