PORTLAND — Three weeks after the Portland City Council approved a sweeping $6 million plan to combat an historic surge in gun violence, most of its core components have been slow to materialize.
There is no firm date for when a reestablished police team tasked with stopping shootings will hit the streets.
The community oversight committee that will eventually monitor and review those officers may not come together for at least another month.
The city has yet to cut a check from the $4.1 million set aside for nonprofits focused on gun violence prevention and healing, and only plans to dole out about 5% of that money by July 1.
The languid pace appears to belie the calls of urgency that propelled Mayor Ted Wheeler and the city’s four commissioners to reach a compromise on the gun violence prevention plan, which they swiftly passed with limited public input on April 7.
But city officials say a thoughtful, deliberative approach on a matter that disproportionately impacts communities of color and is politically fraught is the only way to get it right.
“It’s not all going to happen this week or next,” said Mike Myers, Portland’s newly minted director of community safety and one of the people overseeing the city’s response to gun violence. “It’s progressive. It’s going to happen in phases, over months.”
Myers remarks came as a wave of gun violence persists. Four people were shot Monday night in Portland, including a 13-year-old boy, police said. Another seven people attending a vigil in Gresham mere blocks from the city limits were wounded in a drive-by shooting.
Since the council package passed 21 days ago, 23 people have been injured in 50 separate shootings, bringing those totals this year to 110 and 337, respectively, the Portland Police Bureau said.
Firearms have caused 21 of the city’s 28 homicides since Jan. 1, a pace that currently puts Portland on track to shatter its previous record of 70 homicides in 1987.
“It’s really for us troubling,” said Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell during a press conference Tuesday.
“We’re trying to do everything we can with our resources — to put the resources we have available towards gun violence and do it in a way where it doesn’t negatively impact the other work we have to do in the police bureau.”
Part of the new plan directs the bureau to deploy 12 officers and two supervisors currently assigned elsewhere to form a new uniformed team tasked with combatting the city’s dramatic increase in shootings.
The creation of the so-called “ Focused Intervention Team “ comes nearly a year after the City Council cut funding for the Police Bureau’s Gun Violence Reduction Team, which was criticized for suspecting and stopping too many Black males.
The new unit will be required to collaborate with a community oversight committee to develop specific policing strategies. The committee will routinely review the unit’s work.
Lovell said he isn’t sure where the bureau will draw officers from to serve on the reconstituted team. Nor could the chief provide a time frame for its deployment, other than saying the team should be in place by summer.
“We realize the urgency in having it up and running as soon as possible,” Lovell said. “But we really want to be mindful in its creation, we want to really have the right community involvement in the selection process as well.”
Who serves on the community board that will oversee the new gun violence prevention team also remains to be seen. That is up to the mayor, who is collaborating with his four council colleagues.
Despite multiple staff calls and meetings, they’ve only just begun in earnest to consider those choices.
Wheeler’s office circulated a draft memo Tuesday that proposes creating an 11-member advisory group that would help shape the design, workings and membership of the community oversight committee, according to people familiar with the document.
The memo asks each of Wheeler’s council colleagues by next week to nominate three community members who could potentially serve on the advisory group, which would provide input on what a successful oversight committee would look like.
“The whole create a committee in order to create another committee is about the most Portland thing ever,” said one City Council staffer, who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak on the council’s gun violence prevention plan. “We’re really working at the speed of city government.”
Jim Middaugh, a Wheeler spokesman, said the mayor’s office hoped to have the community oversight committee in place and operating by the end of May.
“It will be a push but it’s important to move as quickly as we can,” Middaugh said.
The new council plan allocated the $4.1 million for community-based groups to work with the city’s Office of Violence Prevention to aid shooting victims and their families and attempt to stop retaliations.
That amount is quadruple what the office had originally requested for next fiscal year, documents from the city’s budget office show.
With the city planning to distribute just $200,000 through the end of the fiscal year on June 30, the remaining $3.9 million will be used the following year, budget documents show.
Commissioner Carmen Rubio, who played a central role in negotiating the final plan, did not respond to a request for comment.
Myers, the community safety director, pushed back against the suggestion that the process wasn’t moving fast enough.
“If we just throw money at the problem and not do it right, it’s not a good idea,” he said. We want to do this with some thought behind it and figure out what’s going to make the biggest impact.”
