Dear Compassionate People,
The Independent Police Review (IPR) recently released a report following up on the Oregonian's analysis showing that more than half of arrests in 2017 were of homeless people. The IPR analysis confirms the analysis by the Oregonian, but it also delves deeper into how police interactions with homeless are initiated and why the outcome is almost always an arrest.
The IPR report found that an equal number of interactions were sparked by a dispatch call (usually a community complaint) as by police self-initiated stops. In other words, the idea that the police have no choice but to respond to 911 calls for assistance is just plainly untrue. Almost half of police interactions with the houseless are discretionary stops by police.
The other interesting tidbit in the report is that of the interactions with houseless analyzed, 89 percent of them ended in arrests, and 60 percent of the arrests were due to outstanding warrants. In other words, police are targeting homeless, not based on criminal behavior, but simply because they are homeless, and then they discover that many of them have outstanding warrants for failure to appear in court. Their failure to appear is often a byproduct of living on the streets. They are thus targeting for being poor, and arrested because they haven't complied with the court system because they are houseless.
Chief Danielle Outlaw's response to the report (7/12) was that the "report did not identify any actions by the Portland Police Bureau that criminalized persons experiencing houselessness." In other words, there is no reason to change how the police are interacting with the houseless because the problem lies with the courts.
One recommendation not made by the IPR is to stop police-initiated interactions with the homeless, and if they happen to find that someone living on street has a warrant for failure to appear, they could simply issue a ticket and give them assistance to make it to court. This simple fix would immediately end half of the arrests of the houseless.
Don't hold your breath on seeing this reform happen any time soon, but 2020 is around the corner, and hope springs eternal.
Cheers,
Elliott