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Portland: A Model for How NOT to Run a City

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By Randal O'Toole

November 17, 2006

NewsWithViews.com

On September 17, 2006, developer Homer Williams sat down to dinner at the Bluehour, "the premier modern restaurant in the Pearl District" (Read). From his perch on the Bluehour's patio, Williams could look with satisfaction at the condos, lofts, restaurants, and shops in the Pearl District, Portland's trendy near-downtown neighborhood. After all, Williams had built most of them.

Of course, Williams did not develop the Pearl District by himself. He had a lot of help from his friend Neil Goldschmidt, now disgraced as a child molester but once the most powerful man in Oregon (Read). Soon after Goldschmidt retired as Oregon's governor in 1991, he started working as a political consultant and Williams hired him to help with various developments. Goldschmidt used his contacts as former Portland mayor, Oregon governor, and U.S. Secretary of Transportation to funnel millions of dollars of public subsidies to Williams' developments.

Prodded by Goldschmidt, the city of Portland has given ten years of property tax waivers to some $100 million of developments in the downtown area, including many of the developments in the Pearl District. Other developments receive subsidies through tax-increment financing, which means that the property taxes they pay go to directly subsidize the development.

These developments all impose costs on Portland police, fire, and other services, but since they pay so little taxes someone else has to pay those costs. As Portland cannot raise taxes without voter approval, these costs are often covered by cutting the budgets of other agencies.

As Williams ate his dinner, one thing in his view was not so pleasant. On the sidewalk outside the restaurant, police had a man in custody (Read). The man was on the ground with his hands and feet restrained, surrounded by police. It struck Williams as strange only because everything was so "casual" (Read).

But it wasn't casual for the 42-year-old man on the ground, Jim Chasse. Known to his friends as Jim Jim, Chasse was a talented musician and had been lead singer in a punk-rock band. But then he mysteriously came down with schizophrenia. As long as he took his medicines, he was fine, but sometimes he forgot.

On September 15, two days before Williams saw Chasse in custody, an overworked mental health worker named Ela Howard received a report that Chasse was not eating and probably not taking his medicines. Howard works for Project Respond, a Portland non-profit that works with homeless people and relies heavily on private contributions. Accompanied by a police officer, Howard went to Chasse's low-rent apartment a few blocks outside of the Pearl District (Read).

When Chasse saw them, he yelled "Don't hurt me" and ran out of the building. The police officer asked Howard if he should chase Chasse, but Howard said no. Instead, she asked him to flag Chasse in the police database as one of Project Respond's clients and to page the group for assistance if police encountered him again.

Back in 1989, Portland had adopted a community policing program. This meant that police officers spent more time walking familiar neighborhoods and less time in police cars. The system was designed by Captain Tom Potter, who later became chief of police and now is mayor. Under this program, crime rates dropped through the 1990s (Read).

However, the 2001 recession resulted in police budget cuts. Over the next few years, more police returned to cars and many became less familiar with the neighborhoods they served. Today, Portland's police are better known for various sex scandals than for community policing (Read and Read).

Perhaps also due to budget cuts, Portland's police force had no way of flagging their database about Chasse. So when Officer Christopher Humphreys saw Chasse acting strangely on September 17, he assumed he was drunk or on drugs. When Humphreys approached Chasse, he saw "absolute sheer terror" in Chasse's eyes, and Chasse ran away. But he still assumed Chasse was just on drugs, and gave chase with the help of two other officers (Read).

According to the officers, Chasse fell down and Humphreys fell next to him, or maybe half on Chasse and half on the ground (Read). Other witnesses said it was more "like a football tackle," with Humphreys "throwing Chasse to the ground" (Read).

The police tried to subdue Chasse, who kicked and flailed and tried to bite them. The police said they hit Chasse "once, maybe twice" in the back, and then used tasers. When they had no effect, an officer punched Chasse in the face twice and pinned him down. Chasse screamed but finally stopped resisting when more officers arrived.

At this point, none of the officers thought Chasse was seriously injured. As they read him his rights, they report that he asked, "What did I do?" Thinking he was suffering from cocaine psychosis, they called an ambulance, but the medics said he was fine.

If this had taken place in the 1990s, police might have taken Chasse to a Crisis Triage Center, designed to help people in mental crises (Read). But funding for the center was cut in 2001, so instead they took him to Portland's overcrowded jail and put him in an isolation cell.

In 2004, Portland dedicated a new $59-million jail, including $600,000 for art works in the jail. But the region doesn't have the funds to open it, so the jail remains empty. Crime rates are increasing and the county sheriff has had to release inmates early, at least one of whom murdered someone a few days after being let out (Read).

Although budgets for police, jails, mental health, and other programs have all been cut, Portland continues to approve heavy subsidies for high-density developments like the Pearl District. When he wasn't distracted by law enforcement or Bluehour's menu, Homer Williams probably gave some thought to the South Waterfront development, which Williams is currently building with hundreds of millions of dollars of public subsidies (Read).

While Humphreys and the other officers were filling out paperwork at the jail, someone noticed that Chasse suddenly stopped struggling. They called a nurse, who observed that he was "twitchy" and told the police to take him to a hospital.

There are several hospitals close to the jail, but the hospital that has the contract for holding inmates is about eight miles away. On the way, police noticed Chasse was motionless and losing color. They stopped and tried to resuscitate him, then called an ambulance, which took Chasse to a closer hospital where he died of his injuries.

An autopsy found that Chasse had a dozen fractured ribs. Some of the broken ribs perforated the serosa, and the coroner fond 300 cubic centimeters of blood in Chasse's chest cavity. There was no evidence of alcohol or drugs. Cause of death was "blunt force to chest" (Read).

A grand jury ruled Chasse's death an accident, but mental health advocates are outraged (Read). Particularly upsetting is the record of 78 complaints against the use of excessive force by Officer Humphreys in the last two-and-one-half years alone -- the second most of any Portland police officer. In one case, the city had to pay $90,000 to someone who Humphreys struck with his baton thirty times before realizing that the person he was hitting was not the suspect he was seeking (Read). Police say Humphreys is just put into dangerous situations more than other officers.

Mayor Potter says the problem is lack of funding for mental health, and he wants to spend $500,000 to train police to better deal with the mentally ill. But Portland law professor Jack Bogdanski (Read) suggests that the real question is: why does Portland continue to subsidize Homer Williams' high-density developments when funding is so short for police, mental health, fire, and other critical programs?

© 2006 Randal O'Toole - All Rights Reserved

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Randal O'Toole has spent three decades studying government planning, including both rural and urban plans. His work on national forest planning led to the book, "Reforming the Forest Service," which proposes free-market reforms of public land management. His work on urban planning led to the book, "The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths: How Smart Growth Harms American Cities," which promotes free-market solutions to congestion and other urban problems.

In 1998, Yale University named O'Toole its McCluskey Conservation Fellow. In 1999 and 2001, he was the Scaife Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, and in 2000 he was the Merrill Visiting Professor at Utah State University. O'Toole is an economist with the Thoreau Institute (ti.org) and the director of the American Dream Coalition (americandreamcoalition.org).

E-mail: rot@ti.org

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In one case, the city had to pay $90,000 to someone who Humphreys struck with his baton thirty times before realizing that the person he was hitting was not the suspect he was seeking...