Transcript
Automatically generated transcript. It may contain errors and includes testimony in languages other than English that is not individually marked up for assistive technology.
Loretta Smith
Mr.
Chair, this is Councilor Smith.
I am online.
Steve Novick
Good morning, Councilor.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Steve Novick
And let's see, um, I think I see Councilor Kanal.
What about— what about Councilor Zimmerman?
Unidentified speaker
Just one.
Steve Novick
All right, um, hopefully Councilor Zimmerman will show up.
Um, good morning, it is Tuesday, September 1st.
I call this meeting of the Committee and Public Safety Committee to order.
Whoops.
Oh, I forgot that my dog barks when I hear— when it hears a sound like a door knocking.
Uh, Barley, hush.
It's okay.
Um, um, so I apologize for being virtual today.
I got COVID, so you wouldn't want me there.
Um, this meeting of the Committee and Public Safety Committee will take on 2 subjects: updates Portland Fire Code and Fee Schedule.
And pursuant to a request from Councilor Murillo, we're going to have a discussion of Portland Police response times with a presentation from PPB and one from Portland Parole.
We had intended to have a 3rd item, which was report on cost of police staffing from Councilor Smith's resolution earlier in this year.
At the request of Councilor Smith, we'll look to a future meeting for that discussion.
Clerk, could you please call the roll?
Unidentified speaker
Councilor Good morning.
Morillo?
Angelita Morillo
Here.
Unidentified speaker
Zimmerman?
Smith?
Loretta Smith
Here.
Thank you.
Lauren Johnson
Kanal?
Sameer Kanal
Here.
Keelan McClymont
Novick?
Steve Novick
Here.
Kevin, could you please read the statement of conduct?
Unidentified speaker
Welcome to the meeting of the Community and Public Safety Committee.
To testify before this committee in person or virtually, you must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at www.portland.gov/council.
Keelan McClymont
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
Public testimony is available online at portland.gov/council/agenda/community-and-public-safety-committee or by calling 311.
Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link.
Registration for virtual testimony closes 1 hour prior to the meeting.
In-person testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard.
If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for 3 minutes unless the chair states otherwise.
Your microphone will be muted when your time is over.
The chair preserves order.
Disruptive conduct such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others' testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed.
If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given.
Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting.
Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass.
Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually.
Your testimony should address the matter being considered.
When testifying, one, state your name for the record.
If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent.
And 2, virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Thank you.
Could the clerk read the first item?
And actually, I think that fire plans to sort of address both together.
So could you read the first and second items?
Unidentified speaker
Happy to.
Item number 1, document number 2026-300, amend fire department fire regulations fee schedule, amend Portland policy document FIR-12.01.
Uh, item number 2, document number 2026-301, amend fire regulations code to adopt current Oregon Fire Code with city amendments, amend Code Title 31.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Chief Johnson, Marshal Schimmel, take it away.
Lauren Johnson
Hey, good morning.
Thank you.
For the record, I'm Lauren Johnson and I'm the fire chief, and Kerry Schimmel, our fire marshal, is joining me.
We're here today to explain the proposed changes to Title 31, which involves updating our city code to the current state code and updating certain city amendments.
Next slide, please.
I'll start by sharing some background on fire codes.
Oregon has statewide fire codes.
This means that the Oregon Fire Code is the state's official set of standards for fire prevention, protection, and emergency preparedness.
The statewide code must be adopted by all local jurisdictions as a minimum standard.
Local jurisdictions can then make their own code more stringent, but not less, than the state's fire code.
The City of Portland is designated as an exempt jurisdiction, which means that Portland Fire and Rescue is responsible for administering and enforcing the fire code within our city boundaries.
The state adopts a new code about every 3 years, and as it is currently written, our city code lists the adopted state fire code by noting the year.
For example, the state made a change in 2022 and the city adopted it, and it was called the 2023 Portland Fire Code.
That meant that the 2023 Portland Fire Code made many references to the 2022 Oregon Code.
And it means that now that we're ready to adopt the 2025 Oregon Fire Code, we need to bring you an ordinance each time the state updates their code.
Next slide, please.
So that brings us to our proposed amendments.
One thing you'll notice is that today's proposed amendments remove references to the specific years of the adopted code.
They add references to the Oregon State Statute Statutes and administrative rules that define which code editions we need to use, and it specifies effective dates.
This will eliminate the need for staff to bring ordinances to council with each update of the state fire code, so that this amendment will streamline and simplify our compliance process.
Next slide, please.
Here are the specifics on the other proposed amendments, all of which are designed to remove outdated code references or obsolete language.
We need to update the administrative rule you see there to the correct OAR.
This corrects a citation error and preserves Portland's ability to allow approved alternative fire protection methods for one and two-family dwellings.
Some of the National Fire Protection Association codes have been changed and/or consolidated, so we needed to correct our reference from Chapter 45 to Chapter 80.
The subject here hasn't changed, but the code reference number has.
Next, we want to delete the inspection record card requirement.
This is an old practice that's no longer in place, and we have a new system that we use now.
We also recommend deleting the lease agreement language for billing the building owner because we deal directly with the property owner.
This simplifies billing responsibility and removes our need to track private lease agreements that the city does not administer or enforce.
Next, we need to update or remove outdated reference to the Administrative Review Board and replace it with current information on appeals.
And finally, we need to remove the section referring to the retail sales of fireworks because it's no longer allowed.
Bans on fireworks sales are noted in a separate ordinance, and that makes this language unnecessary and potentially confusing.
Next slide, please.
So that covers the proposed amendments for Title 31, and I want to pause and give time for questions and discussion before moving to the proposed fee changes.
Okay, all good.
Next slide, please.
So this next section covers our amendments to the fire fee schedule, which was proposed as part of this fiscal year's budget process.
I'd like to invite Angela Wright from the Financial Office of the Public Safety Service Area to join me for this part of our presentation.
Angela did the majority of the research and calculations associated with the fee changes.
So it's important to note that the majority of our fire fees have not been comprehensively updated since before 2012.
Only a few fees have been changed since that time.
These fee changes were developed after an evaluation of actual service delivery, a comparison to peer jurisdictions, and with consideration next slide, please.
So on this slide, you'll see the services that the fire fees pay for.
They include permit reviews and application processing, fire and life safety inspections, responding to customer inquiries, fire protection systems oversight, the regulation of hazardous materials, enforcement of the fire code, and community risk reduction outreach and activities.
Eric Zimmerman
Councilmember Herbold.
Lauren Johnson
When Council approved this year's budget in June, it included fire fee increases as an offset to additional reductions to the Fire Bureau's budget.
The amendments only revise fees associated with existing services and do not change existing fire code requirements or create new regulatory obligations.
The customers that these fees impact include property owners, business owners, contractors, builders, and developers, and other members of the public who apply for special permits or are responsible for complying with the city's fire code.
And when we briefed council staff on this item, we received questions about community outreach regarding the fee increases.
I want to note that this was done as part of the budget town hall series, and to my knowledge, we did not receive any comments or questions.
Next slide, please.
So on this slide, we're showing you the year-over-year difference between our revenues from fire fees and our personnel expenses since 2020.
You've seen the primary drivers of the city's personnel costs in other presentations, and they include changes in salary, pension, and benefits obligations, along with materials and services inflation.
Since 2020, our personnel expenses have increased by 43%.
And you will surely notice the stair-step increase since 2023, which marked the beginning of the current firefighter labor agreement.
This CBA included annual raises, and those increases are visible here.
Across these years, revenue from fire fees has covered less and less of the personnel costs associated with the Fire Marshal's Office.
It's important to note that there are a number of different fire department models that have varying amounts of cost recovery for fire inspection and fire code enforcement activities.
So it makes precise comparisons hard.
Even within our own office, some inspectors are at 100% cost recovery because of the kind of work that they do.
And then there are other inspectors that have assignments that involve a smaller amount of cost recovery or no cost recovery at all.
An example of that, of the no cost recovery positions, are our fire and arson investigators.
