Days after a federal judge granted the Portland Police Association the right to intervene in the city's settlement with the feds over use of force and mental health reforms—essentially letting the union negotiate over the shape of those changes—union president Daryl Turner now says the police bureau has shut him out of the process.

Turner issued a statement this morning saying proposed changes to use of force and Taser policies are "fundamentally flawed" and will lead to officer injuries.

Update 11:05 AM: Read the latest drafts of the Taser (pdf) and force (pdf) policies yourself.

Yesterday, Chief [Mike] Reese circulated ”final drafts” of the PPB’s new Use of Force and Taser polices as part of the PPB’s implementation of USDOJ reforms. Please be clear that the PPA has not been a party to nor have we agreed to these “final drafts” that the PPB has issued!

The PPA’s input regarding these policies has been continuously ignored by the PPB, and Chief Reese’s assertion that the policies are a collaborative effort is incorrect. The PPA has sought and will continue to seek changes to the PPB’s versions of the policies, which are fundamentally flawed and will place officers at a safety risk and at risk for baseless discipline.

The city and union have been arguing for months over whether changes in the bureau's force policies is a matter for contract negotiations (which start up this spring). The city is asking the Oregon Employment Relations Board to make a ruling in the next several weeks.

The bureau wants changes that include requiring cops to better articulate why they used force, whether they reassessed if they could have eased off, and whether they accounted for someone maybe suffering from mental illness. The union says that changes working conditions and officer safety; the city argues changing rules like that is a "management right."

The statement comes right when semi-retired PPA counsel Will Aitchison is scheduled to sit down with police commissioner Mayor Charlie Hales.

Reese, when he and I sat down earlier this year, has claimed he was seeking PPA feedback on policy changes all along.

We want to move forward on the Taser policy. We want to make sure our officers are trained on recent court rulings and community expectations. We are at the final stages of getting feedback from the Portland Police Association and the Department of Justice. Then we're going to start training on it. And our overall use of force policy? Same thing.

Turner has also railed about injuries before, after a weird, public run of hurt cops last fall... and Reese has also said, before, that he didn't think the DOJ settlement was an issue.

I haven't seen any of the recent injuries tied to the settlement agreement. One, the agreement hasn't been finalized yet. It's in the court process now. Certainly officers now are, I think, considering it. They want to know what our Taser policy will be, where it will end up. And our force policy, where will that end up. They want to be trained so they can be in sync with court rulings around Tasers and use of force. Those officer injuries occurred because we interacted with people who were violent and intent on hurting us and the community.

Read Turner's full statement after the jump.

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Upon learning for sure last night that Merle Hatch had only a broken phone handle when he was shot dead by the cops he cussed at and then ran toward on Sunday, Portland Copwatch graciously decided to send flashcards to Police Chief Mike Reese so his officers might better distinguish between real weapons and fake guns.

The flashcards are something of a history lesson.

"Portland Copwatch has prepared a flash card set for the Portland Police Bureau," Dan Handelman wrote Reese this afternoon. "We hope you will distribute it to all members."

I'll go out on a limb and guess Reese will decline. The bureau made a point last night of airing not just video of Hatch's shooting but also audio in which everyone kept saying he had a "gun" or "weapon" in his hand.

• Denis C. Theriault
• Mayor Charlie Hales, Chief Mike Reese, and Assistant Chief Donna Henderson.

But Hatch never got any closer than 40 or so feet, falling to the ground when those three officers unloaded their weapons into him outside Adventist Medical Center on Sunday night.

Portland police still won't say how many shots were fired, what Hatch was doing in Adventist's emergency room, or whether the cops who shot Hatch had even thought about using less-lethal weapons to subdue a man who kept calling them from behind an SUV to "come on" and "come play." Those things will wait for a yet-to-be scheduled grand jury hearing.

But the bureau, in a carefully programmed press conference, did release a subtitled cell phone video, police radio audio (mp3), and surveillance camera stills to begin to fill in the picture of a death that happened just 12 minutes after the first calls came to East Precinct.

