Portland police launch specialized team of officers to respond and investigate shootings in city

A Portland police bureau uniform patch

Portland police Deputy Chief Chris Davis said the Enhanced Community Safety Team is not a re-creation of the disbanded Gun Violence Reduction Unit. “It’s not the same thing as a group of officers in uniform engaged in proactive patrol,” Davis said.

Portland police announced Friday they’ve started a specialized team of officers and detectives to focus full time on shooting investigations as gun violence has spiked in the last year.

The Enhanced Community Safety Team will be made up of three sergeants, 12 officers and six detectives. They’ll staff a seven member on-call unit of officers to respond to shooting scenes, examine evidence, interview witnesses and do immediate follow-up investigations.

Sergeants will determine when to send out the on-call officers, Deputy Chief Chris Davis said. They won’t respond to every shooting in the city.

The move is what Police Chief Chuck Lovell had proposed on Dec. 23 in a memo to Mayor Ted Wheeler, who serves as police commissioner. Wheeler only two weeks ago expressed his support for the plan.

The estimated cost is $153,348 for the rest of this fiscal year through June and $306,695 next fiscal year for a total of $460,043. The money for this year likely would come out of the Police Bureau’s existing budget, but additional funding for next year would have to be approved by City Council

Though the specific source of the funding hasn’t been identified, the first on-call response occurred Thursday, when one sergeant, two detectives and four officers headed to a shooting in North Portland, Davis said.

“We didn’t want to wait because of the urgent need,” Davis said. He acknowledged the Police Bureau would have preferred to have rolled out such a team much earlier as shootings rose last summer.

The city recorded 55 homicides in 2020, the highest number in 26 years. Forty-one of those resulted from gun violence, according to the Police Bureau. In January, there were 103 shootings, compared to 50 during the same month in 2020 and 32 in January 2019, according to bureau statistics.

There have been 144 shootings so far this year, not including suicides or attempted suicides, police said. Of those, 40 people have been wounded. Seven people were fatally shot this year, according to the bureau.

The new team’s focus will be on identifying and arresting what police suspect is a “narrow” group of repeat shooters responsible for much of the violence, Davis said.

It will be different from the disbanded Gun Violence Reduction Team in that it will focus on the investigative side after shootings and less on uniformed patrol and interdiction, Davis said. The City Council last summer called for the elimination of the Gun Violence Reduction Team, citing concerns about the disproportionate arrests of people of color.

“It’s not the same thing as a group of officers in uniform engaged in proactive patrol,” Davis said.

The team also will work on the investigations in collaboration with the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the FBI, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and neighboring police agencies.

Wheeler said the move is one of several steps being taken to respond to the increase in shootings. He said the city’s Office of Violence Prevention is also working on increased prevention, intervention, education and support for victims and their families.

“I want to be clear. I see what others see; too many people being shot and killed in our community, " he said in a statement. “I am deeply impacted by the loss of life and the trauma plaguing our community.”

Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who successfully pushed for the dismantling of the Gun Violence Reduction Team last summer, said earlier this month that she doesn’t support putting more money into the Police Bureau until there’s further community agreement on how to change policing.

Creating the new team focused on shootings will leave one sergeant and five detectives in the Police Bureau’s assault detail to investigate serious assaults that aren’t related to guns and bias crimes, Sgt. Kevin Allen said.

East Portland residents circulated a petition in recent weeks urging the city to act to protect their communities from gun violence.

“We East Portland Neighbors are writing you to condemn the violence occurring in East Portland and to insist our elected officials show some leadership on this issue immediately,” reads the petition by the group East Portland Neighbors Against Gun Violence.

“We’ve heard conversations all year on how the Gun Violence Response Team needs to be replaced by something more humane and prevention-oriented,” it says. “Meanwhile we sit here night after night in the outer east neighborhoods listening to the roar of hot-rodding vehicles and the popping of gunshots. We’re afraid to leave our houses at night.”

Ann McMullen, of the East Portland Neighbors group, called the Police Bureau’s action a “starting point.”

“I hope that this means victims and their families will be consulted and updated by the police as well as be offered trauma counseling and ultimately obtain some form of justice,” she said.

“But most of this focuses on what happens after the violence occurs which won’t stop the ongoing violence,” she added, unless the police are successful in identifying the suspected repeat shooters.

The Hazelwood Neighborhood Association board and all of the residents who signed the petition want elected officials and the police to hold virtual town halls in East Portland to address many of their ongoing questions about the recent violence, McMullen said.

Multnomah County Sheriff’s Capt. Derrick Peterson, who is president of the Northwest chapter of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives known as NOBLE, said the group is concerned about the disproportionate amount of violence affecting people of color. He said he supports the Police Bureau’s decision to restructure a team of officers aimed at reducing gun violence.

“NOBLE believes there is a correlation between the increase of gun violence with the defunding of the Portland Police Bureau and the disbanding of (the bureau’s) Gun Violence Reduction Team,” Peterson said in a statement.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email mbernstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-8212

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