By Catalina Gaitán
oregonlive.com
PORTLAND, Ore. — Bob Day, Portland’s new police chief, is in a time crunch. He has committed to working as the city’s top cop — but only until June 2025, when the city’s next mayor will appoint his successor.
After his first full week on the job, Day on Monday met with reporters to describe the goals he has for the Police Bureau before his time runs out.
Day has committed to working as the city’s top cop until June 2025, when the city’s next mayor will appoint his successor. (Catalina Gaitán/oregonlive.com)
“In June of 2025, I want Portland and I want the Portland Police Bureau to be a different story,” Day said. “And that it’s a story of resilience. It’s a story of recovery.”
Fentanyl crisis
Day said he wants to take a “regional approach” to the fentanyl crisis by collaborating with Oregon State Police, the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office and the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office.
The bureau will measure its success by the number of drug-related arrests, amount of pills taken off the street and the number of people getting connected to addiction services in Portland, Day said.
Body-worn cameras
Day said it’s too soon to evaluate the success of the Portland Police Bureau’s 60-day body-worn camera pilot program, which ended Oct. 19. The bureau is starting to collect feedback from the estimated 150 officers who donned the devices starting in August. Day said he will use the feedback to develop the bureau’s permanent body-worn camera policy and contract, and aims to outfit all officers with the devices by the spring or summer of 2024.
“The engagement with (the cameras) was high, but as with anything, there are bugs to work out,” Day said.
Response times
Day said he intends to work with the Bureau of Emergency Communications and the Police Bureau’s strategic services division, who are “taking a hard look” at the current model for dispatching officers in order to improve flagging response times. One solution is encouraging more people to submit online reports for incidents that don’t require an armed response, which could free up more officers to respond to high-priority calls, Day said.
A push for hiring more officers could also shorten 911 wait times, Day said.
Staffing
The Portland Police Bureau has 81 vacant positions, all of which Day said he hopes to fill before leaving his post in 2025.
“We’re going to need to keep our foot on the gas pedal,” Day said.
In addition, 150 bureau members will become eligible to retire by the end of this year, according to police spokesperson Terri Wallo-Strauss. As of Monday, the bureau has 800 total sworn members, including 292 patrol officers and 96 officers in training. The bureau has lost 54 members and hired 55 new ones so far this year. A hiring ceremony in November could push the number of newly hired officers to 70.
Community trust
Day said he was not aware of when or how a meme encouraging violence against protesters ended up on a Portland Police Bureau training presentation on protests. He led the bureau’s training division from 2016 to 2018 before becoming deputy chief until his retirement in 2019, Day said.
The city made the PowerPoint presentation public in 2022 months after city attorneys turned it over to lawyers for Don’t Shoot Portland, a Black-led nonprofit advocating for social and racial justice that sued the city in federal court alleging officers used excessive force while responding to protests in 2020.
Day said he hopes to restore community trust in police and remove any standpoint of “us against them.”
This includes addressing problematic ideologies held by officers, such as those who responded to an online training on how to interact with the LGBTQ+ community with feedback a city-hired consultant said was indicative of “racism, ableism (and) white supremacy.”
“The days of the chief of police just standing behind the podium and saying ‘Trust the system,’ in my opinion, are no longer adequate,” Day said. “People have a lot of questions about the system, and appropriately so.”
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