"They intentionally kept their distance," Police Chief Mike Reese, flanked at one point by Mayor Charlie Hales and newly promoted Assistant Chief Donna Henderson, said of the cops who shot Hatch. "The situation unfolded very quickly."

• Portland Police Bureau
• The busted phone receiver...

The total impression left by the bureau's materials, without knowing why Hatch was hospitalized, is pretty much going to be "suicide by cop." The cops for the first time said a security guard at Adventist did see a black object that appeared to be a gun. And the police audio repeatedly describes Hatch's phone handle as a "weapon" and "gun," even warning after he collapsed that "the weapon is just a few inches from his right hand."

"Detectives believe the suspect used this to simulate a handgun... during this incident with Portland police officers," Reese said.

Henderson said the video, taken by someone leaning out his window across the street from the hospital, "was very critical. It was a very good video." It played while Reese lightly narrated it. Hatch can be heard shouting various incendiary things at the cops he's spotted: "Come on." "I'm gonna take hostages, motherfucker. You stupid motherfucker." "You're making it fucking hard for me and you." "You want some? You wanna play? Come on." "You and that dog are killing people tonight. I can guarantee that. That's a promise."

Then, before he runs toward the officers, he can be heard shouting: "Okay. I'm gonna come to you. I'm coming to you, pig. Let's go. Let's go." As he raced closer, the officers didn't apparently budge. And Hatch started counting up, "ONE"... as the cops shouted "Stop."... then "TWO"... "Hands up!"... then "THREE" and a loud burst of gunfire followed by one stray shot at the very end. The autopsy results show, unsurprisingly, that Hatch died of multiple gunshot wounds.

(Watch the video after the jump, but be warned, if these kinds of things are hard to watch for you, that it's extremely upsetting and violent.)

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It's looking more and more like three Portland cops shot an unarmed man Sunday night—the still-missing "gun" parroted in early media reports is likely just black plastic—and now Portland Police Chief Mike Reese and Mayor Charlie Hales are planning an extensive press event tonight where they'll provide photos and video showing more of what happened outside Portland Adventist Hospital.

It's set for 5:30 tonight, in time for the top of the evening newscasts. Here's the release the bureau and mayor's office sent out:

Today, Wednesday February 20, 2013, at 5:30 p.m., the Portland Police Bureau will be holding news conference to release updated information about Sunday's officer-involved shooting at Portland Adventist Medical Center.

The news conference will be held in the conference room outside the Chief's Office on the 15th floor of the Justice Center. This is a small room so interested media is asked to plan accordingly.

The news conference is expected to last no more than 30 minutes and will include an audio and a video presentation.

Links and photographs being shared at the news conference will be released to the public at 5:30 p.m.

Expected to speak at the news conference are Mayor Charlie Hales, Chief Mike Reese and other Portland Police Bureau personnel.

There's also been a lot of talk about Merle Hatch's status as a career criminal and federal prisoner who never showed up, like he was supposed to, at a halfway house in Colorado. Or as a suspect in a bank robbery in Clackamas County. That's all true. But let's remember: No one knew any of that on Sunday when he died. Back then, he was an emergency room patient without ID. Or, apparently, a gun.

The long twisting saga of the Portland Police Bureau’s deal with the US Department of Justice over its abysmal record dealing with the mentally ill took a strange turn this week when a judge ruled that both the cops and their critics deserve a spot at the table during the remedy phase.

On Tuesday, February 19, US District Court Judge Michael Simon ruled that both the Portland Police Association, the city’s rank-and-file police union, and the Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for Justice and Police Reform, a police accountability group, will be allowed weigh in on proposed mental health and use-of-force reforms.

Simon wants the two to sit down with the city and the feds in front of a mediator, where they can talk about how to make changes.

But the judge’s ruling comes with some constraints.

Simon upheld the police union’s request to join the city as a partial defendant, citing an earlier federal court decision that allowed Los Angeles’ police union the same right. But Simon didn’t grant the AMA the same courtesy. Instead he gave the group “enhanced amicus” status. This lets the AMA submit briefs and testify, but it won’t have the right to appeal the judge’s final decision. The AMA had wanted the settlement to expand to racial issues. The Judge ruled that went beyond the scope of the mental health reforms the DOJ says the city needs.

