December 21, 2003
Curses Foiled Again
You have no idea how difficult it was to find a pun headline for this story that hadn't already been used in some form.
As you may know by now, and as I first read in a Friday report from OPB, the Portland Police Bureau now faces new restrictions on use of foul language in the course of duty:
Portland Police officers now have to report every time they use profanity on the job, according to a new dictate from city hall.
The Independent Police Review Division came up with a list of three recommendations regarding profanity -- chiefly because swearing is one of the main things the public complains about with regard to the police.
The recommendations have been accepted by the Mayor and the Police Chief.
Saturday's Oregonian helped flesh out the City's previous policy, its new policy, and how it compare to other cities:
The city's Independent Police Review Division and the Citizen Review Committee discovered, however, that Portland may be unique in using profanity as a policing tool. Of the 26 police departments across the country that responded to the groups' survey, none had policies that allowed the use of profanity by officers as a control tactic. Four had no profanity policy, and 22 explicitly banned it.
An Associated Press story also cropped up on Saturday.
According to The Oregonian, the Bureau banned profanity in 1976, but then revised the rules in 1989 to instruct officers "that they could not use 'epithets or terms that tend to denigrate' a race, gender or other groups unless they are quoting another person in a report or in testimony" and then again in 1999 "to allow profanity in an effort to establish control."
According to the new report (pdf, 1.2 MB), however, officers increasingly have used profanity in situations ranging beyond those of controlling a situation.
Parenthetically, I have to point out an inaccuracyin the OPB coverage:
Officers also have to report when they swear, as required each time they use any other tool of control.
Anyone who has followed the debate over police reform recommendations from various reports this year already knows that PPB officers in fact are not required to do this whenever they use a "tool of control" -- at least if you consider drawing one's gun to be using a tool of control.
As mentioned in the Oregonian story on the recent CPORT report, various reform recommendation have suggested that officers be required to write a report every time they draw their weapons -- something they currently are not required to do, and something at which the police unions keep balking.