So during recent years, fees accounted for up to 57% of personnel costs on average for the fire marshal's staff.
This is what it was in FY21.
However, in FY26, these fees only cover 42%.
So in order to return to the 57% cost recovery, we would need to increase our fees by 36%.
However, our proposals represent an increase of less than that, 27%.
This increase is the right amount to help cover more of our costs by providing these for providing these services.
It aligns us more closely to comparable jurisdictions.
It addresses the inflationary increase to our costs that have taken place since our last major fee adjustment, and it supports the long-term financial stability of our inspection program.
Next slide, please.
So as I mentioned, part of our process included a comparison to peer cities.
On this slide, you can see a list of cities and their corresponding fees.
Which are shown with a cost of living adjustment to make the comparison easier to understand.
On average, our current fees are $146 below these cities, and with our proposed increases, we would still be on average $53 below.
Next slide, please.
And finally, we've heard from some councilors' offices specifically about public assembly occupancy.
And we wanted to provide more detail about these fees specifically.
In Portland, public assembly fees are based on square footage.
Some comparison cities have different methods for pricing that include flat fees or hourly rates.
You can see some examples on this slide of how Portland prices compare to others on like items.
This chart does have a cost of living adjustment added so that the comparison will be meaningful and easier to understand.
Thank you.
Next slide, please.
As I mentioned, Portland fees are based on square footage, and this chart shows you the proposed changes specifically for public assembly costs.
And I want to note that we offer fee waivers to nonprofit organizations.
Next slide, please.
So this is the last slide we have for you, and I want to emphasize that we plan to evaluate our cost structures more regularly and to continue to do so in a way that supports life safety for all of Portland, and also improves our ability to process applications and provide timely responses to our customers.
The actual revenue generated will vary depending on development activity, permit volume, and inspection demands.
And many of the fees you see in the schedule are not applied every year, and several others come into play only after repeated warnings and violations.
The fee increases are tied to real changes in our cost, which stem primarily from increases in personnel costs.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Lauren Johnson
And also from materials and services increases.
Finally, we expect these fee changes to have minimal impact on overall project costs because fire prevention fees generally represent a very small amount of total development costs.
We're happy to take your questions and comments at this point.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Chief.
Councilor Smith.
Loretta Smith
Thank you, Chief.
Uh, thank you for bringing this forward.
Going back to what you said, you said if we make these changes that it will allow us to serve our public faster, and that would basically mean that we would be able to hire new people.
And then you back it up and say, no, this is going to be for the increases in employee FTE costs.
So are we are we going to hire more folks, or are we just going to maintain the, the people that we have with the new increases?
Lauren Johnson
Thanks for that question, Councilor.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be confusing.
These fees are not intended to let us add employees.
It's, it's really meant to improve the percentage of cost recovery that's happening for inspectors that are in the Fire Marshal's Office.
And it's important to note that as development, as permit demands, like shrink and increase throughout a year.
The Fire Marshal's Office makes adjustments based on that need so that sometimes we have more people working on that work when there's more demand, and then we assign them to other duties when the demand isn't as high.
Loretta Smith
So have we increased the amount of development that's happening in the City of Portland in this past year?
Lauren Johnson
What do you— do you have a feeling for that?
Councilor, I don't know that we've got a good answer for that right now.
I would like to check with Permitting and Development.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Lauren Johnson
And get back to you.
Loretta Smith
Because, so that I'm clear, so a lot of these, and I apologize for not being there in person, I will be there shortly.
So are these fees, Based on the new development that's happening and existing buildings that you have to go out and check?
Lauren Johnson
Yes, it's to address existing demand and things that we do every year in terms of fire inspections, systems maintenance, assembly and occupancy permits.
Loretta Smith
Okay, okay.
Thank you for, um, thank you for bringing this forward.
Lauren Johnson
Yes, ma'am.
Thank you.
Steve Novick
Councilor Kanal.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you, Chair Novick.
Thanks everybody for being here and for the presentation.
Um, generally supportive of the fee increases.
I've been talking, uh, since the mayor's first meeting on budget last year in February.
We've been talking about this, and I'm excited to see that, uh, develop here.
Um, I'm not particularly concerned about having a code update ordinance every 3 years, but given that we're obligated to have It has to reflect the state law anyway.
It doesn't concern me particularly, and I just wanted to note that for the record because I don't think this is actually taking something outside of public view that is a city decision so much as it's just making administrative an administrative function, which is reflecting state law.
On the subject of the code, I was— this was in the reverse order, so I was finding my notes.
I'll have one question on that, and then most is on the fees.
The building owner text, it's in 3150.50.
It removes the phrase, the building owner will be billed in situations where the document shows the fire marshal a lease agreement or some other legal arrangement with the building owner that places the responsibility for fire inspection and the payment of fees on the building owner.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I want to make sure I understand correctly.
You're saying it's always on the building owner now, or it's never?
Can you— I'm not sure what the change is given what the description was.
Yeah, so the, um, most of our structure is for the tenants in a building, but for example, the fire systems, the alarms, the sprinklers, which is throughout the whole building, which we consider like the core of the building, that's where we usually deal with the building owners because it's throughout the whole building and not on a specific tenant.
So we're taking out that language to make it clear that it's both parties' responsibility, but right now we're just having a tough time because of that language.
Being able to, you know, be in compliance.
So, so that language is allowing people to try to effectively— the tenant and the owner— to point fingers at each other, or?
Yes, potentially.
We don't— we actually don't have a problem.
We have this language that is not really looked at, or it's been brought up by tenants or owners, so we're just trying to make it more current.
Okay, appreciate that.
Um, on the fee side, I'm supportive of it, but I have questions because I'm not sure if it's enough, uh, is, is my ultimate, uh, like underlying question here.
So, um, my first question is, you mentioned it's, it's 42% of cost recovery now.
It was at 57%.
I think the increases you're push— putting forward would bring it up to about 53%, roughly.
Yes, one second.
I can get, uh, it, uh, I can get that.
One second.
Okay, it's, it's somewhere in between.
Um, what is the target?
So you mentioned it's not 100 because fire investigators, that's generally not a good— it makes sense to not have that be— yeah, but what is the, what is the portion of the work that could have fees, um, recover the cost for them?
The maximum.
Yeah, so historically we have always had the target of 55% cost recovery.
And of course, this is going back 20 years or beyond that.
But my understanding, it's more because our office is also— we're dual certified, so to speak.
So they're inspectors and firefighters.
So we're not really looking at getting the cost recovery for the firefighter aspect of it, just the inspector.
So that's just historically, it's been 55%.
So would 55% then be roughly— would it be accurate to say that's the portion of your time that is not doing firefighting and not doing investigations, but is doing, for lack of a better phrase, marshal stuff?
Lauren Johnson
On average across the office, the fire marshal's office.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
That makes sense.
Thank you.
Is there anything in here, I didn't see it, about alarm fees?
I know that one of the challenges that is often faced, and I think that's more on the firefighting side, and that's probably why it's not in here, but I wanted to ask about cost recovery on that piece.
Are you referring to false alarms?
Sameer Kanal
False alarms.
Unidentified speaker
Yes, we do have that in our fee schedule.
Okay.
Is it just not in the exhibit then, or?
It's in the exhibit.
Yeah.
Okay, I'll go back and look.
I, um, I think I might— okay, uh, I, I wanted to ask about this because it's not who actually is going and doing it and responding to the false call or the false alarm.
That, that's normally—.
Is that your office or is that just whoever's on duty and sort of yeah, so usually who's going to those calls is our EOPS personnel, but the follow-up, they refer it back to the prevention office to do the follow-up.
So the inspectors actually go out and so-called, um, like investigate the alarm itself to determine if it was false or did what it was supposed to do.
Got it.
Okay, uh, okay, 2 more questions.
One, what is the proposed cadence then of looking at these?
Lauren Johnson
Is it going to be annual through the budget fee schedules, or So we've received, like, direction from the mayor's office to make sure that annually we are just keeping tabs.
