Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt said he plans to run for a second term.
“We’ve done a lot of great things,” Schmidt said. “But we’re just building and I intend to see that through another term.”
He said he would make a formal announcement later this year.
Schmidt won election in May 2020 with roughly 75% of the vote on a platform of ending mass incarceration and holding law enforcement accountable. At the time, he was part of a larger wave of like-minded prosecutors who laid out a vision shaped by their experiences as public defenders. While Schmidt hasn’t been a public defender, he was elected from outside the office to bring about change.
“When I set out on this path several years ago — feels like a million years ago, pre-pandemic, pre-George Floyd’s murder, pre a lot of things — we talked about ending mass incarceration,” Schmidt said in an interview. “We talked about racial disparity in the criminal justice system. We talked about getting at the underlying causes that lead to criminality. We’re making progress.”
Schmidt said he remains focused on those principles.
Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt speaking at a press conference at the Multnomah County Courthouse in Portland, Ore., on Dec. 14, 2022.
April Ehrlich / OPB
News that Schmidt plans to seek a second term was first reported by Willamette Week.
From his first days in office, Schmidt has faced criticism from police and other elected district attorneys in Oregon. For the second year in a row last year, Portland logged a record-high number of homicides. The rise in shootings happened as the pandemic dramatically reduced the number of jury trials and a year-long public defense crisis has led to judges regularly dismissing cases.
“There have certainly been a lot of headwinds that maybe I didn’t anticipate in 2019, and it’s made the job challenging,” Schmidt said. “There’s no doubt about it. But we’re still making good progress.”
He has also made recent efforts to reset a sometimes rocky relationship between his office and the police. At a news conference last month, Schmidt appeared with law enforcement leaders, including the head of the Portland Police Association, which represents rank-and-file officers.
“A lot of the political narrative is you have to have one or the other: You can only have reform or you can have safety, and you must choose,” Schmidt said last month. “Everybody here behind me today is committed to the idea that no, those two things are intricately linked.”
During the last two years, Schmidt said he’s launched programs aimed at addressing systemic inequality: the justice integrity unit, a new restorative justice program and a diversion court for mandatory minimum sentences, which have disproportionately affected defendants of color.
“Those things are just getting off the ground,” Schmidt said. “They need time. They need effort and intention.”