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Below you will find various resources for people who have been subject to or witnesses of questionable police activities in relation to Occupy Portland. If you’re facing criminal charges, consult with an attorney before filing the complaint.
Occupiers subject to or witnessing excessive force, rude or disrespectful conduct or other violations of the Portland Police Bureau should:
1. File a complaint here with the Independent Police Review (IPR). Alternatively the IPR can be contacted here: , Phone: 503-823-0146. Send requests to the attention of Steve Morrow, who is coordinating these complaints.
2 Request that IPR do an independent investigation (which is within IPR’s authority). This should be done by a separate written attachment (word document or other) to the complaint with these words:
I ask that this complaint be investigated independently by IPR staff and not referred to IA, pursuant to: Portland City Code 3.21.120(C)(2)(b) and for the reason that: that IAD has not done an adequate job investigating a particular category of complaints. (E.G. Excessive Force).
Please keep a copy of whatever you file.
AND
3. Please call the NLG Legal Hotline (503-902-5340) and state that you’ve made these claims to the IPR. This hotline serves as the Occupy coordination on these claims. For more information about the complaint process, click here.
For anyone that may have gotten a ticket in their car/on their bike during the port shutdown:
There is a Portland Police Policy Directive that prohibits police retaliation for “[d]emonstrating one’s constitutional rights”( 310.20 in the policy manual).
If you were one of those people pulled over and you feel like it was because of your protest activities it’s worth filing a complaint over (Follow step 1-3 above).
If you aren’t satisfied with your initial IPR findings and need help to appeal the results, contact
Attend today’s police accountability hearing. See below for the Portland Copwatch Press Release related to today’s hearing on police accountability:
For Immediate Release December’s 14, 2011
Mayor proposes weaker review board despite calls for strength
3 PM Hearing Wednesday
On Wednesday, December 14 at 3 PM, Portland City Council will hold its
fourth hearing on police accountability in just over a month. Responding
to three previous sets of testimony from community members calling to
strengthen the Citizen Review Committee (CRC), Portland’s civilian police
review board, Mayor Adams has proposed a change that will weaken the CRC.
Last week’s hearing on the 8th featured dozens of Occupy Portland
protestors relating first-hand stories of police brutality and misconduct,
urging Council to take the proposals for a stronger CRC seriously, and
asking Adams to “be nice to us.” More than a dozen community members of
the Police Oversight Stakeholder group, convened by Commissioner Randy
Leonard from May to September 2010 to examine possible changes to the CRC,
also testified at the first three hearings, asking that all 41 of their
recommendations be adopted, rather than the 3 or 4 currently on the table.
At the first hearing, CRC Chair Jamie Troy urged Council to change the
standard by which CRC determines whether an officer’s conduct violates
policy to be less deferential to the police than the current “reasonable
person” standard. Person after person testified in support of a different
standard, noting that the current system involves the police Internal
Affairs conducting all investigations into alleged police misconduct.
While the Independent Police Review Division (IPR), which takes citizen
complaints and does the initial “intake investigation,” has the power to
do independent investigations, it has never done so in 10 years of
existence.
The dispute seems to boil down to this: The CRC and many in the community
see that the Review Committee’s role is to review the evidence, while the
Mayor and others in the City insist its role is to review the process.
The Mayor’s proposal will restrict the CRC and take away some of the only
power they have. In a system where people are already concerned is
designed with far too much police involvement to be “Independent,” moving
to take away CRC’s power will lead to more community mistrust at a time
the City needs to build confidence in its police and the oversight system.
Rather than responding to the calls to change the standard of review,
which trace back to the IPR audit released by consultant Eileen Luna
Firebaugh in 2008, the Mayor released a set of proposed changes on Friday
that would forbid CRC from considering any new information presented
during appeals hearings when deciding whether an officer violated policy,
instead forcing the board to send the case back to Internal Affairs for
more investigation. Current practice is that CRC uses its discretion as to
whether new information can be used to formulate a new proposed finding,
to send a case back for more investigation, or to accept the original
finding.
Police accountability group Portland Copwatch points out that there are
several scenarios which have happened in the past in which CRC should not
be required to send a case back to Internal Affairs rather than proposing
a new finding. In 2002, an officer admitted to an act of misconduct at the
CRC hearing, saying she probably did not call the appellant “ignorant”
but, rather, probably called her “stupid” (
http://www.portlandcopwatch.
CRC’s recommendations have been to add a “debriefing” to non-Sustained
findings, meaning that a supervisor should talk to the officer about the
incident. And in some cases, the new information has even led CRC to
support the original findings.
Stakeholders who have testified in the past, some of whom will return at
Wednesday’s hearing, include Portland Copwatch, the League of Women
Voters, the ACLU of Oregon, the National Lawyers Guild, National Alliance
on Mental Illness, and the Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for
Justice and Police Reform.
The Mayor’s announcement about his changes is here:
http://www.portlandonline.com/
and the detailed proposal is here:
http://www.portlandonline.com/
Portland Copwatch’s analysis that outlines the previous seven changes set
forth
by the Auditor and 11 Stakeholder recommendations Council should add to the
ordinance can be found here:
http://www.portlandcopwatch.
As a historical note, at the request of the Auditor and IPR Director in
June 2003, Council made changes taking away CRC’s power to select its new
members, one of several such power struggles that led to the resignation
of five members that August.
After passing amendments in March, 2010 to strengthen IPR, the community
was promised that changes to CRC would be forthcoming. It remains to be
seen how the community and the CRC will respond to this latest effort to
de-fang the police watchdog.
For more information contact Portland Copwatch at 503-236-3065