But then there is city direction that provides kind of an every 3-year cadence and/or requests requires an every 3-year cadence.
So we definitely felt like 5 years was too long and planned to have this annual review and then stick to the every 3 years that's required as part of the City Budget Office.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, and then my last question is, why are these both emergency ordinances, um, if these are things that are regularly planned?
The, the code was adopted in 2020— or sorry, the, the— yeah, the code was adopted in 2025 of the state, right?
So we saw this coming.
I'm not 100% sure how.
Lauren Johnson
No, so I would say we certainly saw this coming.
I think this was more of a growing pains process with service areas communicating to council to get on your calendar.
It was a process thing on our end, kind of on city's end.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
I think we're— I know we're working on that, and I don't know how much has gotten sent to the bureau level yet in terms of timelines and filing for things.
I, I'm hoping we move towards— and I'm more directing this at Administrator Lee— moving towards a situation where the, the council calendar should not be the reason for an emergency ordinance.
I doubt this is going to be something that a lot of people want to testify on at the full council, but having those additional days is helpful for that.
That's my concern around emergency ordinances, but I appreciate that.
Thank you, Chair Novick.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor Kanal.
Lauren Johnson
Um, if you guys—.
Steve Novick
Maria, were you about to say something?
Unidentified speaker
Oh, this is Angela.
Um, I had that number of the cost recovery that we're anticipating with the fee updates would be between 53% and 56%.
The challenge is we don't anticipate all of the fees being charged equally.
So for example, we will see hopefully fewer third citations for people, um, but more hourly rates.
And there's a jump in the hourly rate for a lot of the composite rates.
Okay, thank you.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Councilor Smith.
Councilor Smith, I think that's a new hand for you, or is it a legacy hand?
Uh, Councilor Smith, you're still muted if you're with us.
All right, maybe she's on her way.
Councilor Zimmerman?
Unidentified speaker
Thank you, Chair.
Just a real quick clarification, the hazardous occupancy fee is what again?
Lauren Johnson
Like, what's the cost, or what is it?
Unidentified speaker
No, sorry, not the cost.
What does it represent?
Eric Zimmerman
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
I see that it will move to $250, but what are we talking about?
What kind of situation?
What type of occupancy are we talking about?
Um, I know what hazardous waste is, I know what a fee is, I know what occupancy is, but as together, I'd like to know what are we talking about?
We're, we're talking those type of, uh, occupancies obviously have a higher hazard to them because of what, what's stored inside and what the process is.
This is like an industrial place with chemicals and welding gases, things So it's our inspection for those type of occupancies and sometimes extra permitting for those type of processes.
Thanks.
Um, so I see that, um, that one I am generally in favor of.
I don't know that we can really, in one hand, be raising fees for additional plan review hours, so going from— so it's tripling the cost of the plan review when we spend a lot of time at this council talking about reducing permitting costs.
So either we split the question or I'll be a whole no today, because I think we've got to put our money where our mouth is at.
And this is one of those areas where $50, $100 seems small and it creeps in at every point.
And I'm trying to send a message of if we're serious about permit reform, permit cost reform, and all forms of development reform, this is one of those areas I'm going to kind of draw a line here.
Councilmember But I do appreciate it.
It's very clear.
It's laid out.
I'm just making a values judgment here.
But thank you.
That's all, Chair.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Smith?
Loretta Smith
Yes, thank you so much, Mr.
Chair.
I have a question.
Does fire have mandatory overtime?
Lauren Johnson
Yes, mandatory backfill if there's a vacancy for fire station positions.
Loretta Smith
Okay, and I'm not sure, um, does police have mandatory overtime?
Sameer Kanal
No, Councilor.
Loretta Smith
No, they don't?
Sameer Kanal
No.
Loretta Smith
Okay, okay, thank you.
I have some, some more questions.
I'm trying to figure a couple things out, but I just needed to know those 2 questions.
Thank you.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
So, um, all of these fees, we in effect approved all of these fees in the budget.
Is that right?
Lauren Johnson
Yes.
Steve Novick
Um, I have to say, I'm a little concerned about, uh, and we didn't do any outreach other than, you know, through the norm— through the normal budget process.
Lauren Johnson
That's correct.
Steve Novick
I'm kind of a little worried that anything that's sort of lumped together with everything else in the budget, it might tend to get lost.
I mean, if you were to do specific outreach related to these changes, particularly the fees, this is, I realize, a hypothetical question, but what can you imagine it would have been?
Like, what are the most affected organizations that you might have tried to contact?
Unidentified speaker
I don't know.
Lauren Johnson
I, I, yeah, Councilor, I, I certainly appreciate the question.
And other than those, um, budget town halls where we, you know, make notifications through council offices and neighborhood associations, I I think probably some outreach could go to a business, kind of a, yeah, Chamber of Commerce, something like that.
There's probably some unions that would be good to outreach.
I'm certainly open to suggestions.
And receive your point.
Agreed.
Thank you.
Steve Novick
Yeah, just one.
Um, I mean, do you have any guess as to which kind of entities will be most affected and might be most concerned?
Like, would it be the entertainment venues, or those increases, um, such that you wouldn't expect to see much pushback?
Um, again, I'm asking, I'm asking you to guess, but I'm just trying to calculate, um, Are there folks that, you know, that if we had our druthers, we would have reached out to directly?
And might there be some reason to delay until we've had some more direct outreach?
Lauren Johnson
Do you feel like you get pushback on any fees?
Um, and if we do— just sorry, Councilor, I'm asking questions because I don't have direct knowledge of where we're yeah, um, it's a tough question.
Unidentified speaker
Our, our fee schedule is pretty complex, so when you talk about the increase in fees, it really depends on the size, the type of occupancy, if there's violations noted.
So there's a wide range of how somebody's fee may increase because there's so many ins and outs and deductions and what goes into it.
So obviously the larger the complex and higher risk, like what was brought up, a hazardous material facility that might be thousands of— have thousands of square feet, is going to have a higher fee.
So those possibly would be more of the conversation and pushback.
Lauren Johnson
I mean, I would also just add, I think it's notable that we don't typically get thank you.
Steve Novick
Councilor Knoll.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you.
I'm gonna kind of do a little tangent first.
I noticed we've got some folks in the back, and I just wanted to, uh, take a chance to welcome them.
I just got a message from Councilor Koyama Lane's office.
It's the Intercultural Academy of Municipalities.
Sameer Kanal
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
Is that correct?
Steve Novick
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you so much for being here.
And I hope we're not talking too much about your area of work in this meeting, I don't think.
But I am really grateful that you've joined us and I hope you enjoy your time here.
I will say this is relevant in one sense because outreach to neighborhood associations is actually part of their work as well as some of the conversation we just had around engagement.
And I hope that as we get our engagement structure fully built out as a city, that this is something where we're not necessarily counting on the bureaus to do all the work directly, but to have the support, um, for that.
I do think this relates as well to the question about length of time that people can give input.
So I'm not going to ask about in terms of delay of the policy, in terms of like pulling it back and refiling it, but in terms of giving that extra week or 2 for folks to, to do a first reading, second reading, if that's something that would cause Uh, a problem.
And, and I'll, I'll note it's not just the first reading, second reading, but then also the 30 days of, um, implementation time after the second reading.
Would— if those were added back in, so 37 additional days, would it cause— what, what would be the problems that would be caused, if any?
Do you want to—.
Lauren Johnson
Would it be an option to move forward with the state?
I mean, the, the downside, right, is that we're not compliant with state fire code.
Since we haven't updated.
So I don't know if it's an option to split those 2.
Yeah, there's just not an issue with state fire code adoption and updating the Portland City Code.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I would like to consult with the city attorney too, to see what are the ramifications for us not complying with the state fire code.
I know in different states, the state can send down fines for not being in compliance.
With their code, but I'm not 100% sure what the state of Oregon does as it relates to not quite being in compliance, or if we're in the process of becoming compliant and have a compliance schedule to come into compliance, what that means.
