The PBA’s Mike Kuykendall just spent the last five minutes telling downtown business owners and representatives from downtown’s public safety community about the Street Access For Everyone (SAFE) committee at the mayor’s downtown Public Safety Action Committee (PSAC). Kuykendall is chairing the committee this morning (it’s never chaired by anybody from the mayor’s office, of course). I should warn those uninterested in how money talks when it comes to public safety, to skip this blog post.
On the surface, the committee is designed to improve public safety downtown. But it’s also an opportunity for those involved in downtown to do a sound bit of politicking for their own causes. Especially the Portland Business Alliance. I have a problem with the Portland Business Alliance controlling the management of public safety downtown. That problem cuts right to the heart of Portland City Government, and Tom Potter’s election pledge to do “community policing.” I think the police, and the mayor’s office, should control public safety. Not the business community. That’s what we pay our taxes for, and if the taxes are being supplemented by business interests in the downtown area, then we’ve no way of ensuring equal service for people all over Portland. Also, the Business Alliance can then use its financial clout and PR machine to lobby for ordinances that impact the rights of downtown’s less fortunate, like the sit/lie (sidewalk obstruction) law, and the drug free zones which effectively criminalize people without a trial. The vast majority of them African American.

Everybody just shrugs their shoulders and says “we have to do the best we can with what we’ve got.” But if the mayor took more of a lead on these issues—and lobbied to get the Wapato jail opened, for example, or simply put more real cops, not rent-a-cops, on the street—rather than talking about “community” and never showing up at any of his community policing committees, we’d see genuine changes in the way downtown’s public safety works. But for all his rhetoric, I can’t believe Potter really cares about any of this—so downtown continues to flounder. And I keep showing up at committees like this and wondering why.

I told you it was wonky. More on the actual meeting, after the jump.

Kuykendall, certainly, appears to have decided to take this morning as an opportunity to practise his speech about SAFE to city council tomorrow. He certainly "focused on the positive," and didn't mention the sit/lie ordinance—council votes on enforcement of it tomorrow—until prompted at the end of his monologue by a representative from the District Attorney's office.

Then it was the turn of Terry Barker of PPI—Portland Patrol, Inc, the PBA-funded rent-a-cop firm that has no public oversight or formal complaints process, whose officers patrol downtown dressed like cops, many of whom carry guns and with the power to issue park exclusions—to give the group an update.

"We're doing the wake-ups in the morning, trying to get the homeless moving, out of the 'eyesore areas' we call them, under the Burnside Bridge," he says. "But we're not getting the same numbers as we used to, because I think we're focusing on some of the larger groups. I'm not sure where they're going, we know some of them are going to the East Side."

Kuykendall asked Barker to tell the group about the drug dealing that PPI officers are seeing.

"Drug Dealing—we'll find a group where we're pretty sure there's some dealing going on, and we just go up there and hang out with them. If we see something going on, then we'll contact the police bureau, and usually an arrest is made," responded Barker.

Then Doreen Binder of Transition Projects, (TPI) Inc. said she's seeing a lot of drug dealing outside her location. But she drew a distinction between targeting the homeless in general and targeting "drug dealing."

Binder says: "I don't know why you don't let people live under the bridges. The drug dealing is a whole different issue, but sleeping on the streets because you have no place to go is different from that."

The District Attorney's representative responded: "That's why we need to make sure those tools that we have, like the drug free zones and the sidewalk obstruction ordinance stay in place. Those tools aren't there to target the homeless, they're there to target the problem behaviors."

But, as I mentioned, those ordinances also happen to criminalize African Americans without trial, and push the homeless across the bridge. Which is why this town needs a new leader. PUBLIC SAFETY AND PLATO: Saying something often enough doesn't make it true...