"If people think they should call, they should call ," says Leticia Sainz, a program manager at the Multnomah County Health Department. The first is simple: Portlanders could call someone other than the cops. Two changes could reduce the interactions police have with homeless people. Daryl Turner has a bit of a point when he says the police should not be dealing with situations that are public health crises." "Regardless of your positions on policing philosophically, policing is not social work. "We're forcing a square peg in a round hole," says former mayoral candidate Sarah Iannarone. The Gladen killing has renewed pleas from activists that people stop calling the police on homeless and mentally ill people. But they are trained to interact with criminals, and are increasingly responding to people in the midst of mental health crises who would be better handled by a social worker. Police receive much of the criticism when these calls escalate. 6, officers responding to a report of a man asleep on a porch shot and killed Andre C. In December, DoubleTree Hotel employees in the Lloyd District phoned the cops to kick out a black man talking on his cellphone in the lobby, even though he was a paying guest at the hotel. But it's also because of a few high-profile incidents that began with a 911 call to report an "unwanted person." In part, that's because of a spike in shootings by police: as many in the past four months as in any full year since 2010. The encounters that result from those calls have received an unusual amount of attention this winter. "It's a recipe for failure to put the burden of the homelessness solution on the Police Bureau's shoulders and then give us insufficient resources to do the work." "The Portland Police Bureau has not been given nearly enough resources to fulfill its small piece in addressing the homelessness crisis," police union president Daryl Turner said in a recent statement. Like firefighters, who rarely fight fires and more often respond to medical calls, Portland police have found the work they are trained to do-fighting crime-is increasingly overshadowed by the work they are summoned to do: dealing with the homeless and mentally ill. When Portlanders call 911, dispatchers nearly always send police to respond, unless the caller asks for medical treatment. Not only do Portlanders call dispatchers every 15 minutes to report an unwanted person: They call every four minutes, on average, to ask police to intervene in situations where there has been no crime committed. Their rise matches the overall growth in 911 calls-in other words, they account for most of the increase in dispatched calls Portland police respond to. "Those kinds of things are certainly not 911 emergencies, but because they don't know what other number to call, they call 911."Ĭombined, these "disorder calls" account for half of all calls for police assistance, according to Police Bureau data. "We get a lot of administrative-type calls," says Bureau of Emergency Communications director Bob Cozzie. Together, they classify these as "disorder calls," to distinguish them from calls about crimes in progress. Portland police lump together these calls with welfare checks-which are calls to check on the health of a person who has either been unresponsive or is in distress-and other less common non-criminal calls. That's the designation dispatchers assign a call when someone has asked a person to leave their property and the person refuses. Since 2013, calls reporting "unwanted persons" have increased more than 60 percent, according to PPB data. Instead, Portlanders are far more often calling 911 when they see a person who frightens or inconveniences them. But slightly less than a quarter of dispatched calls last year were from people reporting crimes. The total number of calls police were sent to is up almost 30 percent since fiscal year 2013, according to call data WW requested from the Bureau of Emergency Communications and the Portland Police Bureau. "If the only tool you have is calling the police, then everything is going to look like a police call," says Julie Sullivan-Springhetti, a spokeswoman for Multnomah County, which administers housing and mental health services.Īs frustrations over street conditions have grown, calls to 911 have changed.
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