Dear Compassionate Portlanders:

More than a year ago thousands of us came together to ask our City leaders to adopt a compassionate response to homelessness. One of the primary goals of that effort was substituting unarmed first-responders for police interactions. With the leadership of Street Roots and Commissioner Hardesty that idea will no become a reality with a pilot project for Portland Street Response.

As this program proves its effectiveness and expands, we hope the City moves to transfer resources from the Portland Police to Portland Street Response. This will free up much-needed police officers to focus their efforts on solving violent crime and allow trained responders to provide help to those most in need in our community.

It's nice to see Mayor Wheeler and Commissioner Hardesty working together on what is a common-sense solution to the crisis in police enforcement against the homeless, which accounts for half of arrests and half of use-of-force incidents.  

Shout out to Kaia Sand and Joann Hardesty, two of our co-sponsors, who made this happen.

Cheers,

Elliott