Portland Rejects Bid To Slash Millions More from Police Department
City commissioners in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday rejected a budget amendment that would have slashed another $18 million from the Portland Police Bureau amid months of protests and riots.
The commission voted 3-2 against the amendment, which had been proposed by Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty.
Mayor Ted Wheeler, who is also police commissioner, was one of three commissioners who voted last week to delay a vote on the budget amendment until after Tuesday’s election.
Wheeler won a second term and voted “no” on the amendment on Thursday.
“Last week, we heard that it won’t require layoffs, which is wrong. It will require layoffs. This is not a detail. This is a critical piece of information,” he said before voting.
“The testimony we’ve heard is clear: The status quo is unacceptable. Many Portlanders, and most of the people who testified about this item, do not trust the current criminal legal system — they do not trust the Police Bureau,” he said, adding that he nonetheless felt cutting the police budget further was not the solution.
The commission voted in June to cut nearly $16 million from the police — eliminating school resource officers, transit police and a gun violence reduction unit — and the force has also suffered pandemic-related budget cuts.
Portland has been roiled by five months of near-nightly and sometimes violent Black Lives Matter protests, and Wheeler has come under intense criticism from both the right and the left for the city’s response.
On Thursday, a day after rioters smashed windows downtown, a group of protesters stood in heavy rain for several hours to call for authorities to reopen an investigation into the fatal police shooting of a 27-year-old black man two years ago.
A grand jury in 2018 concluded that officers were justified in opening fire on Patrick Kimmons.
Authorities said Kimmons was armed and had already fired shots at two other men when police showed up and fired 12 shots, striking him nine times.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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