July 02, 2003

Anger And Frustration Vented But Kendra James Forum Produces Little Real Progress

This might be cheating somewhat. The headline above reflects, I believe, the overall result of Tuesday night's community forum on the shooting death of Kendra James. But, as I try to process it after the fact, the breadth and depth of the discussion -- and the sheer weight of, for example, the presentation of the case from law enforcement -- might be a stretch beyond my ability to synthesize into a coherent item here.

So for now, I'll leave you with a few items from other sources, and at least one comment of my own.

First up, this KGW story -- headlined, "Forum does little to resolve Portland police shooting strife" -- seems to agree with my perception on how productive, or unproductive, the forum might have been:

Portland Police Bureau Chief Mark Kroeker and Mayor Vera Katz led a community forum Tuesday night explaining why a police officer who shot Kendra James during a traffic stop is still on the force.

But some in the crowd say the forum did little to answer their questions, despite the presentation of a video tape and computer graphics re-enacting the events of the May 5 shooting on N. Skidmore Street.

It's early yet, so the article is fairly skimpy. Expect everyone to have more substantial coverage in the morning. Right now, there is also some KATU coverage.

But in the meantime, already available from The Oregonian is the full transcript (in nine parts) of the forum itself.

As to my own brief initial reflections. First, I have to say that part of my difficulty in being able to effectively write it up at this point is that it's very difficult to watch a group of mainly older, white, and on the whole dispassionate men try to justify an officer-involved shooting to an impassioned, if not outright angry, room of mainly black men and women.

It's unnerving, unsettling, and uncomfortable, as a white male, to have the distinct sensation that the sheer emotionality of how how deeply people feel not only about the Kendra James shoting but about issues regarding race and the police was disappearing into a void on the stage.

Afterwards, as I stood awaiting the #4 Fessenden, a woman passing by on the sidewalk asked if I had been at the forum, and what did I think about how it all went. I told her that, on the whole, no matter how many specifics may (on the surface at least) have been addressed, most questions and complaints from the community remained hanging in the air, completely unresolved.

If the forum was productive in any sense at all, I told her, it was in very clearly conveying the extent of community ire. But even there, I confessed, it could still be easy for "the other side" in this matter to rationalize away that ire -- unless community pressure is kept up.

Some quick random comments before I close off this initial item: One question not asked (and the context of this will be clearer if you read the transcripts, or if I get around, tomorrow when I'm not exhausted, to explaining) was why, if the order was given to use tazers -- an order that, reportedly, every witness on the scene heard -- did Officer McColliser allegedly think only of pepperspray and gun?

Now, that point might not have steered the event in another direction. But it speaks directly to whether or not McCollister is capable of following proper procedure, such as, say, following orders at the scene.

To close, I want to turn to soemthing Portland Police Chief Kroeker said: "In everything I can find, the officer was not motivated by a racial motive. I believe that he was doing police work."

What's not factored into this formulation, of course, is one of the crux matters when it comes to disputes between the community and the police: One does not have to be motivated by race -- an underlying racial bias is all that's necessary for a situation to go dangerously wrong. Was this the case here? I don't know. But it's an absolute necessity for exploration.

Which is, perhaps, part of what made so much of the evening difficult to watch.

For my part, I understand that a very many in America's black communities experience the reality of different sets of rules that seem to be determined by race. But when the Chief of Police seems to demonstrate either an inability or unwillingness to accept this possibility -- to differentiate between racial motive and potential racial bias -- the sense of roadblock and powerlessness in a room such as Tuesday evening's is almost literally and agonizingly palpable.

This is not the post I meant to make this evening. I had gone into this intended to come back with a slightly more routine journalistic account -- indeed, I have a rather full set of notes.

But I've always admitted to having bias. And I've never pretended to be altogether that detached. I am not separate from the City in which I live. I'm part of it, and what happens here matters. In a sense, this was less of an event than an experience. And so this is, perhaps, the only way I know how to approach it.

My final suggestion: If you do nothing else, at least read the entirety of the transcripts for yourselves.

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