A person armed with a gun who reportedly fired several shots Wednesday night in Southeast Portland was shot and killed by an officer, according to the Portland Police Bureau.
Police said officers responded around 8:17 p.m. to a home on Southeast 126th Avenue at East Burnside Street, after multiple 911 callers reported someone firing a gun in the front yard.
Officers arrived and requested assistance from the bureau’s Focused Intervention Team, a police group devoted to proactively interrupting cycles of retaliatory violence. The formation of the team, FIT for short, was announced just over a year ago by Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, who recently launched the Safer Summer PDX initiative to address the city’s ongoing gun violence.
This is the third police shooting this week in Portland. On July 26, Officer Kyle Roush shot at a man in a truck who police say tried to run the officer over. On July 24, a police spokesperson said officers were trying to arrest a man when a struggle ensued. Witness video shows two officers wrestling with a man on the ground when what sounds like a gunshot can be heard. As one officer continues wrestling the man and appears to take a gun from him, another officer, later identified as Mina Cavalli-Singer, shoots the man six times, killing him.
Portland police have shot at five people this year, killing three. Last year, PPB officers shot eight people and killed four.
At the Southeast Portland scene, a FIT officer shot the armed person, police said. Paramedics also responded, but the person died.
Police said Wheeler’s office was notified of the shooting. The bureau’s assistant chief of investigations Jami Resch, who served as the bureau’s police chief for six months in 2020, went to the scene.
In a statement, Resch said “The level of violence officers have been responding to is unprecedented.”
The Portland police homicide unit is investigating the death. The bureau will conduct an internal review of the officer’s use of force.
The person who was killed had not been identified as of early Thursday morning.
This story will be updated.