Mediation is expected to start in March and could last into the spring. That puts off a public “fairness hearing” where the community will be invited to sound off on the deal and a final decision by Simon.

“It’s not as much we would have hoped for,” says AMA lawyer Ashlee Albies, “but it’s more than we expected… we have a seat at the table and we certainly appreciate that.”

Update 6 PM: All of this agitating yesterday and today about the "missing" gun wasn't for nothing. Look what the O is reporting, citing police roll calls:

Merle M. Hatch was carrying a black piece of plastic that police thought was a gun and had no firearm on him, some Portland officers were told at roll calls Tuesday.

Police spokesman Sgt. Pete Simpson declined to comment on the new information, saying police would release no additional details until detectives had interviewed the sergeant and two officers who fired at Hatch. The interviews are scheduled Wednesday.

Told you so./end update

The Adventist Medical Center emergency room patient shot dead by Portland police officers Sunday night has been identified by the state medical examiner's office. And despite front-page headlines, ahem, referring to the man as "armed," the Portland Police Bureau still isn't confirming whether a gun or replica gun has been recovered.

According to the Oregonian, the dead man is Merle Hatch. He was 50 years old. And, according to an interview with his mother, he spent years in and out of prison for crimes including bank robbery while battling a decades-long drug addiction.

Update 12:15 PM: The O now says Hatch was a federal "escapee" who was released from the medium security federal prison in Sheridan on February 12 but never showed up at a halfway house back in Colorado.

Mary Hatch, Merle Hatch’s mother, said she hadn’t seen her son in two decades. She said Hatch lived in Colorado. She didn’t know how he ended up in Portland.

“He was troubled,” said Hatch, who lives in Iowa. “He was in and out of prison most of his adult life. He got into drugs early. There wasn’t much left of the person we knew as a kid growing up.”

The medical examiner's office tells me Hatch wasn't carrying any identification and that he was identified using fingerprints. The office also couldn't find a listed residence for Hatch, but it can't confirm, on the other hand, that he was homeless.

Sergeant Pete Simpson said the bureau is waiting until detectives finish their interviews before releasing more information, something that he says won't happen until tomorrow. He told me that after I asked him whether a gun or replica handgun had been recovered. In other police shootings where guns or replica guns had been recovered, the bureau released that information within hours. Simpson also declined to confirm the O's use of the word "armed" in its print headline today.

A hospital spokeswoman yesterday said the man only told a worker at the emergency room he had a gun—enough, all the same, to send Adventist into a "code silver" lockdown. It was 911 dispatchers who told cops on the way to the hospital that the man was reportedly armed.

"I can only confirm the information that I released, which was that we responded to the report of an armed man," Simpson told me this morning.

The man shot dead by cops at Portland Adventist Medical Center last night may have been a patient at the hospital, according to the latest update from the police bureau, and was killed only minutes after officers first responded to a call about someone in the hospital's parking lot wielding a gun.

The bureau has identified the three officers who shot at the man—Sergeant Nathan Voeller (12 years with the bureau, and a training instructor who thought the 2010 shooting of Aaron Campbell was in policy), Officer Andrew Hearst (three years), and Officer Royce Curtiss (seven years). And it also made sure to mention the fact that officers used a ballistic shield to approach him "immediately" after he went down to see about giving any aid—a sore point in other shootings.

But as to what kind of patient the man was, or his name, that information remains forthcoming. The bureau is waiting to identify the dead man and won't release his name even then until his next of kin are notified. Most of the people shot by police in Portland are experiencing some kind of a mental health crisis, and Adventist has a 24-hour intake facility for its inpatient psychiatric center.

"That's the information we received," police spokesman Sergeant Pete Simpson told the Mercury when asked about the description of the man as a patient. "I can't confirm he was a patient. That's the information the officers received in the call."