So I probably need to consult with our legal counsel to kind of see what that means for us.
Unidentified speaker
Thanks.
To be clear, in terms of splitting, um, there are 2 legislative items here, right?
So one is the code piece, the other is the fee piece.
I think our conversation around okay, I, I think our conversation around the engagement question is more on the fee side, so I have no concern on the— and then the other question, uh, relatedly, uh, and this isn't something we necessarily have to do in this meeting because, um, for us it's a one-meeting referral or not anyway, but at the full council is where that would be relevant.
But the, the other question I had, and this goes back to Councilor— to Chair Novick's point, we my understanding is that we approved a budget that was dependent upon increasing these fees in order to keep the Fire Bureau solvent.
Steve Novick
Correct.
Unidentified speaker
At the level of service that we authorize on the expenses side.
Sameer Kanal
Correct.
Unidentified speaker
But that was a dollar amount increase.
And so how we got from here to there, the details of, of which thing is going up, for example, is something that probably Angela sort of modeled out and, and said if we make this one go up by this much and that one go up by that much, it'll add up to what we need.
Correct.
So there are some— so to some degree we have to do this because we already did it.
Sameer Kanal
Mhm.
Unidentified speaker
And but the how we do it is what we're discussing right now.
Um, and so I, I just wanted to make that clear that there is a— to some degree we already— the, the, the opportunity for engagement should have been in at that exactly as you said, Chief.
Um, In the budget because we approved the fee increases.
Having said that, when we do this process this way, and this is— we did this last year as well— if you are a person who might pay one of these particular fees but not all of them, you're not sure during the budget process if this increase is going to matter to you or not.
And so it's not an ideal process for that.
That's not on anyone here.
I think that has to do with the budget side.
Um, but in terms of going forward, I think transparency and clarity around which things are being increased is really helpful at the time that the actual decision happens, which was the budget.
This is the how.
So I just wanted to get that on the record too.
Sameer Kanal
And I agree with you 100% on that, Councilor.
I think what we're discussing now is more of a process question as it relates to our budgeting process and how do we get engagement and feedback as it relates to fees or additional revenue.
I items that may come for council to vote upon, for council to be able to have that process to hear that feedback a part of that process.
Hearing it now on the tail end of it is kind of backwards in this.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, and we'll be talking about— this is not a pitch, I swear— but, uh, in the Committee of the Whole on Thursday, we will be continuing our budget process conversation.
So I, I'd be happy to bring that up there for next year.
But for this year, I think it's a question of would the emergency or another tool be able to help us get opportunities for the public to weigh in, whether they're the directly affected fee payers or not.
Thank you, Chair.
Oh, sorry.
Lauren Johnson
Councilor, just to thank you.
Fire Marshal mentioned that on our fee schedule, there are some fees that are also on PP&D's fee schedule.
Those were approved by council in June, for what that's worth.
Just that you'll see fees in the same place or in 2 different places.
Unidentified speaker
And in the future, do you— is your intention that that's the, the time, whether it's 1 year or 3 years?
Lauren Johnson
Okay, yes, so much of this was done just going off of what PP&D has done.
And then, as I think you all are aware, that there's certainly the city's interest in improving that process, the permitting and development process, the plan review process.
And I think even in the last 6 months, our Um, process with that group has gotten much tighter, and so it's going to be just much more natural for these fee schedules to flow together.
Unidentified speaker
Got it, got it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Chair Novick.
Steve Novick
Councilor Zimmerman.
Eric Zimmerman
Thanks.
Um, I think we're in desperate need of a city administrator for public safety.
Now, let's say this, We've turned the mundane into a complicated situation here because of the lack of just coming in and talking.
And so this is a couple in a row now, and so I'm growing a little frustrated, Mr.
Administrator.
What is normal and mundane should be normal and mundane.
It just takes a brief amount of effort.
There's nothing overly complicated in these documents, but the manner in which they come, or the manner in which Public Safety has been working now for a while, is a little frustrating.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Eric Zimmerman
I had a very regular opportunity with the previous DCA on this type of stuff, and it would've come up.
This is not something that's come up.
So I plan to vote to adopt the fire code, and I'm not prepared at this moment to adopt the fee schedule.
And I would— Councilor Kanal talked a lot about engagement, but I think on the mundane, I'm comfortable with the engagement also just to councilors, right?
Like, I'm in community all the time, I can ask these questions, but to bring something forward, um, that— I don't mean this as a pejorative, like the rubber stamp.
I think some things are appropriate for a rubber stamp, but they require that we're a little bit read in ahead of time, and, and that hasn't occurred today.
So, um, that's kind of where I'm, I'm struggling a little bit, and I'm seeing a trend, so I'm addressing a trend so we can nip it now.
Um, and so that— I'll just, I'll just say that in terms of where I'm at.
And I'm, I'm looking for, uh— I know that the service area is without, uh, the senior leader at this point, but I, I'm looking for that improvement.
Thank you.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
Um, Councilor Kanal, were you suggesting earlier that we perhaps remove the emergency clause from the fee schedule in order to allow for more opportunity for public input?
Eric Zimmerman
Yes.
Steve Novick
At the council level?
Um, and would you want to— would you want to do that here in committee or just sort of, uh, leave that or send it along as is and raise that as a possibility at the full council?
Unidentified speaker
Either, either would be okay, Chair Novick.
With me, I think, um, it's a little more transparent to do it now, but only A small amount.
I don't know if there's interest in doing that here, but I'm happy to propose it or second it if you propose it.
Loretta Smith
I—.
Steve Novick
Well, we'll see what the rest of the committee is, but personally, I rather like the idea.
So if you were going to propose it, I think you might get a second.
Brian Hughes
Should I—.
Unidentified speaker
You still have the floor, but I'll—.
Steve Novick
I withdraw my hand.
I no longer have the floor.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, so in that case, without making any changes to document number 2026-301, I would move to amend Ordinance 2026-300 to remove Section, um, 2.
Second.
Steve Novick
Yeah, any discussion of Councilor Kanal's proposed amendment?
Eric Zimmerman
Councilor—.
Steve Novick
Sorry, Chair.
Eric Zimmerman
Councilor Kanal, um, Angelita and I were being like the bad kids in the back here.
Can you repeat what you're saying?
We missed what you said.
Unidentified speaker
It was a proposal to remove the emergency clause from the fee one, but not the code one, to allow for additional engagement at the full council level.
I would just like to state that I was skillfully listening to both at the same time.
Skill issue.
Steve Novick
All right, if there's no discussion, could the clerk please call the roll of the amendment?
Unidentified speaker
All right, uh, vote on the motion to amend the ordinance to remove the Section 2 emergency clause.
Morillo?
Angelita Morillo
Aye.
Keelan McClymont
Zimmerman?
Eric Zimmerman
No.
Unidentified speaker
Smith?
Loretta Smith
No.
Sameer Kanal
Aye.
Keelan McClymont
Novick?
Steve Novick
Aye.
Unidentified speaker
Can you confirm, was that aye?
Steve Novick
Aye.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you.
Uh, with 3 ayes and 2 nays, the motion to amend the ordinance has been approved.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
And, uh, since Councilors Brio and Zimmerman have been being bad kids in the back, I will, um, make the comment that I meant to make earlier, which is that if we had a reasonable organized crime organization in this city, then we'd know who the arsonists were and we could charge them fees for investigations.
Um, so it's one of the— one of the downfalls of not having an organized crime organization.
Lauren Johnson
Thank you.
Steve Novick
Is there any further discussion on either of the two items substantively?
Unidentified speaker
I'll move to refer Ordinance 2026-301 to the full council with a do pass recommendation.
Steve Novick
Do we hear a second?
Angelita Morillo
Second.
Steve Novick
Any discussion?
Could the clerk please call the roll?
Unidentified speaker
All right, on document number 2026-301— or sorry, Morillo?
Loretta Smith
Aye.
Keelan McClymont
Zimmerman?
Eric Zimmerman
Aye.
Keelan McClymont
Smith?
