Portland’s Reckoning With Systemic Racism is Long Overdue
Portland’s past 50 years reflect a police force with a history of harassment and violence against African-Americans, surveillance of activists and organizers, and excessive force in response to public demonstrations. The white supremacy that set the stage for that oppression extends back even farther, to the founding documents of Oregon’s statehood. It seems important to share this context, in light of the City’s recent announcement that it plans to investigate whether the Police Bureau is resistant to change.
I moved to Portland after law school 14 years ago because I received a post-graduate fellowship to work on police reform there, as a staff attorney for the Northwest Constitutional Rights Center. My fellowship focused on racially discriminatory policing, police use of excessive force in crowd control tactics, and efforts to strengthen civilian police oversight. During that fellowship, and in over the course of a decade of police reform work in Portland, I learned about the problems in the Police Bureau and the racism that has shaped Portland’s neighborhoods, its police-community relations, and the struggle of Portland’s people of color for justice. This is what I learned.
Racism runs deep in Portland. Portland is famously the whitest city in America, and despite recent population growth, it remains one of the least diverse major cities. This is by white supremacist design. In the 1840s, Oregon became the only U.S. territory with a racial exclusion law. It required that African-Americans leave Oregon after two years, or be flogged publicly every six months until they did so. In 1857, by popular vote, Oregon adopted a state constitution that banned African-Americans from coming to the state, residing in the state, or holding property in the state. The post-Civil War adoption of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees equal protection of the law, rendered the exclusion illegal. Black people have never comprised more than 3% of Oregon’s population.
Oregon remained in many ways true to its white supremacist roots. Oregon was one of only six states that refused to ratify the 15th Amendment, which gave Black people the rights of American citizenship and Black men the right to vote. (It became the law of the land in 1870, after 28 states ratified it.)
In the 1920s, Oregon had the highest per capita membership in the Ku Klu Klan and a Klan-endorsed candidate, Walter Pierce, was elected governor. In the early thirties, Oregon voters elected him to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served until his defeat in 1942.
This persistent white supremacy ensured Portland’s Black community remained a small minority of the city’s population. Before WWII, most of Portland’s Black residents came to the city to work as railroad porters, and the neighborhoods close to Portland’s Union Station became their home. In fact, it was the only place that Black people could buy homes, due to a Realty Board of Portland Code of Ethics, adopted in 1919, which forbade realtors and bankers from selling or giving loans to people of color for properties located in white neighborhoods.
During WWII, the Black community in Portland grew substantially, with the promise of jobs in Portland shipyards. The majority lived in Vanport, the largest wartime public housing development, hastily built by the Housing Authority of Portland for the influx of new residents — and segregated by race. At the time, in a report prepared for the Portland City Club, several police officers admitted to “discriminatory feelings,” but the chief of police showed a “lack of enthusiasm” for implementing courses on “racial tolerance.”
Also during this time, many Portland businesses refused to serve Black people. The Portland branch of the NAACP, the oldest branch on the West Coast, fought this racism, drafting a public accommodations bill in 1919, which finally passed the Oregon legislature in 1953. (The Portland City Council had passed a city-wide anti-discrimination ordinance in 1950, but Portland voters failed to pass it when it was put to them in a referendum.)
After a flood destroyed Vanport in 1948, and the construction of the Memorial Coliseum, Interstate 5 and Highway 99 further uprooted the Black residents in the 1950s, the Albina District became the center of the Black community. By 1960, 80% of the city’s 15,000 Black people lived in Albina, and the four elementary schools in that area were more than 90% Black.
In 1970, the City destroyed Albina’s main street, the heart of the Black community, to make way for expansion of the Emanuel Hospital. The Portland Development Commission hid its plans from the community for years. When it finally consulted residents, it approved the plan at the same meeting despite strong opposition. The destruction, which included 300 homes, was all for naught. Emanuel did not get the grant it needed to build.
