2 Oregon officers disciplined for leaking false information

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Documents released by the city of Portland show two more officers with the Portland Police Bureau have been disciplined for leaking information that falsely identified Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty as a suspect in a hit-and-run vehicle crash.

Officer Kerri Ottoman was suspended for one day without pay and Officer Ken Le received a letter of reprimand for violating the bureau’s directive on sharing information over the March 2021 incident, KGW-TV reported.

Ottoman and Le are the second and third Portland officers to be disciplined. The other was Brian Hunzeker, who was fired after an internal affairs investigation found that he shared confidential information with the media and did it in response to Hardesty’s negative comments about city officers.

Hunzeker was president of Portland’s police union at the time. He resigned as head of the Portland Police Association in 2021, citing a “serious, isolated mistake” in connection to the incident.

The same internal affairs investigation found Ottoman and Le also were responsible for leaking the misinformation.

On March 3, 2021, a victim told dispatch that she had been involved in a hit-and-run incident and said she thought the woman who hit her looked like Hardesty. That information was released to the media after Hardesty was ruled out as a suspect.

“When you have taken on police accountability issues as long as I have, you come to expect these kinds of attacks,” Hardesty said following the leak.

Ottoman told Gabriel Johnson, who is affiliated with a conservative political action committee called Coalition to Save Portland, about the hit-and-run call on March 4, 2021, and sent a picture of the dispatch report, according to police documents.

Johnson shared the false information during a livestream on Facebook. Ottoman said she “was venting” to a friend, didn’t know Johnson was going to share the information during a livestream and that she was upset about it.

Chief Charles Lovell said in documents that the one-day suspension for Ottoman was appropriate because he said Ottoman learned from her mistake, accepted responsibility and apologized for her actions.

Le was one of the officers who investigated the hit-and-run accusation. According to another police memo, Le said he sent a message to a friend who works as a dispatcher at the city’s Bureau of Emergency Communications with information about the hit-and-run accusation, including a screen shot of the report. According to the memo, Le said he sent the message “just for kind of laughs.”

Le told investigators he didn’t know it was a violation to share the information with a dispatcher.

Lovell said in the memo he determined that a letter of reprimand for Le was appropriate, citing Le’s “relative inexperience as an officer, and the fact that (Le) did not realize you could not share the information with” a Bureau of Emergency Communications employee.

Hardesty filed a lawsuit in December seeking a total of about $5 million in damages from the police bureau, along with Hunzeker and Ottoman.