Update 4:20 PM: Judy Leach, spokeswoman for Adventist, has confirmed the man was a patient in the hospital's emergency department but declined to comment on the nature of the emergency, citing medical privacy laws.

But in a statement (attached at the bottom of the post), she says the man only said he was armed—and that he threatened to shoot an employee inside. The hospital called the police and went in lockdown all the same, with the threatened employee leading the man to an exit that he then bolted through. Security kept an eye on him, but let the cops take over once they arrived./end update//

The bureau also hasn't included any more details about whether the man did, in fact, have a gun or anything that looked like a gun. Or whether, like in several other officer-involved shootings, the man had a replica firearm.

But the timeline from the bureau roughly jibes with what our reporter Nathan Gilles said witnesses told him. Edward Dass, who lives in an apartment complex across from the hospital said he heard eight shots around 9:30 last night and ran outside.

"I put my shoes on, ran out the door," he said, "and then I heard someone say the 'suspect was down' about five minutes after."

The bureau puts the shooting in the employee parking lot at Adventist, near a parking garage along SE Main and said cops from East Precinct showed up at 9:24 pm "on the report of someone in the courtyard armed with a black handgun." Later, 911 dispatchers heard the man pointed a gun at a security vehicle.

As more cops flooded in, and as officers tried to figure out what to do—calling in the bureau's airplane, medical personnel, a canine unit, and Project Respond—cops somehow "encountered the suspect," gave him "commands," and then shot him until he fell to the ground.

The autopsy is planned for tomorrow morning—right when a federal judge is scheduled to discuss what a "fairness hearing" on federal reform of the Portland Police Bureau (and its rough handling of the mentally ill) might look like. Read the bureau's release after the jump.

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Update 12:30 PM: Mayor Charlie Hales' spokesman just sent out a statement explaining that the mayor would not be sending out a statement on last night's shooting. It was followed by another email explaining that Hales would also be cancelling tomorrow's planned press conference on what's expected to be a scathing audit of Portland's street-paving funding.

Mayor Hales will not release a statement today regarding the officer-involved shooting that took place Sunday, Feb. 17 at Portland Adventist Medical Center.

The mayor was on scene during the incident, having been contacted by Portland Police. He did not observe the confrontation.

The mayor received a briefing today (Monday, Feb. 18) from Portland Police. The topics of the briefing included the process of the investigation, and how it must proceed in order to find out what happened. Participants in the process include the district attorney’s office, the medical examiner’s office and the Independent Police Review Division for the city of Portland.

Mayor Hales intends to maintain the integrity of that process.

We are anticipating the release of further information in a couple of days. We will work with Portland Police to get information out as quickly as we can.

Update 11:15 PM: Mercury reporter Nathan Gilles says the shooting happened in a parking lot behind the hospital, sprawling from a parking garage along SE Main to a church along SW Market. Officers and techs are still in the lot, about 300 or so feet Southeast of the parking structure, near a fence that divides the lot from the hospital campus.

Adventist spokeswoman Judy Leach says the hospital lifted the lockdown by 11 last night, and that it went into effect at 9:30 after the hospital issued a "code silver," aka there was a "a combative person with a weapon on the premises of the hospital." Leach wouldn't comment on what anyone from the hospital may or may not have seen.

We also don't know whether the man who died was experiencing a mental health crisis. Adventist is home to an in-patient psychiatric center with a 24-hour intake center.

Original post resumes here: It's always a bad sign when the Portland Police Bureau issues a late-night release about a shooting, with practically zero details, and then makes a point of saying the bureau's public information officer will be suiting up and driving over to the scene. It's usually code for a police shooting.

So it went with an alert last night about a shooting at Portland Adventist Medical Center. At 1:20 this morning, as Steve mentioned briefly in GMN, the bureau issued an update confirming that officers were involved and that one man was dead.

This is what the release said—the only accounting so far of what happened. The whole thing started with a report of an armed man in the parking lot. That man presumably was the one shot—although there's no confirmation yet of whether the man was armed or had his weapon out and was threatening officers.