In the decades following, City neglect, lack of access to traditional mortgage lending, and later gentrification decimated Albina as the center of Portland’s Black community. That heart is gone, and the people who knew it still mourn its loss.
I mention this history because it illustrates how systemic racism has shaped Portland over the past fifty years. And this backdrop is essential to the full picture of how the Portland has policed Black people.
The Portland Police Bureau has a history of racial harassment. By the late 1960s in the Albina District, according to a history of Portland policing, “citizen harassment and social control were higher Police Bureau priorities” than public safety — much like policing in many urban Black communities across the country at that time. In the “long, hot summer of 1967,” more than 159 uprisings against racial oppression took place across the United States, and the Albina uprising was among them.
In the wake of the unrest, President Johnson convened the Kerner Commission to study its causes , and the Portland City Club conducted a parallel study, Problems of Racial Justice in Portland. It found:
The range of deficiencies and grievances in Portland is similar to that found by the Kerner Commission to exist in large cities in general. It includes discrimination or inadequacies in many areas: in police attitudes and practices; in administration of justice; in unemployment and underemployment; in consumer treatment; in education and training; in recreation facilities and programs; in welfare and health; in housing and community facilities; in municipal services; in federal programs, and in the underlying attitudes and behavior of the White community.
With regard to law enforcement, in particular, the study noted:
The Mayor and the Chief of Police have indicated that in their opinions the Kerner Report is not applicable to Portland. Satisfactory police-citizen relations are not likely to be achieved as a reality in Portland in the absence of a fundamental change in the philosophy of the officials who formulate policy for the police bureau.
In 1969, Kent Ford and Percy Hampton founded the Portland Chapter of the Black Panther Party. They advocated for community-controlled policing, opened a free health clinic, and— every school day for five years — provided breakfast for up to 125 children. Portland police kept a file on the Black Panthers, and Ford later described how their constant surveillance nearly destroyed him. The health clinic was one of the many Black-owned establishments that were forced out to make way for the planned-but-never-built Emanuel Hospital expansion, but reopened nearby and continued to serve Portlanders until 1980.
Also in 1969, Albina residents filed a class action suit to put an end the police harassment in their community. The City admitted no wrongdoing but settled in 1971 in a consent decree that ordered Portland police to stop using “insulting, degrading or ethnically derogatory terms” and instructed all officers that they needed to have a search warrant before entering an Albina resident’s home, among other provisions. While this may have curbed some of the outright racism, it did not go nearly far enough.
Racial profiling persists within the Portland Police Bureau, nearly fifty years later. In the years immediately preceding my fellowship, the Portland Police Bureau traffic stop data for 2004 and 2005 showed African-Americans were over-represented: 13% of the total number of stops in each year were of Black drivers , despite that they constituted only about 6% of the Portland population. Blacks and Latinos were twice as likely to be searched as whites, despite the fact that whites were found to have contraband more often than either group.
These statistics have not changed in the ensuing years. Despite that the Portland Police Bureau engaged in community listening sessions on racial profiling and prepared a plan to address it, racial profiling remains a reality for Black people in Portland today.
Black people in Portland accounted for 16% of all traffic and pedestrian stops from June through September 2019, despite that they represent about 6% of the population. In addition, data from June 2018 to July 2019 shows that Portland police search Black people at more than twice the rate of white motorists and pedestrians.
Across the Multnomah County criminal justice system — from an officers’ decision to arrest, to a district attorney’s decision to prosecute, to a judge’s decision on whether keep someone in custody pending trial — Black people are way more likely than whites to suffer harsher outcomes. Part of this is due to the fact that , due to a statewide ballot measure passed in 1934, Oregon was one of only two states to allow a criminal conviction by non-unanimous jury. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Oregon’s non-unanimous jury law just last year, noting in its decision, that its adoption in Oregon, “can…be traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to dilute the influence of racial and ethnic and religious minorities on Oregon juries.”
