May 11, 2004
(Updated) Police Bureau On Track To Adopt All PARC Report Recommendations
Previously-Rejected Items Back On The Table
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
According to OPB News, Chief Derrick Foxworth today told a City Council work session that the Portland Police Bureau will be adopting all 89 recommendations of the independent Police Assessment Resource Center report released last year:
Derrick Foxworth: In September 2003 we were only able to report that 40 of the 89 recommendations were listed as done. As of today, we can now say that we have 13 more recommendations for a total 53.
Those changes run the gamut from making sure officers are interviewed within one day of a shooting, to placing a gag order on them so they don't discuss the incident before it reaches a grand jury.
Others include adjusting the make-up of the board that oversees the use of force in the bureau. Chief Foxworth wants to include more community members, as has been done in cities like Denver, Phoenix and Minneapolis. He also wants officers involved in an incident to present their version of events to the board.
It's good to see this hasn't been forgotten. One month ago, in the wake of the officer-involved shooting death of James Jahar Perez, we reported on the status of a select few of those PARC recommendations.
As the OPB story points out, Foxworth's statement that all 89 of the PARC recommendations will be adopted included the reversal of an earlier decision which outright rejected several of them.
Taking a look at our report from last October on the status of the PARC recommendations, we notice that the existence of three rejected recommenations at that time was actually itself a drop from eight recommendations which had been rejected under Chief Mark Kroeker.
The three recommendations which had been rejected last Autumn but are now back underway are: Making the unit commander a non-voting member of the Review Level Committee when it reviews officer-involved shootings, other deadly force cases, and in-custody death incidents; investigators who conduct the administrative investigations should take the lead in presenting officer-involved shooting and in-custody death cases to the Review Level Committee; and abandoning use of term "lethal cover" in relation to less-lethal weaponry training and deployment.
Update
There is, of course, Oregonian coverage of these developments today. There seems to be some discrepancy between their description of previously-rejected recommendations and our own, but ours is drawn from the last time the Bureau themselves gave a status report, which was last Autumn, so we're not sure why there seems to be a difference.