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Monday, May 19, 2008
News Petition Asks Mayor: Where’s The Cops’ Overdue Racial Profiling Plan?
Posted by on Mon, May 19 at 11:08 AM
This is Sheila Warren, who is part of the community campaign to end racial profiling, showing up at the mayor’s office with a petition this morning, demanding action on the issue. The police chief was supposed to have a plan presented to the mayor’s racial profiling group by the end of 2007, but so far, all anybody has seen is a few thoughts jotted down on a piece of paper by the chief, back in March 2007.
The 600-strong petition included signatures from 50 North Portland businesses who say they are being affected by the practice. “When customers fear the police, it hurts the bottom line,” Warren told a gathering of 30 people outside city hall, before going inside. Ricky Clark, a community organizer for the AFLCIO, told the crowd about his recent experience of being racially profiled in North Portland:
Clark said he’d been stopped by a policeman as he was going door to door off Martin Luther King Blvd. The officer asked him for his identification, which he gave, the officer ran his name, and it came back clear, and then Clark, assuming he was free to go, started walking away, he said. “Then he asked me if he could search me, and I said ‘no,’ because that’s my right,” said Clark. “So he grabbed me, wrestled me over a car and said ‘I might just search you anyway’.”
“The Portland Police Bureau is stalling on its public commitments,” said the Reverend Lynne Smouse Lopez, from the Ainsworth United Church of Christ. Inside, Maria Rubio, the mayor’s director of public safety policy, greeted the petition-bearers. “We’ve been meeting on a regular basis and we’re very committed to continuing this work,” Rubio told them. When asked if there was a deadline for the plan to be written, Rubio responded: “The deadline is as soon as possible.”
Ironically, perhaps, the community’s frustration was delivered to Rubio against the backdrop of the mayor’s distinctively “community-embracing” wall art, as the KOIN 6 cameras rolled:
Afterwards, I asked electronics expert and former corrections technician for the sheriff’s department, Donald Rivers, why he was part of the campaign. “It’s a very long delay in coming up with a policy,” he said. “You’d think they’d at least have a nice rough draft available by now.”
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as spacy as poor Tom is, he'll mutter out
loud, "what report?" and then look off in
bewilderment into open space. After few
minutes, he'll likely say, "umh! umh! I
will get with Robert King on this matter
right now!" Then, once the petitioners
are gone, he dials up King and says some-
thing like this: "Robert you got to tell
me what to do?" Such is the way of life
in our City Hall as it's morphed into
the Potter Hall of Mirrors! Good Luck
on getting meaningful "action"!