Loretta Smith
Aye.
Aye.
Unidentified speaker
Novick?
Steve Novick
Aye.
Unidentified speaker
Uh, with 5 ayes, the motion to refer the ordinance document number 2026-301 2026-301 to City Council with a recommendation it be passed has passed.
Steve Novick
And could I get a motion on the next item?
Unidentified speaker
Move to refer Ordinance 2026-300 to the full council, the do pass recommendation.
Loretta Smith
Second.
Steve Novick
Any discussion?
Unidentified speaker
Can I confirm, was that Smith or Murillo who did the second?
Murillo, thank you so much.
Um, all right, so motion to refer the ordinance document number 2026-300.
Murillo?
Angelita Morillo
Aye.
Unidentified speaker
Zimmerman?
Eric Zimmerman
No.
Keelan McClymont
Smith?
Loretta Smith
Aye.
Unidentified speaker
Kanal?
Sameer Kanal
Aye.
Unidentified speaker
Novick?
Steve Novick
Aye.
Christy Butcher
The—.
Unidentified speaker
With 4 ayes and 1 nay, the motion to refer the ordinance as amended, document number 2026-300, to the City Council with a recommendation it be passed has passed.
Thank you.
Steve Novick
Well, Um, we normally don't take a break after 45 minutes, but since there's only one further item and we do have to have a break at some point, um, let's reconvene to hear the next item at 10:30.
Any recess?
I'll get there.
Welcome back, everyone.
Are we still waiting on Councilor Zimmerman?
Loretta Smith
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
Yes, but we have quorum.
Steve Novick
Okay, uh, let's give the councilor another 30 seconds.
Unidentified speaker
He, he just walked in the room.
Steve Novick
All right, here we all are.
Um, welcome back.
Uh, I think it's— I can't see him, but I think it's Chief Yu.
Oh, actually, okay, again, I think that all of us, um, Have seen the stories saying that, although in recent years, police calls for service have gone down, response times have gone up.
Councilor Murillo suggested that as a topic for discussion, and I agreed.
We're going to have PPB here to address that issue, and Councilor Murillo has invited Portland for All to also address that issue.
Councilor Murillo.
Do you have anything further to add before we proceed to the presentations?
Unidentified speaker
Um, thank you, Chair Novick, and thank you so much to all the folks that are presenting today.
I think after this report came out, there was a lot of media interest and public interest in it as well, so I think it's just good for us to have a discussion and get clarity on some of the information that came out so that we can better make decisions about budgeting and staffing throughout the city.
I also think that there are some options that are listed from different groups about having the auditor maybe look into the report as well.
And so I think that this will hopefully be a very fruitful discussion and we'll get a lot of information out of it.
So thanks everyone for being here today.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor Morillo.
We've asked both PBB and Portland for All to have 15-minute presentations in order to leave a bunch of time for council questions and discussions.
Chief Hughes, I don't see you, but I think you're the one there.
Take it away.
Brian Hughes
I am here.
Good morning, Chair Novick and members of the CAPS Committee.
For the record, I'm Brian Hughes, Deputy Chief of the Portland Police Bureau.
Unidentified speaker
Chief, before—.
Or sorry, Captain, before you start, I need to read it in the record officially.
Thank you.
Lauren Johnson
And you have to open the item.
Steve Novick
I'm so sorry.
Lauren Johnson
That's okay.
Steve Novick
Forgot the basic committee.
Could the clerk please read the next item?
Unidentified speaker
Thank you.
Item number 3, document number 2026.
Take it away.
Thank you.
Portland Police Bureau
All right, good morning again.
Deputy Chief Brian Hughes, for the record, Portland Police Bureau.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this morning.
We've been asked to provide some information related to call response times.
As you'll hear today, there are a myriad of factors that affect our ability to respond to calls across the city.
Staffing is certainly part of that conversation.
But so too is how the resources we have available are being used at any given moment.
Today's presentation attempts to highlight one part of that larger ecosystem.
A single high-risk incident can require a significant number of patrol officers to establish containment, protect the public, and manage the initial response.
At the same time, it can require specialized personnel to leave their regular assignments or respond to home— or from home while off duty.
Those incidents can last hours, and while they are underway, they have a very real impact on the resources available to respond to other emergencies across the city.
You'll first hear from Lieutenant Christy Butcher, who leads our Special Emergency Reaction Team.
Lieutenant Butcher will walk you through what one of those incidents looks like operationally, the resources required to safely resolve it, and the impacts those incidents can have on both staff— patrol staffing and the specialized personnel who respond on call.
Following Lieutenant Butcher, Christian Peterson from our Strategic Services Division will broaden the lens and provide a longer-term perspective on Bureau staffing, call demand, and our response to high-priority incidents over the past decade.
Our hope is that these 2 presentations together provide some additional context around the complexity of call response times and the many competing demands placed on a finite number of police resources.
Thank you, Deputy City Attorney.
Thank you again for the opportunity to present this morning.
And with that, I'll turn it over to Lieutenant Butcher.
Christy Butcher
Good morning, councilors.
I'm Christy Butcher, Lieutenant of the Specialized Resources Division for the Portland Police Bureau.
I'm here to talk about PPB's specialized responses to incidents throughout the city and how, although highly beneficial for the community, some of these incident responses can impact overall staffing and citywide resources.
Therefore impacting emergency response times.
I will highlight some of our specialized response teams, talk about why some incidents require hours and not minutes to resolve, explain how patrol, specialized resources, and investigators work together to provide a coordinated response, and why life safety drives every operational decision.
Then I will give an example of one extended specialized tactical response in our city and explain how the resources work together over many hours to safely resolve the incident.
Critical incidents are dynamic, resource-intensive, and driven by life safety, not by the clock.
Christian Peterson
Next.
Christy Butcher
Portland's specialized response teams provide capabilities beyond routine patrol operations.
Continued investment strengthens public safety, protects constitutional rights, reduces liability, and improves outcomes for the community.
As you can see on this slide, there's a number of our specialized response teams.
Not all of them are listed.
I just grabbed a few to highlight some of the differences.
The numbers listed on the slides indicate the number of responses that team had in the year of 2025.
Specialized teams bring specialized training, experience, and equipment that aren't practical for every patrol officer to maintain.
Lauren Johnson
Thank you.
Christy Butcher
Here are a few examples of our specialized response teams.
First up is the Metropolitan Explosive Disposal Unit.
This unit consists of 8 agencies, and they respond to suspicious devices, explosive threats, and are responsible for the disposal of explosives.
This is one of the teams that you saw respond earlier in the year to the Multnomah Athletic Club incident.
Next up is the Enhanced Community Safety Team, which responds to and investigates crimes involving gun violence.
And is primarily responsible for injury shooting investigations.
Homicide is responsible for major investigations including homicides, suspicious deaths, officer-involved shootings, and missing person investigations.
The Major Crash Team responds to fatal and complex crash investigations.
And the Rapid Response Team, they provide specialty tactical response to all hazards that require a high level of technical competence, knowledge, and skill, such as public assemblies, civil disturbances, and natural or man-made disasters.
The Specialized Emergency Reaction Team, they provide high tactical response such as responding to hostage rescue events, barricaded persons, and serving high-risk arrest and search warrants.
All these teams these teams do not operate in isolation.
They are brought together based on what each unique incident resolve requires.
Many of these incidents are fluid and complex.
By providing specialized responses such as these, this improves community outcomes.
Loretta Smith
Next slide.
Christy Butcher
In a critical incident, time is a consideration for many reasons.
We have to consider the amount of resources on a given, given incident that are tied up for the duration of that incident.
We have to consider the wellness of our officers for that entire incident, and we also have to consider the overall impact to uninvolved persons, such as keeping people from their places of work or having to reroute traffic around a certain closed area.
But oftentimes, time itself is a resource that allows us to make the safest decision.
What may look like a delay from the outside may actually be a deliberate risk management tool, creating time to gather information, establish containment of the problem, communicate, develop a plan, and bring the appropriate resources together.
