August 29, 2003

Resignations From Citizen Committee, A Critical Report On Police Shootings, And McColliser's Discipline

So the continuing stress in relations between the Portland Police Bureau and various facets of the community-at-large pretty much boiled over in the past couple of weeks. Since I've expressed my hunch that Kroeker was forced to resign in order to remove the "lightning rod" factor -- and since I've simply not gotten around to these important items -- it seems like this is the time to take a tour of what's been going on here.

For purposes here, we'll start with the recent resignations of more than half of the Citizen Review Committee (part of the Independent Police Review out of the City Auditor's office):

Five of the panel's nine members criticized the 20-month-old review system as ineffective when they resigned at the end of the committee's meeting Tuesday.

"It is clear to me that the current system is not working," said committee Chairman Hector Lopez, who accused various city officials of undermining the panel's work.

...

City Auditor Gary Blackmer, who proposed and oversees the current review system, also was at the meeting. Although he seemed surprised by the resignations, Blackmer said he does not think the system needs to be changed.

"Overall, I think we're handling reviews better than any time in the past 20 years that the city has had a review process," he said.

For more, see this, this, and , all from The Oregonian.

Then, just this week, an independent review of police-involved shootings and in-custody deaths from 1997-2000 slammed the Portland Police Bureau. It found, among other things: internal review was inconsistent and failed to result in lessons being learned from incident to incident; 31% of incidents did not include a documented review; focus merely on whether a crime had been committed and an underemphasis on tactical and policy issues.

There's a collection of articles on this report from The Oregonian -- not to keep coming back to that particular paper, but as much as I abhor their website, their material on this is much easier to find than that of other publications.

Finally, there's this week's discipline of Officer Scott McCollister, who shot and killed Kendra James. Chief Kroeker ordered McCollister suspended for 5 1/2 months without pay, a punishment which would also result in his loss of health benefits. The police union immediately blasted this discipline, and threatened to hold a "no confidence" vote targeting Kroeker.

All of this in a matter of weeks. In closing, I do want to comment briefly on an element of McCollister's suspension that continues to plague me with confusion. On the one hand, Chief Kroeker argues that McCollister's actual use of force fell within proper Bureau guidelines. However, the Chief himself asserts (according to The Oregonian) that "McCollister's lack of tactical planning in deciding how to get James out of the car, his entering the car, the unholstering of his firearm inside the car and his failure to operate his pepper spray effectively" were all mistakes.

In other words, every decision McCollister made which led up to the shooting was wrong, but somehow the shooting itself was not also therefore wrong. Apparently, there's no equivalent in Police Bureau disciplinary procedures to the concept in the legal system that if one engages in actions about which one should have known better and something bad happens, one is responsible for that bad something.

Perhaps someone could explain to me just what was Kroeker's logic, given this description of his decision.

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