Portland leaders say they will slowly phase out a controversial arrangement between the police bureau and Downtown Clean & Safe, a nonprofit that provides extra cleaning and security services in the city center.
Since 1997, the nonprofit has hired Portland police to patrol the enhanced services district downtown, one of three zones in the city in which property owners pay a fee to get better services than what the city supplies. Under the agreement, four police officers on bikes are assigned to patrol the 213-block radius. Businesses that pay into the district receive a faster police response as a result.
A woman walks past the Woodlark Building, home of the Woodlark Hotel, on Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2019, in downtown Portland, Ore.
Bryan M. Vance / OPB
The arrangement has come under scrutiny in recent years with a city audit highlighting a failure by Portland leaders to supervise these districts and showcasing how oversight of police in the area had been left in the hands of a private entity. In the aftermath of the audit, advocacy groups argued a private group should not be able to hire public safety officers.
The thorny issue was left unresolved during last year’s contentious vote by the Portland City Council to renew the city’s contract with Downtown Clean & Safe. That $25 million deal committed the nonprofit to overseeing the enhanced services district for another five years but left many of the most controversial aspects of the arrangement unchanged, including the district’s reliance on private security and city police officers.
With a separate agreement between Downtown Clean & Safe and the police bureau expiring at the end of June, city leaders have been quietly re-examining the relationship. On Wednesday, the city council will consider a new four-year contract between the two entities that would eventually see Downtown Clean & Safe sever its relationship with the police bureau.
The change would happen gradually. According to the contract, Downtown Clean & Safe would continue to pay the city for four police officers for two more years, through June 2024. Clean & Safe would pay the city at most $544,000 for the first year and an undetermined sum for the second year.
In the summer of 2024, Downtown Clean & Safe would stop paying for the bike patrol, under the proposed agreement. But the police bureau has agreed to keep officers in the area for at least an additional two years through June 2026, though the nonprofit would no longer pay for these services.
Clean & Safe members will continue to be able to reach out directly to the bike patrol if they need a police officer, and law enforcement and Clean & Safe leadership will check in on a weekly basis, per the contract.
This aspect of the agreement has already drawn outrage from some of the most vocal opponents to Downtown Clean & Safe, who see the district getting a sweet deal on the city’s dime: two years of free personalized police services.
“By phasing out the funding from Clean and Safe to the PPB, it is now ensuring that the public will be funding private interests entirely for the exact same role they were serving before,” organizers with Stop The Sweeps, an advocacy group that rallied against renewing the district last year, wrote in a statement. “… Now all community members of Portland will be forced to ‘opt-in’ to Clean and Safe via this contract and forced to pay for security services that many disagree with and have had terrible outcomes as evidenced by the state of Downtown.”
Shawn Campbell, the city’s new Enhanced District Coordinator, spearheaded the contract and said a slow dissolution of the arrangement presented a “win-win” for both advocacy groups and downtown businesses. The deal transitions the private sector out of public safety in a “responsible manner” that won’t leave downtown scrambling for a beefed-up police presence they have relied on for a quarter of a century.
“Whether or not it should have existed, [we] can’t really do anything about it because we don’t have a time machine,” Campbell said. “At this point, it’s a level of service that’s existed for 25 years, and it’s not something that’s a very cut-and-dried thing just to get rid of.”
Campbell said incomplete records, particularly around lower-level calls for service, meant city leaders were not ready to terminate the arrangement immediately. He said they wanted to collect more data on what kind of calls bike police working with Downtown Clean & Safe are answering before the city takes over full patrolling responsibility for the area.
There also appears to be some wiggle room for the city in the years that Clean & Safe is effectively getting a free bike patrol. The contract states that the police bureau “agrees to the goal” of keeping officers in the area for Downtown Clean & Safe between 2024-2026, but Campbell said the bureau will be able to move the police if they’re needed in a different part of the city due to a staffing shortage. The contract commits the police bureau to make “every effort” to maintain the bike patrol and the current level of service through 2026.