Every decision is therefore evaluated against questions such as: is anyone in immediate danger?
Can we create time and distance?
Can we safely contain that situation?
Can we communicate with the persons involved?
Can we evacuate or protect uninvolved community members?
And do we have enough information to act safely?
What additional resources may we need to bring?
And can we accomplish the objective without unnecessarily increasing the risk?
Next slide.
So let's look at some incidents and see what is happening after the 911 call is placed.
Next slide.
So here's an example of a typical call response.
It usually always begins with the call being made to BOEC, the dispatcher having to create the call, and then dispatching the appropriate units to that call.
Patrol always responds to each incident first.
Containment is usually established, followed by incident command, having one person in charge of each decision that is made on that incident.
Communication and negotiations are attempted with the subjects involved in the call.
We may need to call in specialized teams.
Investigators might need to apply for a search warrant, and tactical and medical planning take place.
The call usually resolves, and the investigation continues.
It's important to note that a lot of these activities I just described occur simultaneously and often behind the scenes.
Also, it's important to understand that patrol responds first to everything.
Lauren Johnson
Thank you.
Christy Butcher
It doesn't matter the call type.
Patrol is always the first to get dispatched, arrive on scene, evaluate, and decide what else is needed, if anything.
Next slide.
One incident can involve dozens of employees across multiple bureau functions.
The tactical incident I will explain next more in depth involved all of these listed units on this slide.
Patrol responds first, then specialized teams such as CERT and CNT, which is our Crisis Negotiation Team, which I should note always responds with the CERT team to spontaneous patrol-initiated events.
K-9 units, our UAS team, which is our drone team, our Metropolitan Explosive Disposal Unit, investigators, EMS, which is Emergency Medical Services.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Christy Butcher
And Portland Fire and Rescue responded to this scene, as well as partner agencies such as our East Metro SWAT partners from Multnomah County and Gresham.
A lot of these specialized response teams that I mentioned earlier rely on detached members, meaning that this is not their primary full-time job.
So if their team gets called to a scene, they are likely responding from home or from another full-time position such as patrol or investigation.
Next slide.
So now we'll take a look at an extended tactical response within our city.
I've laid out the timeline here just so you could follow along, and I'll describe some of the activities that are occurring during this timeline.
At 5:35 AM, Boeck received a call from a third party saying that her mom was being held at gunpoint at the call location.
At 5:38, patrol units were dispatched and minutes later, 5:44, patrol arrives and begins to establish containment of the problem.
I should note that this takes several resources to keep people out of the danger area and also to keep the potential suspect in the area contained.
For the next 75 minutes, patrol gathers resources and tries to communicate with the persons inside the location.
This call, however, quickly outgrew the capabilities of patrol and required specialized responses from our CERT and CBRN teams.
Thank you.
C&T team at 0700 based on the high risk and complexity of this incident.
As those teams began to arrive, many responding from home from this— for this incident, uh, at 7:57 AM, resources began to evacuate nearby residents.
Our C&T team worked with patrol and investigators to gather as much intelligence about the location and the persons involved.
At 8:00 AM, the, the potential victim who was in harm's way from the— look, came outside the location and was held nearby in safety by police, therefore redefining this incident as a solo barricaded person.
We believed just one person was inside, and investigators began to apply for a search warrant at 8:35 for the location.
In this case— oh, sorry.
In case we could not get the suspect inside, whom we knew— whom we now had probable cause for coercion, menacing with a firearm, to come outside the location.
And plus, eventually we needed that search warrant to enter and search for evidence of the crimes.
At 9:15, we were able to deploy technology such as our drones and robots both inside and outside the location.
11:25, We continued with crisis negotiations, and in this incident, the suspect just kept disconnecting the line.
At 12:17, tactical planning was ongoing, and we were trying to figure out how we could safely resolve this incident.
At 1:04 PM, medical contingency planning was happening if we needed to get medical aid into the suspect.
Inside or officers or community members outside, how were we going to safely do that?
And this involves staging medical resources nearby in order to provide a safe and quick response.
If they're not staged, depending on where they are and what call they are currently assigned to, it could take a much longer time to respond and provide medical resources to those in need.
This is important to note, much like patrol response, These, these incidents can impact other citywide resources as well.
All these things previously mentioned are often occurring simultaneously and in multiple variations.
At 5:32 PM, the suspect is safely apprehended after he climbed onto the rooftop and tried to swing across to another rooftop but fell while trying to grab onto a tree branch.
When he landed on the ground, he was safely taken into custody.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Christy Butcher
However, this incident is not over.
Now the investigation continues, and there still is a need to hold the perimeter for the crime scene in order to provide a safe and thorough investigation.
6:30 PM, evidence collection and scene processing took place, and after the scene was released, per policy, officers still have to write their reports prior to ending their shift.
This includes all the patrol members that responded to the scene.
All these events are happening continuously and simultaneously.
The time is spent reducing risk, not just waiting.
Specialized resources can create time, distance, containment, communication, and negotiation opportunities.
These long hours represent risk reduction and problem solving, but can also impact our ability to respond to emergency calls.
Lauren Johnson
Next slide.
Christy Butcher
This slide just highlights that every incident is different, even if they begin with similar fact patterns.
So Incident A that I put up here, it could take 2 hours to serve a search warrant where you encounter a cooperative suspect and you take them into custody.
Incident B is much like the 18 hours that I described on this one, where it involved a barricaded subject, several negotiations, evacuations, And deployments of tech— of technology.
And then Incident C, it could be even longer with a multiple-day investigation coordinating arrest and search warrant service.
Rarely do 2 incidents follow the same timeline.
And last slide.
So every decision balances life safety, constitutional rights, investigative needs, and available resources.
Most critical incidents are resolved without the public ever seeing the complexity behind them.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Christy Butcher
The public often sees only the final outcome.
Each successful resolution represents hours of coordination among patrol officers, specialized units, investigators, dispatchers, and command staff working together under constantly changing conditions.
So today I've explained the benefits of providing specialized response to certain incidents throughout our city.
I've also pointed out how these incidents can have an overall impact on our ability to and now Christian's going to describe a more longitudinal view to things impacting PPB responding to incidents.
Thank you.
Christian Peterson
Hello, everybody, and thank you.
Christy Butcher
This—.
Christian Peterson
Thank you for the opportunity to share some information today.
I'm going to walk you through a reason for optimism and hopefully provide some insights along the way.
The first 5 graphs that I'm going to be showing you all depict the last 10 fiscal years on the x-axis and have data labels indicating their frequency count on the bar graph.
The first graph gives a reason for optimism, showing a slight upward trend in the available officers over the last few fiscal years.
Now, I want to caveat that this is not the number of officers assigned to patrol.
This includes all officers that are in an academy, trainees, officers assigned to specialty assignments like Neighborhood Response Team, Community Engagement Unit, and Investigative Support, and many others.
However, with this optimism, there is also insight.
If you look at the fiscal year '17-'18 compared to the most recent fiscal year, the number of officers available is down approximately 11%, 70 officers.
This insight is only the beginning when you realize that at least 90 officers are in training status right now.
The reasons I highlighted fiscal year 2017-'18 will be highlighted again on multiple other slides.
Next.
The next graph continues the theme of optimism.
Fiscal year '25-'26 had the highest total call volume in the last 6 fiscal years.
I want to take the time to identify what makes up the total call volume.
First is dispatch calls for service.
These are all calls that are generated from the community asking for assistance.
The second component is self-initiated calls for service.
These are calls initiated by officers.
They include following up on crime incidents, proactive interventions, stops, community engagement, walking patrol, the officer getting flagged down or witnessing an incident.
Loretta Smith
Mr. Chairman, point of order.
I'm, I'm sorry, I didn't get your name and what department in the police are you with?
Are you representing?
Christian Peterson
Sorry, uh, my name is Christian Peterson for the record, and I am part of the Strategic Services Division of the Portland Police Bureau.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Loretta Smith
Okay, perfect.
Thank you.
