Portland City Hall, September, 2022.
MacGregor Campbell / OPB
In a brief presentation before Portland City Council on people committing retail theft, Portland police officers may have also violated state law.
The Tuesday virtual work session featured updates from a number of Portland police teams, including a 10-minute overview on retail theft prevention in North Portland from a pair of officers. Commander Robert Simon and Sergeant Jorge Mendoza explained how they work with theft prevention staff at large retailers at the Jantzen Beach and Cascade Station shopping centers.
To illustrate their work, Mendoza used a slideshow to walk commissioners through a few “case studies” of recent theft attempts at Dick’s Sporting Goods.
The first slide featured a mugshot of a Black man in his late 30s, listing his name and date of birth. Mendoza described how this man allegedly drove a stolen car to Dick’s and proceeded to steal merchandise from the store before being stopped by Portland police. The following slide featured three more mugshots – two women and one man – who allegedly used a fake check to pay for merchandise from Dick’s.
Like the previous slide, the suspects were all Black. Their mugshots were accompanied by names and birth dates. Mendoza noted that one of the identified women said she was a victim of sex trafficking.
Mendoza ended the presentation with little fanfare.
“That’s what we have for our slideshow,” he said.
The officers involved in putting the slideshow together are now under investigation by the Police Bureau’s internal affairs division for this slideshow, according to the bureau. It’s not clear if Mendoza is under investigation.
That’s due to a state law prohibiting law enforcement from making mugshots public, except under certain circumstances. The 2021 statute allows police to share mugshots publicly only if it is critical to help law enforcement apprehend a dangerous suspect or prompt potential victims of a criminal suspect to come forward. Mugshots can also be posted publicly if the subject has been convicted of the crime they were charged with when the photo was taken.
Three of the four people featured in Mendoza’s presentation have not been convicted for the crimes described. At least one of the suspects’ charges were dropped, according to public records.
None of the five city commissioners present at the meeting questioned the mugshot usage at the time. Mayor Ted Wheeler later shared a link to the recorded presentation on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, praising the Police Bureau.
After the presentation, OPB asked the Police Bureau which exceptions allowed them to publicly share mugshots. By 2 pm Wednesday, the video of the public meeting was removed from the city’s YouTube channel, and Wheeler’s post on X was deleted.
OPB received a response from PPB spokesperson Mike Benner two hours later.
Benner explained that the retail theft slideshow was intended “for internal purposes only.”
“PPB regrets the unintentional error of not omitting the photos before the presentation to City Council, and ultimately the public,” he wrote. “This has been referred to Internal Affairs for review.”
The video of the public meeting, including the retail theft section, has returned to the city’s YouTube page.
Lawyers familiar with the state law say the presentation appears to have violated the statute. Juan Chavez is a civil rights attorney with the Oregon Justice Resource Center, which helped craft the statute.
“Putting their mugshots up in a public forum like that violated their rights under this law,” Chavez said. “From what it sounds like, their faces were only shown to do what police departments frequently used mugshots for in the past, which was to shame and intimidate community members and to act like a mounted trophy for the police. The fact that they only showed pictures of Black people further ties this act to a dangerous and sordid history of racism in this city and state.”
Yet that statute doesn’t include an explicit penalty for officers who violate this law. Chavez said officers could be charged with the crime of “official misconduct,” a state misdemeanor against public servants who “knowingly fail to perform a duty imposed upon the public servant by law.”
Oregon state Rep. Janelle Bynum sponsored the state mugshot law in 2021. At the time of its passage, she said that the policy addressed a public safety concern.
“When law enforcement agencies were releasing booking photos, people were also suffering harm from that,” said Bynum. “They were getting threats at their jobs, they were trapped inside of their homes because people were intimidating them.”
Bynum, who is running for Congress, declined to comment on the PPB’s mugshot presentation.
Law enforcement groups helped craft the legislation and it passed with bipartisan support.
Last month, PPB published a public service announcement on the new law, explaining why the bureau has stopped sharing mugshots.
“This makes it illegal in most cases for us to release mugshots,” said Lieutenant Nathan Sheppard in the video. “Now, I don’t know about you, but I for one don’t want to go to jail.”