Mingus Mapps
Mapps is a Portland city commissioner.
Since January 1, I have served on the Portland City Council, a job that obliges me to tell the people of Portland the truth. Portland, we have a gun violence crisis. In the first nine months of 2021, our city has seen more than 800 shooting incidents, with more than 235 injured and more than 61 people murdered.
The city is investing in increasing capacity at nonprofit organizations that promote community-based prevention and intervention. I fully support developing a comprehensive plan to end gun violence. But today, and with any plan moving forward, the Portland Police Bureau must play a role to stop the killing on our streets. These are my proposed solutions to end the gun violence in Portland.
First, the city must acknowledge that the police bureau is understaffed. Currently, the Portland Police minimum staffing model recommends 1,100 police officers. Today, Portland employs only 793 police officers. Short staffing public safety has two predictable outcomes. Instead of doing proactive and preventative police work, officers are running from call to call for service. Relatedly, the time it takes for an officer to respond to a 911 call has gone up, increasing frustration and anxiety over the state of public safety in Portland. The bureau should immediately ramp up its recruiting of new officers to help replenish officers’ ranks. At the same time, I am pushing for adding more officers to meet and exceed the minimum staffing levels to make our city safe.
Second, police morale is at an all-time low which makes it hard to hire new officers. Being a cop is dangerous and challenging work on the best of days. Portland and regional officials have a bad habit of vilifying our police for political gain. Police are people who have dedicated their careers to serving the public. I can sympathize. As a Black man in Portland, I can attest that it is sometimes difficult to love and serve a city that does not love you back and does not have your back. We need to end the culture of blaming the police first and understand that challenges and solutions deserve complex and nuanced policymaking. That necessarily must include a strategy of police reforms to enhance accountability, starting with the immediate adoption of body cameras.
Third, we need to expand the Portland Street Response program. Upon completion of the six-month pilot, Portland State University will offer its assessment early next month. Based on that data, we should move with urgency to expand this program. As the commissioner-in-charge of the Bureau of Emergency Communications, we send about half a million calls to the police every year. Too many of those calls involve people who are houseless or mentally ill – people whose needs are best handled by another agency and a poor use of our limited police resources. I am deeply committed to expanding our Portland Street Response program to every block in the city as quickly as possible while also strategically setting it up for success.
Fourth, Portland has a gang problem. Anti-police rhetoric has given way to a feeling of lawlessness, and criminals are filling the void. One of the heartening aspects of being a Black man in an overwhelmingly white town is feeling my neighbors’ well-intentioned commitment to eradicating racism. This Black man feels the love and embrace of the truth that Black Lives Matter. However, willfully ignoring the fact that gang violence is devastating Portland’s Black community is itself a form of racism. Pretending gangs do not exist devalues Black lives. While 33.6% of homicide victims were Black males last fiscal year, we make up roughly 3% of the population. At this point, it is disingenuous to deny that the Portland Police Bureau and law enforcement have a crucial role to play. I want to thank Capt. James Crooker, Acting Lt. Ken Duilio and Cmdr. Art Nakamura for volunteering to lead the new Focused Intervention Team, created to respond to and interrupt the retaliatory violence that fuels gang-related shootings. This team, along with more anti-gun violence specialty teams, will stem the current homicide rate. Officers who volunteer for these units are heroes and deserve our admiration and highest respect.
Portlanders deserve public safety. We need proper staffing and funding levels for our police bureau. We need commonsense reforms, such as equipping all officers with body cameras. We need an urgent and data-driven expansion of Portland Street Response, and we need Portlanders and City Council to support police specialty teams, like the Focused Intervention Team. Most of all, we need to recognize that police must be part of the equation for stopping the cycle of violence plaguing our city. Portlanders, please join me in showing our support.