Casey Minter / OPB
Retired Oregon Supreme Court judge Paul DeMuniz was the only Oregon-based member of the team tasked with overseeing mandated reforms of the Portland Police Department, until he quit for health reasons this last spring. That left a gaping hole in a team of outsiders who had to work with community members and a police force in a city they didn't live in. The solution? Kathleen Saadat.
Saadat has worked for the city of Portland, Multnomah County, and the State of Oregon on affirmative action, diversity, and LGBTQ rights. Despite having said she wanted to raise hell in her retirement, Saadat wasn't immediately certain she wanted the job when they called her to offer it.
"I'm not young anymore, my friends were concerned that I might tire myself out," Saadat says. "I got a lot of support for doing it, which was one thing I needed to know. Would I have people who would help me think this through? This is not something one person can do."
Saadat began to feel her own passion for the position once she started attending the meetings. In conversation with with Dave Miller on Think Out Loud, Saadat described meeting bright-eyed, passionate people who cared, but needed help focusing their passions.
"The settlement agreement is 75-pages long. Lots in there," Saadat says. "Questions of how you operate within this complex: an out of town contractor, the city of Portland, the police bureau, the community itself and the settlement agreements. Those all have to be brought together in some way that we're communicating."
Saadat wants to help bridge the gap from rigid, red-taping bureaucrat and your everyday Portland citizen. She talks of herself as a facilitator, a conduit, a thought leader and a translator.
“I want to facilitate ideas from people to help them understand the bureaucracy and help the bureaucracy understand them. This is not an event where people come in with their briefcases and their already defined language. This is the case of people coming together from different parts of our community who are going to need to create a standard language for themselves and to agree upon direction...That's going to take some work.”
Saadat is emphatic that these meetings are an open forum of discussion, and will only be successful if all sides of the issues are represented. Five non-voting members of the Compliance Officer/Community Liaison (COCL) team are Portland Police Officers, and Saadat would like to hear more input from them.
"Our perspectives as people who are not police officers runs up to a line, and then we need to hear some more," Saadat says. "We need to hear what's on the other side of that line that we don't see, that we don't hear about."
The main focus of the COCL team is different than the national discourse around police and race. Portland's federally mandated police reforms must address better ways for the police force to deal with mental illness. However, Saadat believes that the COCL is ultimately the best way to address many issues surrounding policing.
"I've talked about change a long time, I've helped to do some and I've marched for some. This is an opportunity to do change at an entirely different level," Saadat says. "This is a model, this is an experiment, and so people will be looking at us to see if they can replicate this model of community involvement in other places of our country. That's pretty big, that's pretty important."
Many people have been disheartened by the current state of our nation's police/community interactions. Saadat believes that focusing on these negatives only leads to more negative situations.
"I get dispirited and then I come back. It's a matter of understanding that cynicism takes me out of the fight," Saadat says. "If I'm a cynic, then I don't do anything to change anything, but as long as I'm here why not do something to make it better."
The COCL/COAB will hold it's next open meeting on the 25th of June at Portland Community College Southeast campus, 2305 SE 82nd in the Community Hall Annex starting at 5:30pm.