Christian Peterson
Uh, the second component was, uh, was the, uh, self-initiated calls for service, um, which included proactive intervention stops, community engagement, walking patrol officers getting flagged down, and witnesses witnessing an incident or other things.
Although we have reason for optimism, insights also show us that we have still not reached the levels of service we experienced in fiscal year 2017-18 or fiscal year next slide, please.
The next graph isolates just self-initiated calls for service.
The optimism I spoke of before is even more pronounced.
In the graphs, you can see a dashed line that— this is the 10-year average.
In fiscal year '25-'26, this was the first time we were above that since COVID The last 6 years in a row, the PPBE has experienced increases in documented self-initiated activity.
As I mentioned earlier, this is proactive activity and follow-up work.
However, the same trend mentioned earlier that this activity is below the pre-COVID numbers.
Next slide, please.
Moving on to the second part of total calls for service, I am now showing you dispatch calls for service.
This is the community-generated calls for service, and again, the first thing I see is a cause for optimism.
Last fiscal year was the highest in 4 fiscal years.
The last 2 fiscal years have increased by over 5% each year.
However, although I have optimism about the recent increases in call volume, the insight shows that we still have a long way to get to the high-water mark of fiscal year 2017-2018.
We're still over 30,000 calls below that.
Next slide.
The last graph here is the— sorry, this last graph is the formatted places of all the previous graphs together.
It highlights the reasons for optimism that although we have less officers available by at least 11%.
We are still doing more.
We're responding to more community calls for service, and we are being more proactive.
Although— however, although there is reason for optimism, we are still not reaching previous heights in community-generated calls for service.
So again, I want to look for insights, and so I focus on the high-water mark of 2017-18 versus last fiscal year.
Next slide.
So the first thing I want to do here on this page is to provide some clarity on the 2 graphs, and I apologize ahead of time, there's a lot going on here.
These graphs represent only the top 10 Priority 1 calls for service in each of the indicated fiscal years.
They are activities occurring— Priority 1 are activities that are occurring and imminent danger incidents.
I believe there was a handout that was provided that translates each of these call types.
However, I want to provide some additional clarity.
The W behind these call types indicate a weapon was involved.
The bar graph depicts the volume of calls represented by the Portland Police Bureau.
The line graph indicates the number of officers on average responding to this type of incident.
Before we get into the specific call types, I want to highlight this one insight: all Priority 1 dispatch calls for service have increased by almost 1,000 calls in fiscal year '25-'26 compared to fiscal year 2017-2018.
That's an increase in over 20%.
So although calls for service are down, Priority 1 calls are up.
Now let's focus on a few specific call types.
The last 3 call types in fiscal year '17-'18 of the top 10.
We're going to jump into the first one, Shoot W. The first call type is shooting with a weapon.
We have all seen the rise—.
Loretta Smith
Excuse me, sir.
Steve Novick
Can I just interrupt?
Can you go back to that slide?
Just explain what the numbers mean, like in the last— what, what 7.4 jumps up to 14.8?
What does that mean?
Christian Peterson
So that's exactly what I'm going to be, be following through and explaining on each one, each one of these.
So the, the bar graph, like I said, is the frequency count of the number of incidents that occurred for, for that specific call type, and the line graph is the average number of people that are, uh, officers that are responding to each one of those calls.
In the 2 fiscal year comparisons.
And then I'm going to highlight that specifically with 3 call types.
Thank you.
Steve Novick
You're way over 15 minutes, um, so we're going to give some more time to the second presenters as well.
Christian Peterson
Sorry, I apologize.
Sameer Kanal
Go ahead.
Christian Peterson
Uh, the first call type is shooting with a weapon.
We have all seen a rise in gun violence that thankfully is going down in recent years.
However, the number of shootings with a weapon call type has almost doubled, increased by 78 calls Uh, in these 2 comparisons, the number of personnel responding to this has also increased by 2 officers on average.
This increase is directly correlated to examples that Lieutenant Butcher just provided.
The next example is stabbing with a weapon.
This call type, much like shootings, have increased, although at a lower scale, increasing by 28 incidents and roughly 29%.
The big difference here is the increase in personnel responding to this— these incidents, on average increasing by 3.6 officers per call.
Eric Zimmerman
Thank you.
Christian Peterson
The final call type I'm going to highlight is suicide and web— with a weapon, and compared with enhanced crisis intervention team with a weapon call types.
First, I want to acknowledge these call types are not an apple-to-apple comparison.
The ECITW call type didn't exist in 2017-2018.
This call type came out of the DOJ settlement and is supposed to have an enhanced crisis intervention team officer responding.
These officers have more training than other officers.
The ECIT call type, although is a, is a high acuity incident that involves a weapon, it may not involve someone attempting suicide.
These call types have seen a slight decrease in the number of officers that are responding on average.
However, there has been a 3 times increase in the number, 350 more of these types of calls this last fiscal year compared to the suicide W calls.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you.
Christian Peterson
In 2017-2018.
And I know I'm— we're already over our time, so I apologize.
Next slide.
Finally, I want to end with both insights and optimism.
The PPB is going to more Priority 1 calls for service with less officers, with more requirements, while still prioritizing life in the community.
These insights show that calls that have potentially higher complexity are on the rise, and although we have less resources available, the PPB is still striving thank you.
Steve Novick
Can we, um, let's see, let's, let's hold questions for everybody until after both presentations.
Um, uh, do we have the Portland for All folks ready to present?
Andres Oswalt
Yep, this is Andres from Portland for All.
Unidentified speaker
Um, thank you, Andres, for being here.
I'm going to be attempting to share my screen, and if I don't, I've heard that we have backup.
So thank you, um, and bear with me because technology is not my strong suit.
Loretta Smith
Point of order, um, Mr. Chairman.
Um, this is Councilor Smith.
I'm not sure we have a Portland for All panel about our, uh, response time.
I'm not sure why is the political action committee— why is the political action committee, um, actually up here giving a presentation?
I'm not clear about that.
We didn't have—.
Well—.
There was a, there was a press conference last week with the pastors, the Black pastors and no one brought that up, and they had concerns about this same report.
And I'm, I'm not understanding why we have a political action committee talking about this.
We should be talking to our public safety folks.
We should be talking to our police unions about this.
I'm not understanding this.
Steve Novick
Councilor Morillo, these were your invitees.
Do you want to respond to that?
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, thank you, Councilor Smith, for bringing that up.
So, you know, the police did their analysis and gave us a report.
This is a community analysis that was done based on volunteer time, so there is not a conflict of interest.
We've had a lot of different people come and present before us who do endorsements, who engage in political work, and this is not well, I'm—.
Loretta Smith
Can I answer her?
I, I'm concerned because Andres came as Andres Aswell with Portland for All.
He didn't come as himself.
And if he would have come as himself, then I would have thought, okay, he's a community member.
But he came as a political action committee, and I have a problem with that.
And I think there is a conflict of interest, particularly if Andres Oswalt is, is a consultant for any of our, um, for any of our council members, if he is a consultant for any ballot measures that, that are up right now, this is highly inappropriate.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, um, Andres, I see you've unmuted yourself.
Would you like the opportunity to address any of that or clarify?
I think there's been some misinformation about your role here at the city.
Although I will again emphasize that at other committees, we've had plenty of people show up to testify and present who are involved in endorsement processes, involved in independent expenditures, and this has never come up as an issue.
So Andres, I'll pass it to you.
Andres Oswalt
Of course, happy to respond and happy to respect the decision of the chair and the committee.
For the record, my name is Andres Oswalt.
I use he, they, and el pronouns.
I'm a volunteer board member and registered lobbyist for Portland for All.
Portland for All is a 501.
It has a separate political action committee, but I'm here today representing the volunteer organization that is a .
We are made up entirely of volunteers, and in a city as small as Portland, people wear lots of different hats, and we are clear that when we are here in our Portland for All roles, we are only wearing that.
For the record, I am not working on any ballot measures or with any political candidates for the City of Portland this election cycle.