The shooting on the grounds of Portland Adventist Medical Center (PAMC) is an officer-involved shooting. One subject is deceased. No officers were injured during the shooting.

The investigation began on Sunday evening at approximately 9:30 p.m. when officers were called to PAMC on the report of a man with a gun in the parking lot. Several officers responded to the area and began to get containment on the large PAMC complex. The hospital went into lock-down to keep patients and staff safe.

As officers were continuing to get containment on the complex, some officers encountered the suspect and shots were fired. The suspect died at the scene and no officers were injured.

Homicide detectives and Criminalists from the Forensic Evidence Division are at the scene in the very early stages of the investigation.

Per policy, any involved officers will be placed on paid administrative leave as the investigation continues.

This is the first police shooting of Mayor Charlie Hales' tenure as police commissioner. And his office has confirmed that Hales, like his predecessor, Sam Adams, used to do, was on scene during the initial stages of the investigation. An update from the police bureau is promised no earlier than noon... we'll update earlier, though, if anything else pops up.

Yesterday, the Portland Police Bureau issued a fretful statement about an unpermitted anti-violence-against-women rally and march planned for downtown at the (slightly) tender hour of 3 o'clock this afternoon.

And, coincidentally, it came just after Central Precinct Commander Bob Day, the bureau's point person for so-called crowd control, held forth for a Citizen Review Committee subgroup—quite candidly—on his philosophy for handling protests and keeping traffic moving.

Today's big event—one of many across the world—is called One Billion Rising, and it's launching from Director Park. Organizers here have been clear that they believe the issue they're marching for is too vital to require permission. Which falls into the situation Day described above. As such, the bureau's announcement came with CYA language in case things go sour:

The Portland Police Bureau has been in communication with event organizers but to date, the organizers are refusing to obtain a permit for the march and have stated that they may share the march route information but not until right before the event begins.

Rally and march organizers have further expressed that they will not comply with requests to remain on the sidewalks or stop for traffic signals.

"I had an epiphany," Day said at the sitdown. "If it were me trying to get home, I'd be frustrated. But then these people who are stuck drive by and they're waving and giving people the thumbs up. If they're okay with it, why does it matter than I'm not okay with it. But there are other people who are frustrated this unpermitted event is occurring, and they're going to be late."

"In some respects, it's not all that significant," Day also said of today's march. "On the other hand, this is a significant holiday for businesses. People want to go home and see their significant others on that. We're trying to balance all those needs out."

So look out downtown—and maybe show up and march. Because when enough people show up, permits and routes tend to matter even less. Cops back off and let the crowd mostly do what it wants. And if you want to read more thoughts from Day about policing protests and marches, what works and what doesn't, hit the jump.

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It's fitting this comes out the same week Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse makes its debut at the Portland International Film Festival. The Mercury has obtained new information about a very public gun-waving road-rage incident involving Sergeant Kyle Nice, one of the officers who waved off an ambulance ride that might have saved Chasse's life.

Despite being urged by all five Police Review Board members to suspend Nice without pay (with four members voting for at least 40 hours) and also require anger management classes, Police Chief Mike Reese took it easier on Nice and handed out, instead, a letter of reprimand.

That's just one more nugget tucked inside an exclusive Mercury database, obtained through a records request, comparing Police Review Board findings against whatever discipline the chief actually ordered. Last week, we reported that Reese set aside calls to terminate two more officers, besides the demoted Lieutenant Todd Wyatt, who had been found untruthful by the PRB.

In its deliberations on Nice's road-rage case, the board was especially clear about his anger issues. It's unclear whether Reese's letter required anger management counseling.

Nice has been among the police bureau's most controversial officers. He went back on street duty in September only to be photographed, several weeks later, pepper-spraying teenagers during an unpermitted march against school budget cuts. He was suspended two weeks in the Chasse case, but just for not insisting on medical care, and even that suspension was overturned in arbitration. He was accused of intimidating a jailed protester in 2007.