Portland Police have repeatedly killed Black residents with impunity. During the 1970s, Black people comprised 60% of the people killed by the Portland police, yet comprised just 7% of the city’s population. In the mid-1970s, Portland police officers shot and killed four Black men in the span of six months. Ricky Johnson was one of the victims, shot in the back of the head while running away. The community was outraged and called for the officer to be fired. The police chief refused, stating, “It has not been our policy in the past and it is not our policy now and we will not be changing it at this time.”
In the two years before I began my fellowship, Portland police had twice shot and killed unarmed Black people during a traffic stop: Kendra James in 2003 and James Jahar Perez in 2004. Neither incident resulted in an indictment of the officers involved, and both kept their jobs.
In 2010, Portland police officers shot and killed two unarmed Black men: Aaron Campbell and Keaton Otis, both of whom were suffering from mental illness. As with previous police shootings, these did not result in indictments or discipline of the officers involved. The chief of police fired the officer who shot Campbell, but an arbitrator and, later, the Oregon Court of Appeals, ordered him reinstated. In Keaton Otis’s case, a City investigation found that the shooting was “within policy.”
In response to the Kendra James shooting, the Albina Ministerial Alliance, a group of 125 Northeast Portland churches formed in the 1960s to address social injustice in the Albina community, created the Coalition for Justice and Police Reform. In an analysis done in conjunction with coalition member Portland Copwatch, it found that, of the 61 people killed by Portland police between 2000 and 2011, 23% were Black, despite that the Black people comprised just 6.4% of the city population.
In 2017, police shot and killed 17-year old Quanice Hayes as he was on his knees with his hands in the air. Don’t Shoot Portland marched in protest in response. A grand jury declined to indict the officers involved. The City recently agreed to pay $2.1 million to settle the wrongful death and excessive force lawsuit brought by his family.
The City has repeatedly failed to respect community input on police reform. In 2012, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the Portland Police Bureau found cause to believe that Portland police had a pattern of excessive force against people with actual or perceived mental illness. While it did not investigate racially discriminatory policing, it nonetheless expressed concerns over the relationship between Portland police and the Black community, stating, “tensions expressed by community members appear to date back many years.”
The DOJ filed suit against the City, but they had worked out a settlement agreement, which they asked the Court to accept and dismiss the action, retaining jurisdiction to solely if needed to enforce the agreement. Shortly thereafter, both the Portland Police Association (the police union) and the AMA Coalition intervened in the case — on opposite sides — with the union expressing concern that the agreement went too far while the AMA Coalition contended it did not go far enough. (I represented the AMA Coalition for the first four years of this suit, along with two other Portland NLG lawyers, Ashlee Albies and Kristen Chambers, who represent them still.)
Over the course of the saga that has been the implementation of the settlement, the City fought the court’s decision to hold regular hearings in which members of the community could express their concerns. The City also did not adequately support the volunteer Community Oversight Advisory Board set up as part of the settlement, and failed to report back to them on their recommendations. The City later disbanded the Board altogether, and the new volunteer board it has put in its place faces issues with attrition of members, lack of broad community outreach and respect for the board’s recommendations.
Overall, the City has disrespected the police reform advocates in this litigation. The members of the AMA Coalition, the now-disbanded Community Oversight Advisory Board, and the new board set up in its place are all unpaid volunteers who did this work in addition to other jobs or positions. During the time I was involved, they City made no effort to acknowledge that imbalance or accommodate community members. Instead, our clients were often asked to attend meetings or provide feedback on short notice — only for the City to take no action on recommendations.
Portland has a history of resistance to robust civilian police oversight. The Portland Police Bureau first created an police Internal Affairs Division to handle complaints of police misconduct as part of the 1971 consent decree that settled Albina residents’ class action suit for racial police harassment. In its first year of existence, the Internal Affairs Division deemed 85% of complaints unfounded or exonerated.
Forty years later, the DOJ findings that led to its 2012 suit against the City pointed to inadequate investigation into officer misconduct as a contributing problem, and called the police accountability system in Portland “byzantine” and “self-defeating.”
