Congressional Republicans from Washington and New York ventured outside their districts — and states — this week to deliver an urgent message in the suburban town of Fairview — the Portland police budget is too low.
Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Washington, and John Katko, R-New York and the ranking member on the House Committee on Homeland Security, met privately with representatives from local law enforcement agencies about funding cuts and increases in crime. Katko held a similar meeting outside his district with New York City police last week.
The two out-of-state House members then held a press conference decrying the Portland Police Bureau’s budget cuts and erroneously blaming those cuts for the city’s increased homicide rate.
Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-WA, and John Katko, R-N.Y., speak at a press conference in the suburb of Fairview to blame Portland Police Bureau budget cuts for the rise in crime.
Jonathan Levinson / Jonathan Levinson
Homicide rates and gun violence have been increasing nationwide and have impacted cities that cut police budgets as well as somewhere leaders chose to leave police funding untouched, or even increase spending.
“The two biggest takeaways are something that should be painfully obvious to everyone,” Katko said. “When you take funding away from police, bad things happen. And when you handcuff police’s ability to do their job, bad things happen.”
No lawmakers from Oregon attended the meeting.
Attempts to link Portland’s police budget to the crime rate ignores the web of factors influencing crime rates and belies the reality of the past eight years when the bureau’s budget grew from $169 million in 2013 to $229 million in 2020. The proposed FY 21-22 budget returns police funding to 2018-19 levels, or $226 million when crime rates were substantially lower than they are currently.
Katko and Herrera Beutler were joined at the press conference by officers representing police departments in Eugene, Gresham, Vancouver and Tigard. Of those, only the Gresham police budget has been cut in the past year, largely due to a longstanding budget shortfall exacerbated by the pandemic. The Tigard and Vancouver City Councils increased police funding.
None of the police departments in Herrera Beutler’s district had their budgets cut this year.
Herrera Beutler said even more officers attended the meeting but did not come to the press conference. She wouldn’t confirm if any members of the Portland Police Bureau were there. A PPB spokesperson said they aren’t aware of anyone from the city police department attending.
During their roundtable with officers, Katko said, they expressed frustration with new laws being passed they consider punitive in nature.
The Oregon legislature approved a raft of policing bills this past session aimed at strengthening police oversight and accountability. Those new laws range from creating a uniform statewide background check process to toughening requirements for officers to intervene and report officer misconduct to limit an outside arbitrator’s leeway to overturn a police department’s discipline decisions.
All but a few of the changes passed with broad bipartisan support.
“Cops are afraid to do their job,” Katko said. “When cops are afraid to do their job, that’s when they get hurt because they think too much.”
The city of Portland was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2012 for a pattern and practice of unconstitutional use of force against people in mental health crises. The police bureau continues to operate under DOJ supervision.
Portland officers have killed two people in mental health crises so far this year. And in January, a Tigard police officer shot and killed a man locked in his car and experiencing a mental health crisis.
All three of those killings are still being investigated.
Police investigate the scene at a Motel 6 where an officer shot and killed a man on June 24, 2021 in Portland.
Jonathan Levinson / Jonathan Levinson
Herrera Beutler, who represents Southwest Washington, said she crossed the Columbia River into Oregon because “we are a region” and she has constituents who “are exposed to the same threats that people who live in Portland are exposed to.”
Herrera Beutler also said she came to Portland to try to fill a leadership void from the city’s elected leaders.
“That’s part of the problem,” she said. “It takes two of us who are not directly in Portland, coming here to highlight this to get this attention.”
Portland voters reelected Mayor Ted Wheeler last November after months of racial justice protests and demands for increased police accountability. And while some Portland voters may see a leadership void — there is a recall effort underway to oust Wheeler from office — electoral results suggest they aren’t pining for more politically conservative leadership. Coming in a close second to Wheeler last November was Sarah Iannarone, a candidate firmly to Wheeler’s left and a decidedly harsher critic of the police than Wheeler.
Before the press conference, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat whose district includes most of Multnomah County and Portland, tweeted his disapproval.
“If Congresswoman Herrera Beutler wanted to be helpful, she could work within her own district to try and prevent the Proud Boys and other white nationalists who live there from spreading their hate and violence in Oregon and in our U.S. Capitol,” Blumenauer said, referring to Vancouver-based far-right groups like Patriot Prayer that have made a habit in recent years of coming into Portland to hold rallies that often turn violent.
Katko said he and Herrera Beutler accept that some police officers violate the public trust but that the response has gone way overboard.
“When you have problems, you don’t swat a fly with a sledgehammer,” Katko said.
But even modest attempts at accountability have been blocked by a system that has historically made it difficult to discipline police officers.
Portland officer Andrew Caspar was fired last August after an internal affairs investigation found he intentionally delayed responding to a welfare check, let the suspect walk away, and was dishonest with investigators. The Oregonian/OregonLive reported this week an arbitrator overturned that decision, forcing the bureau to reinstate him and pay him back pay.
In her meeting with officers, Herrera Beutler said, they talked about how difficult it has become for them to protect the community.
“I am so proud and humbled that men and women every day in our community in Southwest Washington and in Portland continue to put on the uniform and really be willing to take not just smears and insults, but bodily harm,” she said.
Katko is a moderate Republican whose own upstate New York district includes Syracuse, New York, where homicides increased 55% last year. He said the police, society and the city of Portland are at a tipping point.
“How much more are the citizens and the city of Portland going to take?” he asked, on the one-year anniversary of the first time federal law enforcement officers burst from the federal courthouse and used tear gas and impact munitions to clear protesters from Portland streets alongside city police. “You see people everywhere committing crimes and not being held responsible.”
If there was a tipping point, however, it may have come last November when 80% of Portland voters supported a new independent police oversight board after the Portland police documented more than 6,000 uses of force against protesters in 2020.
Other possible tipping points include any number of the 42 killings by Portland police officers between 2003, when an officer shot Kendra James, and June 24 of this year, when another officer shot Michael Ray Townsend.
None of the more than 60 officers who fired in those deaths have been disciplined or indicted.
