A Portland police officer on the unit responsible for investigating injury shootings in the city said the group of 17 officers is overwhelmed with the workload and needs more resources and support from elected city leaders, as city leaders seem poised to debate expanding staffing within the bureau as early as next month.
By the end of the year, Officer Charlie Asheim predicted between 1,100 and 1,200 shootings in Portland – a sharp increase from the nearly 900 seen last year and the less than 400 seen the year before. Despite the surge, Asheim said they’re investigating the shootings with about a third of the manpower they had last summer, after city leaders voted to disband the Gun Violence Reduction Team in June 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.
The family of at least one homicide victim blamed the violence on a lack of resources for police and said it’s costing people their lives. Jacob Vasquez-Knight died in the early-morning hours of September 25 when a gunman walked up to a window at Silver Dollar Pizza Café in northwest Portland and fired off into a crowd of people. Police said Vasquez-Knight, was not the gunman’s target.
“It was a great loss to this community and to our family. He was the baby boy of the family,” Don Osborn, Vasquez-Knight’s brother-in-law said days after the shooting. “I believe if the proper tools were in place for our law enforcement officers, this event wouldn’t have even happened.”
Osborn called on city leaders to “untie the hands” of police and allow them to do more work related to gun violence prevention. In many ways, the debate unfolding in Portland is not new. In a 2019 budget meeting, Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty pushed to disband the Gun Violence Reduction Team, citing a city audit that showed 59% of the unit’s stops involved Black Portlanders despite only being roughly 6% of the city’s population.
The police bureau leaders pushed back on that criticism and said the data tracked more closely to the gun victimization rate; the benchmark PPB used to compare stops data on the gun violence reduction team. After the debate, city commissioners voted against disbanding the team then.
However, a year later, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and massive protests in Portland demanding police reform, city leaders voted unanimously to disband the Gun Violence Reduction Team. The 38 full-time positions were distributed back to patrol and other functions within the bureau.
The months since that decision have been violent; this year alone, police have reported over 1,000 shootings, and the city passed its highest number of killings in a single year – the majority of which happened by gunfire.
Critics of police, like Commissioner Hardesty, said the violence is more closely tied to the instability and economic insecurity of the pandemic, though police have tied the increase to the decision to disband the gun violence team and not publicly support the police bureau.
In April, city leaders approved a nearly $6 million plan to address gun violence. It included funding for community grants to organizations working to stem the violence and gave permission to police to do more, but it did not give the agency more money or officers to do that.
City leaders have pieced back together parts of what GVRT did. First, the bureau created the Enhanced Community Safety Team, a unit that responds to and investigates shootings but does not do any proactive patrols, as GVRT officers did.
Police Chief Chuck Lovell is in the process of creating a Focused Intervention Team, which will include 12 officers who will do those proactive patrols. However, unlike GVRT, there will be a community oversight group to track what the team does. The city commissioners' April plan approved this team.
In the meantime, officers on the Enhanced Community Safety Team have been overwhelmed with the workload and said city leaders needed to allow police to do more.
“This is the worst I’ve ever seen it. I’ve been a cop for 16 years. I was born and raised in Northeast Portland. There’s never been a time like this with shootings in the city of Portland that I’m aware of,” Officer Charlie Asheim said, a member of the GVRT and now the Enhanced Community Safety Team.
There are eight officers, six detectives, and three sergeants on the Enhanced Community Safety Team compared to 22 officers, 12 detectives, and four sergeants who made up GVRT. Asheim said the diminished workforce and surging caseload have overwhelmed the team.
“Many of our officers on our team are working sometimes double shifts daily trying to go out and do this work. That’s taxing,” Asheim said. “With the resources we have, we go after the cases that we are most likely to be able to solve and have the best leads.”
Asheim said the new safety team focuses on cases where guns are connected to multiple shootings or other cases where there are things like surveillance video, witnesses and victims who will cooperate, or other good leads to follow. Asheim said they review every case and have made several arrests.
“We’ve had a lot of successes, but just by the sheer number of shootings we have, it doesn’t feel successful, right? Every one of those is good. Every one of those is a gun off the street. Somebody that’s been shooting somebody else,” Asheim said.
A spokesperson for Mayor Ted Wheeler said he will propose a plan to rehire Portland officers who have retired. Commissioner Mingus Mapps supports that. Commissioner Carmen Rubio hasn’t explicitly supported that, but she told KATU News that she wants to address staffing vacancies in the short term while getting a more detailed plan from Chief Lovell on staffing and hiring for the future.
It will take three votes on the council to make changes. The family of Jacob Vasquez-Knight said they’ll push city leaders to give more resources to police.
“We are going to do our part to make sure we can make Portland a safer place and turn the homicide rate back down,” Osborn said.