The mayor’s Racial Profiling Committee (RPC) is meeting for its second four hour session this afternoon—its five two hour meetings between January and May weren’t long enough, and members said they wanted to “get something done.” So: the meetings are now four hours long, and the group is splitting into three subcommittees.Racial Profiling Committee: Darryl! Moch, executive director of Brother-To-Brother talks to Sergeant Dave Hendrie in a subcommittee working on how to improve Police/Community Relations.

Next month, the three subcommittees are each going to split into six more subcommittees, and then report back. Just kidding.

While I was tempted to write about the three subcommittees as “forming more committees for committees’ sake,” the mayor’s racial profiling group does in fact seem to be moving towards some concrete objectives, timelines and measures of success, at last—in part because of the decision to break its work down into manageable chunks.Chief Sizer: Shares ideas on police policies and practises with Maria Lisa Johnson of the Latino Network (left) and Maria Rubio from the mayor’s office (far right).

The three subcommittees are: Policy and Practices, with the goal of identifying specific policies and practices that can eliminate or contribute to racial profiling; Data Collection & Analysis, with the goal of establishing a methodology for collecting and analyzing data to measure racial bias in policing in order to determine a statistical baseline to measure progress over time, and publish analysis of relevant data; Community & Police Interactions, with the goal of building a bridge of trust between community and police.

The make-up of the subcommittees is interesting—each has a mixture of community advocates and representatives from the police. But it’s hard not to notice Alejandro Queral of the Northwest Constitutional Rights Center and Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch went for the “Data” subcommittee. Building relations and changing policies is all very well, but police oversight activists want to be able to measure the success of such initiatives.

The subcommittees’ll all come back together at 5pm to talk about their progress and give an opportunity for the wider group to give its impressions of what they’re doing. In the mean time, somebody just brought some food in. Later.