Retiring Bend Police Chief Porter: More training is needed – but it’ll cost

Expects police costs to rise 25-30%; also defends 'restraint technique'

BEND, Ore. (KTVZ) -- At a coincidentally momentous time to be hiring a new Bend police chief, retiring Chief Jim Porter touted the department’s progress on various fronts, from training to citizen trust, during a talk with city councilors Wednesday evening. But he also said more training and some tough issues lie ahead, amid intense national scrutiny over police practices.

Porter retires at month’s end after nearly four decades in law enforcement and six years as Bend's police chief. He spoke with councilors by video conference on the eve of the start of the city’s selection process involving five candidates for chief – three internal and two from elsewhere, a process involving dozens of stakeholder groups and a community survey to make sure all get to provide input in a process more closely watched than most.

Porter said a survey conducted last year found big improvements from one done five years earlier, in areas ranging from citizen trust of the police to officers’ job satisfaction, as well as far fewer officer days lost to illness and injury, thanks to a concerted effort to promote wellness, from on-duty workouts to yoga and meditation that have boosted morale.

He said 75 percent of officers have received the week-long de-escalation training, taught by mental health specialists, with a goal of 100 percent as soon as possible. He said it also involves those who have had mental health issues and can speak to their past interactions with police, as well as role-playing and scenario-based training.

Many of the police reform proposals being discussed in Salem, on Capitol Hill and across the country have already been engaged in by Bend police, such as collecting more detailed data on police stops; Porter said Bend police joined in a state project to do just that last year.

But two days after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule on the controversial issue of “qualified immunity” for police, Porter said it’s something that could, if changed dramatically, have negative consequences.

If the doctrine is struck down, or there’s national legislation to remove it, officers and police agencies will be far more widely exposed to tort claims and legal action, he said.

Porter also said proposals to ban or severely restrict chokeholds also raise issues,though he said Bend officer “do not choke” but instead, when necessary in life-threatening situations, use a “pressure restraint on both carotid arteries below the ears,” to help protect the windpipe. And even then, he said, they are “only allowed to use that in defense of themselves or another person, in a situation where use of deadly physical force is allowed.”

“To outlaw that would put us in an exceptionally bad position,” Porter said, when an officer is protecting himself or others, “on the ground and can’t get to his firearm. He could literally find himself being indicted for using a technique that literally saved his life, and that is a lot less intrusive than an officer using his firearm.”

“It sets the officers up to fail,” he said, and “doesn’t meet the science” involved in how to resolve such life-or-death situations.

Despite stepped-up training, “police officers in the U.S. are significantly under-trained, compared to officers in Europe,” Porter said, having been on hand during use of force encounters with Dutch police.

“Our under-training shows,” he said, compared to two or three years of “basic training” officers must undergo overseas.

“We’re going to have to increase our training,” he said, including “more implicit bias training, so that becomes part of our culture we think about, every time we get out of the car to talk to somebody. So it’s intuitive – not training.”

Porter also said the next Bend chief is going to need an advisory committee that is “much more diverse, in race and age,” than the one in place now. And they need to be sure that every officer, before they work solo, has undergone 40 hours of crisis intervention training.

The chief said the number of mental health-related calls is rising 10 to 15 percent a year lately, and even with the police embedding mental health workers on related calls, they aren’t seeing a decline in those numbers.

“We’re going to have to be a little more inventive,” he said, such as “a civilian response model, partner with Deschutes County Mental Health, have civilians respond first, officers only when the threat level increases.”

And then there are issues that contribute to crime and related issues that are far afield from police, such as the need for more affordable housing, Porter said.

On a night when the city made budget reductions, and cries are heard from protesters to “de-fund police” (and the Portland City Council on Wednesday cut $16 million from the police budget – not enough say some, who wanted far deeper cuts), Porter said police actually will need more money, not less.

“The cost of policing going forward is going to go up 25-30%, with the mandates the president put in place, reviewing what our legislators are looking at. We’re going to have to increase our training.”

Asked by Councilor Bill Moseley is he’s concerned about use-of-force investigations being handled by someone like the attorney general, who could succumb to political pressure, Porter said, “I believe, if set up properly, it’s an appropriate process.”

“I’d like to keep it (the investigations) local, but I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Porter said, noting he worked with Oregon Attorney General Rosenblum on “Kaylee’s Law.”

“There’s always politics,” he said.

Answering a councilor's question about police use of military equipment, Porter said he’d declined an offer four years ago of an armored personnel vehicle. “I didn’t want it in our inventory,” he said. Instead, using some saved funds, they bought a civilian, armored “police rescue vehicle” that he said has been used many times to rescue people, without the use of force.

During the councilor Q&A, Porter noted that last year, Bend officers arrested 147 people who were black (or the officer believed was black), and only had to use force twice.

Amid praise from several councilors, Porter credited the team at the department, including the three internal candidates to succeed him.

But Councilor Gena Goodman-Campbell told her colleagues and Porter: “I don’t think we should pat ourselves on the back and say what happened in Minneapolis couldn’t happen here.”

And later, Goodman-Campbell said she’d declined to recite the Pledge of Allegiance as the start of the meeting as a “statement of patriotic support for everyone speaking out for justice in this country.”