Over the years, I have assisted several people with police misconduct complaints. This included the denial of a complaint by Fred Bryant, father of Keaton Otis, on procedural grounds too convoluted to summarize here.
In another, I represented an African-American women who filed a misconduct complaint after Portland police officers arrested her daughter over a playground fight with another girl at an after-school care program. Two white police officers took a 9-year-old girl, dressed in a swimsuit and flip-flops, from her home and her mother, put her in handcuffs, drove her downtown in a squad car, finger-printed her, took her mug shot, and kept her in a holding cell. The white, male investigator who interviewed my client did not understand why she alleged that race played a factor in the arrest, despite that she explained that, to her, the whole incident was an act of domination by white officers over her and her daughter. In the end, the officers were not disciplined because there was no Police Bureau policy against custodial arrest of young children — something they knew before they put my client through the pain of this interview. They have, however, since implemented a policy.
Nearly 50 years after the Internal Affairs Division was created, the City’s Office of Independent Police Review now handles police misconduct complaints, but has shockingly similar statistics to those in 1971. Between 2012 and 2017, the majority of complaints, between 77 and 93% were closed after initial review of the evidence. This, despite many efforts to improve oversight of the Police Bureau over the course of several decades.
Several incidents have fueled fears that the Portland Police Bureau has white supremacists in its ranks. In 1981, for example, Portland police officers dumped four dead possums on the doorstep of the Burger Barn, a Black-owned restaurant. The police commissioner at the time, Charles Jordan, Portland’s first black city council member, fired the two identified officers involved. The Portland Police Association — the oldest police union in the United States — vehemently fought back. It held a no-confidence vote against Jordan, held a “Cops Have Rights Too” rally and filed a union grievance fighting the officers’ dismissal. Within months, the mayor took oversight of the Police Bureau from Jordan and the two officers were reinstated after a union arbitrator ruled in their favor.
In 1985, Portland police officers killed Lloyd “Tony” Stevenson, an African-American off-duty security guard, by placing him in a “sleeper hold” when they arrived on scene after he intervened in an altercation between a convenience store owner and a suspected thief. The police chief responded by immediately banning the use of the the “sleeper hold.” In response, two Portland police officers to created t-shirts that said “Smoke ’Em Don’t Choke ‘Em,” which they began selling on the day of Stevenson’s funeral. After the police chief fired the two officers, the police union filed a grievance and the officers were reinstated following arbitration.
In 2004, it came to light that a Portland police sergeant wore Nazi uniforms in his off-duty time and had nailed plaques memorializing Nazi soldiers to a tree in a Portland public park. For years, City took no action, despite that it knew about the plaques because the sergeant, Mark Kruger, had handed them over to the city attorney’s office after he had been sued for using excessive force during anti-war protests. In 2010, the City finally took action in response to public pressure and Kruger received an 80-hour suspension without pay following an internal affairs investigation. The City later rescinded that discipline, however, to settle a libel suit Kruger brought against the City because — wait for it — a fellow Bureau employee had called him a Nazi. Kruger, now a captain, still serves in the Portland Police Bureau.
Just last year, a public records request revealed hundreds of texts between a Portland police lieutenant who served as a crowd control liaison and Joey Gibson, the leader of Patriot Prayer, an alt-right group whose events have attracted white supremacists. The texts reflected a friendly relationship, as well as the sharing of legal and tactical information, such as the location of antifa counter-demonstrators and advice on avoiding the arrest of a Patriot Prayer member with an outstanding warrant. An investigation did not find sufficient evidence that the lieutenant had engaged in misconduct. The Bureau, however, now requires training for crowd control liaison officers.
Many members of Portland’s Black community know these stories. The woman who owned the Burger Barn, the site of the 1981 possum incident, is the grandmother of Teressa Raiford, the founder of Don’t Shoot Portland, which is fighting for police reform today. The Albina Ministerial Alliance has been working in Portland since the 1960s. A member of the Coalition, co-founded the Black Justice League in response to the police killings of African-Americans in the 1970s. These incidents matter because they live on in how people perceive the Portland Police Bureau.