A fellow cop, Thomas Brennan, had complained about Nice and his anger issues to Reese (still just Central Precinct commander) before the road-rage case. Brennan wound up suing the city and the police bureau after Reese—in a very unusual move—transferred Brennan to the bureau's evidence warehouse.

Here's something important tucked all hush-hush on the city council's no-discussion "consent agenda."
Mayor Charlie Hales and the city attorney's office want to haul the Portland Police Association in front of the state Employment Relations Board over an impasse in how the cops can implement a new use-of-force policy as part of federal police form.

It's a complicated debate. The city wants to require officers to better articulate why they used force in the first place, whether they reassessed as an encounter progressed if they could have eased off, and whether they accounted for someone maybe suffering from mental illness.

The PPA, on the other hand, thinks that's unfair and unsafe and is arguing for a strictly in-the-moment standard. A standard that will keep it easy for arbitrators to continue siding against the city in force cases.

The loggerheads come into play over whether the city is contractually obligated to negotiate that change with the union. The city is planning on bargaining over other federal reforms, like oversight and internal investigations. But it strongly believes that force policies are a management right. The union, meanwhile, is worried it will lead to unsafe working conditions, and argues that working conditions are an issue for contract talks.

Police officials want an answer sooner than later. As in 45 days. They say the US Department of Justice is nearly finished reviewing Chief Mike Reese's proposed changes to force and Taser policies. The bureau also wants to start retraining before renovations at their new training facility in Northeast make that difficult.

I reported back in November, the day the tentative agreement with the feds was up for debate, that this would be an issue.

After the hearing, PPA counsel Anil Karia huddled privately with one of his city counterparts, Stephanie Harper. [Harper prepared the ordinance council will be voting on Wednesday.] City leaders might think all those "the cops shall" phrases are ironclad. The union? Not so much.

Karia told Harper he wanted to work "constructively" but that he still needs breathing room when contract talks resume next year. Already, he's worried that one of the settlement's centerpieces—stricter limits on the use of force and a new rule requiring cops to explain their decision-making—might not be "trainable."

That's a code word for the status quo: cops fired in fatal shootings always getting their jobs back. And if that's what "real change" ends up looking like? No wonder everyone's so freaked out about what we'll get.

Hopefully you remember: In the latest batch of reports from the semi-secret Police Review Board, Police Chief Mike Reese was urged to fire three cops—including the now-infamous Lieutenant Todd Wyatt—either partly or wholly because of allegations of untruthfulness.

The chief's decision to demote Wyatt from captain, despite a 5-1 vote, has become a well-known PR nightmare for the bureau. But the Mercury has since learned, according to data obtained through a public records request, that all three cops, in fact, were allowed to keep their jobs.

That revelation comes at the same time the Mercury has learned the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office is talking with the bureau about how to better identify officers whose credibility is in such doubt they won't be called as witnesses at trial. That conversation started before the outcry over the Wyatt case because of evolving case law, Deputy District Attorney Don Rees tells me.

"This office currently is in discussions with the city attorney and the police bureau," Rees says. "But in a general way. It's not linked to one specific incident or officer."

No cop even currently holds that verboten status, Rees says. And it turns out, only one cop has even had that black mark in recent history: former Portland Police Association President Scott Westerman. It's a big deal for cops. Westerman quit the bureau and didn't get support from his union for a grievance challenging the discipline. But if he'd stayed, he'd have been consigned to a job where he'd never be in position to testify in court—a career death sentence for a cop.

But the timing, in light of the Police Review Board information, is compelling. And it suggests the bureau and the DA's office ought to have deep discussions about whether certain kinds of untruthfulness and other criminal conduct, like are worse than others.

In the most eyebrow-raising of the two new examples, Reese set aside a unanimous dismissal vote for a cop accused of failing to file a use of force report and then lying and dodging questions to cover his tracks. Board members were so upset by the allegations, they basically said the officer fundamentally lacked the credibility to continue working as a cop.

Reese, though, gave the officer a letter of reprimand. In doing so he rejected the word of the entire five-person panel—including a peer officer, the accused cop's supervisor, and a representative directly in the chief's office.

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