God bless Amanda
The Portland City Council has so many dumb ideas going at once, it's impossible to keep track of them all. Fortunately, the city has bloggers. Amanda Fritz has picked up on a juicy tidbit relating to investigations into allegations of police misconduct. Portland has enough of those for a city twice its size, and when changes in the investigative procedures are being greased to slide right through without the public noticing, it's cause for alarm.
Her post on the subject -- here -- is well worth reading and thinking about. She almost completely obscures the key facts by insisting that it has something to do with the merits of the pending charter change. But screen out all that noise, and you'll see that she's come up with a nice find of some significance.
| Posted at 9:23 PM | Permalink |
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Comments (2)
Some comments may have been lost (at least temporarily) due to a server failure on April 14, 2007.
Posted by Jack Bog | April 15, 2007 10:52 AM
Dang, I forgot to put [Warning: obligatory tie-in to Charter reform coming up] on this one, as I had on the post below. Just an illustration, Jack - heaven knows the Charter change proponents aren't giving examples of what the measures might mean in practice. And yes, I realize hardly anyone cares.
Kudos are due Dan Handelman for catching this item - I'm just the messenger. Folks are invited to come to Council Wednesday morning to ask questions about the staffing issue on the agenda, or about the bigger question of when the independent consultant will be hired - the one whose position has already been funded in a previous year's budget.
Posted by Amanda Fritz | April 10, 2007 9:57 PM
Once again, I'm only speaking from what I've heard, so grain of salt please. This is part of a shift of sworn staff back to the street to support the miserably undermanned patrol function of the bureau. They are also making some of the background investigators into non-sworn positions. How it affects what happens up there, I have no idea. I try to stay out of IA.
Lots of specialty units have been broken up or downsized and the sworn officers moved back to regular patrol lately. Because we are so low on street officers with no relief in sight, I think it's a heck of a good idea. However, with units like the Auto Theft Task Force being disbanded, it seems like a of a lot of cars are being stolen because the prolific thieves are not being caught. I'll bookend this post with the fact that I have no stats backing that, only the knowledge that it seems like we are finding a heck of a lot of dumped or rolling stolens in the last month or two. Maybe its just spring fever.
Posted by JP | April 10, 2007 11:42 PM
we are so low on street officers with no relief in sight,
But thank God, we have an aerial tram.
Posted by Jack Bog | April 10, 2007 11:47 PM
And a city council poud of what it has done to...err, for the city.
Amanda told us so, so it must be tue.
Posted by Nonny Mouse | April 10, 2007 11:50 PM
[Posted as indicated; restored later.]
Posted by Blog restoration | April 15, 2007 5:25 PM