The Portland Police Bureau has a history of surveillance of activists and organizers. Over the course of the events I’ve described here, Portland’s Black community organized, marched and demanded reforms. Many were placed under surveillance, and targeted for harassment by the Portland Police Intelligence Division, as detailed in this history of policing in Albina. Files containing the names of at least 3,000 people from over 575 organizations, later turned over to the media, revealed that police targeted people based on their political beliefs, without any suspicion of criminal activity. The records revealed that this spying continued after the passage of Oregon Statute 181.575 in 1981, which bars police from gathering information about the political, religious or social views of any individual or group unless the information directly relates to an criminal investigation.
The Portland Police have repeatedly used excessive force in response to public demonstrations, long before the Feds showed up in response to last year’s protests. The Northwest Constitutional Rights Center, where I worked during my fellowship (sadly now defunct), was founded by Portland NLG attorneys with a portion of the the $545,000 fees they had earned suing the City for police use of excessive force during two demonstrations against the Bush administration. Just one month into my fellowship, in October 2006, Portland Police Bureau responded to an anti-war demonstration with rubber bullets, batons, pepper spray and officers mounted on horses. The Bureau used similar tactics again in May 2007, despite public overtures that it would change its crowd control procedures. These were just the latest in a line of incidents of police violence at public demonstrations. Later that year, I documented the City’s history of excessive force during public demonstrations in a report, which called on banning the use of pepper spray and less-lethal munitions against crowds.
While much of the national attention on Portland’s recent protests has focused on the conduct of federal law enforcement, protestors have pointed out that the Portland Police Bureau used the same tactics. Those tactics have prompted at least nine lawsuits against the city, many brought by pro bono lawyers working for the Portland NLG.
This context matters. Today’s protests have roots long in the past, that go beyond the actions of a particular police chief or mayor. This account shows some facets of the systemic racism that Black Portlanders have lived with for years.
If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected — those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most — and listens to their testimony.
— James Baldwin
I don’t presume to speak here for anyone — and I have probably left important things out. I wrote this to process my time working for reform in Portland and to provide a backdrop to what is happening there now. The protests over the past year were unlike anything I had seen in Portland. This inspiring solidarity gives me hope that Portland will finally reckon with its racist past.
It will require radical new visions to achieve justice — and those must be defined by the people who have suffered the oppression. It will require listening to people with lived experience and supporting their struggles, not just when the whole world is watching, but in longer, harder battles to come.
For further study:
Darrell Millner, Blacks in Oregon, Oregon Encyclopedia, Oregon Historical Society (last updated July 29, 2020).
Cornelius Swart, Priced Out: 15 Years of Gentrification in Portland (documentary) (2017).
Alana Semuels, The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America, The Atlantic, July 22, 2016.
Jodi Darby, Julie Perini, and Erin Yanke, Arresting Power: Resisting Police Violence in Portland, Oregon (documentary) (2015).
L. Bates, L, A. Curry-Stevens & Coalition of Communities of Color, The African-American Community in Multnomah County: An Unsettling Profile. Portland State University (2014).
Walidah Imarisha, Why Aren’t There More Black People in Oregon? A Hidden History (presentation) (2014).
Leanne C. Serbulo & Karen J. Gibson, Black and Blue: Police-Community Relations in Portland’s Albina District, 1964–1985, 114 Oregon Historical Society Quarterly, 1 (2013).
Karen J. Gibson, Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Divestment 1940–2000, 15 Transforming Anthropology 1 (2007).
Ben Jacklet, The Secret Watchers: How the police bureau spied for decades on the people of Portland, The Portland Tribune, September 12, 2002.
The City Club of Portland, “Problems of Racial Justice in Portland,” City Club of Portland Bulletin vol. 49, no. 02 (1968).
