It’s time to police the police
When the BLM protests of 2020 were met with police brutality, the point was proved. Being responsible for police, city governments across the country knew they needed to do something, but resisted change. This was done either outright or with empty promises, and Portland, Maine was no different.
Protests here were met with police firing pepper balls and the city council promising to view its work through the “lens of racial equity.” The council’s first long, hard look through that lens was the creation of the Racial Equity Steering Committee (RESC). The 13-member group was tasked with examining Portland’s approach to policing and producing a report with its recommended changes.
Now, the thing about these groups is that, historically speaking, their creation is often a predictable and transparent act of bureaucratic delay and cowardice. White leaders have been creating things like the RESC in this country since the Chicago Commission on Race Relations in 1919. The best-known example is the Kerner Commission, created by Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of Black unrest in the summer of 1967.
In that commission’s report, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark is quoted as saying, “I read that report … of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts Riot.
“I must again in candor say to you members of the Commission – it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland – with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations and the same inaction.”
Maybe you see the pattern?
The RESC’s report was released in April of 2021 and was predictably similar to its century’s worth of predecessors. One of its many suggestions was to dissolve Portland’s largely symbolic Police Citizen Review Subcommittee and replace it with a new board that is “transparent” and “provides true accountability.”
In the fall of 2022, 61 percent of Portlanders voted for a new civilian police review board, agreeing that there should at least be some accountability for police. That need has only become more clear in the last year. Last January a study found that Black people in Portland are three times more likely than whites to be arrested, and “the odds of Black or Latinx individuals being arrested increased when the incident was initiated by the officer rather than initiated by a 911 call.”
Last April, Portland police looked on as Nazis marched through the city, displaying a banner reading “DEFEND WHITE COMMUNITIES” while screaming racial slurs at passersby. The police intervened only when the Nazis attacked members of Portland’s LGBTQ community in front of City Hall. Disorderly Conduct is punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine in Maine, but the Nazis were allowed to leave the scene without so much as being ID’d.
The city council is due to finalize the new Civilian Police Review Board this month, and while that may seem like a relief, the situation has gone from bad to worse. City staff has inserted language stating, “The board shall make no recommendations or offer any findings or comments relative to any disciplinary action, or lack of action, against any officer,” thus destroying any chance of transparency or true accountability.
It actually gets worse than that, because if the city council held a hearing on an accusation of police misconduct, councilors “will have no power or authority to subpoena or call witnesses nor to impose or modify any disciplinary action, or lack of action, against any police officer. The city council’s hearing will not address, and its advisory opinion will make no recommendations nor offer any findings or comments relative to any disciplinary action, or lack of action, against any officer or any other personnel matter.”
In case there’s still any question about whom the law is intended to serve in this city, the Press Herald recently reported, “Portland has fielded 182 complaints, mandated 150 cases of remedial action and issued 37 violations against landlords since the city’s rent control ordinance took effect three years ago. … But the city has yet to issue a single fine.”
If Portland wants to remain a city where laws don’t apply to Nazis or landlords, then it must also refuse its citizens the right to hold police accountable, against the clear wishes of those citizens. I would prefer Portland not be that kind of city. Since Portlanders are clearly past being able to vote their way out of this, the only hope is further civic engagement. Contact your city councilor and/or the city manager. Tell them this version of the Civilian Police Review Board is unacceptable.
“We will live here together, or we’ll die here together,” James Baldwin said in 1968. “It is not I am telling you. Time is telling you. You will listen, or you will perish.”