And the work was done as Portland for All.
Volunteers from Portland for All did the data scraping, have done some of the analysis and the presentation.
And so in honor of the work done under the name Portland for All, that was the kind of like hat to wear in this.
Thank you.
Space, um, and we are not here to push an agenda, but we're here to share some of the data analysis that we did with the publicly available information in response to community members being really concerned about response times, uh, and to just share some of how far we got in what we were able to access, uh, to make sure that council has that information and can then continue their conversations as they explore this important issue.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Please proceed.
Sameer Kanal
Okay.
Andres Oswalt
Um, I think Councilor Murillo is trying to share slides.
Um, I'll wait to see if we can get that.
You're sharing your entire screen.
Unidentified speaker
I know.
Oh, well.
Andres Oswalt
And appreciate all of your patience.
We did our best to meet the timeline, but coming back from council recess and making sure we understood kind of how we could best help today, we missed the deadline for the clerk, and so have Councilor Murillo sharing slides for us.
Thank you.
Loretta Smith
Great.
Andres Oswalt
We can work with this.
So I'll go ahead and start.
Again, Andres Azuel, volunteer board member and one of the lobbyists for Portland for All.
In my work, I'm a policy wonk.
So my role as part of our team is to help make meaning and communicate what we found in our work.
I am not a data scientist.
I want to be clear about that.
I do have Thomas Cavanaugh, another Portland for All volunteer who led our data work on this call.
If there are data-specific questions that I can't field, and I wanted to start by thanking Thomas and Nikhara, another volunteer, for the hours of work and their patience during the months that we've been working on this.
I think as we frame the conversation, we're really starting from a place of shared desire.
We all agree that Portlanders deserve faster police response times.
We followed the growing response time delays along with the general public, watching with concern as the amount of time it takes to reliably respond to an emergency call grew without a clear explanation of why.
We've known that staffing has been the go-to answers for response times, and we wanted to check if that matched the data.
So our team spent hours reviewing the publicly available data from the Police Bureau to try to understand why response times have been skyrocketing over the past years.
Next slide.
So in terms of our methodology, we used Portland Police Bureau data whenever it was publicly available.
There were some times we had to supplement that with news coverage that cited bureau statements and reports.
And we were mainly focused on call volume, officer staffing levels, both sworn and unsworn, and response time, though we did look at some other datasets.
Something that's important to note is that we used P90 response time, not averages.
So this is consistent with how fire measures response times.
And it uses the amount of time that 9 out of 10 calls have to wait for a response to their emergency.
It's a common emergency response metric because it is so critical that help arrives quickly when lives are at stake.
So that is just the context.
And in each of the slides, there's more reference to the data we use to try to show our work and help folks follow along.
Next slide.
So the first piece that we saw that I think now everyone's very familiar with is that call volume overall has been going down.
We know that crime is going down.
And what we're seeing in this chart is columns for each of the year and the total count of dispatch calls to police for that year.
And we've seen a consistent decline over the past 6 years, which at the beginning of this conversation was surprising given that response time has been growing so much.
Loretta Smith
Next slide.
Andres Oswalt
So the next thing we looked at is that the trend becomes more stark when we're just looking at high priority calls.
They have decreased more significantly.
So what you're seeing here is only looking at high priority calls.
Those are the bars.
And then the line is it's layering in the wait time for the average for each call.
So it mirrors national trends that have shown that crime has continued to decrease.
Across the board, Portland is seeing less crime and having fewer calls come in.
But paradoxically, the amount of time it takes for Portlanders to receive a response to a high-priority call has continued to rise.
Next slide.
So then, starting in 2019, we looked at both all levels of calls coming in, total officer staff levels, and response times together.
So there's a few lines here.
In blue, you have the officer staffing levels down at the bottom.
In gray underneath that, you'll see the call volume.
And then the purple line shows the call per officer ratio.
The last line here in orange shows response times during that same period of time.
And so what we've seen is we know there have been fluctuations in staffing.
We know that calls have decreased.
But after the dip in 2020, staffing levels for officers have been relatively stable.
And during that same period of time, we could see that the calls per officer also remained pretty steady.
But that's the same period of time where call response time starts to grow and grows drastically.
And it kept growing even as the total number of calls went down, even as the calls per officer ratio held steady.
Christy Butcher
Thank you.
Andres Oswalt
So what we're seeing in this chart is that staffing and call volume alone cannot explain the continuous and concerning rise in longer and longer response times.
And I think this was really like the thing that we found when we dug into the data that was both surprising and concerning.
Next slide.
We looked at a couple more things just for context.
So one of the things we looked at was precincts.
To see what else we could learn from the publicly available data.
Unsurprisingly, one of the things we saw is that this slowdown was most impactful in East Portland, where we've seen the highest increase in delays for response times.
We did see longer delays for all of the precincts, but we did want to call out specifically that that concern has been more significant in East Portland.
Next slide.
We also see that the cost that Portlanders are paying for a call has grown.
So when we looked at the total budget for the Portland Police Bureau and divided it by the number of calls that are coming in, we can see that the cost per call has continued to grow each year.
And then at the bottom is just a pullout of the response time for high priority calls, which, like we've mentioned, has seen a consistent increase.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Next slide.
Andres Oswalt
So the last insight, and again, one of our biggest limitations is just data we could access that we could find publicly and reputably.
But the last insight that we found and a potential hint on where to go next in the conversation and in understanding why response times have grown is this is showing what happens after a call has been answered and assigned for police response.
So there's 2 pieces in here.
The blue is travel time, so the amount of time it takes for an officer to head to a call, and the red is the time spent waiting for an officer to respond before they actually go to a call.
So travel time, the blue, how long it takes them to get to a site, has increased modestly.
But what we've seen balloon is queue time.
So this is after 911 has answered a call.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Andres Oswalt
Assigned it for police response.
This is the time that calls are waiting in that queue for officer response before an officer is actually on their way to a call.
Next slide.
And that is unfortunately is as far as we were able to get as volunteers with publicly available information.
So why we're here today and what we've been focusing on in our advocacy is wanting city leaders to really take a hard look at the data and determine what's going on based off of that data and facts.
This is not political.
This is about ensuring that each Portlander has a timely and appropriate response during one of the worst moments of their life.
And so our role today, and why I'm here today, is really to ask the council and auditor to dig deeper.
We've done what we can as volunteers cobbling together the data we have access to, but we're asking for council and the auditor to use their position to really dig and find real answers to these questions.
So the first one is.
Christian Peterson
Thank you.
Andres Oswalt
Despite our best efforts, we really can't definitively answer why we've seen a meaningful number of calls have to wait longer and longer for police responses.
There could be data that we don't have access to that could help answer that.
And as our city's elected officials, you have the ability to access information that we can't.
So we're asking for you to try to find the root causes to the call response crisis.
And address it not with politically expedient solutions, but with interventions that really address the specific roots that are causing those growing delays year over year.
The next thing that came up for us is we had a lot of questions that came up as we dug into the data and found what we could.
One we didn't have enough information to answer is if there's something about absenteeism or officers covering each other's shifts that's contributing to longer responses.
We didn't have fully satisfying data on this, but it's one of the questions we'd like to see the city explore further.
And then the last is really just a big question for the CAPS Committee as a whole.
You are tasked with setting up the policy direction for our city's emergency response system.
And there's a systems-level question here about how the city prioritizes our emergency responders' time across various activities.
The data we have doesn't allow us to understand how police officers' time is spent.
Or other factors that could influence response time.
And Portland for All believes that it's critical for calls to be sent to the appropriate responder and that police time really be reserved for calls that they are best suited to respond to.
That means prioritizing non-emergency calls to unarmed responders like Portland Street Response and ensuring that we're using officer time for the most appropriate responses.
So this is the end of our part of the presentation.
We think it's really critical to get to the bottom of why response times have been so long.
Thank you.
Skyrocketing based off of the police data that we were able to access.
It can't be attributed to staffing levels alone.
And so we're asking you to do the work to continue the conversation.
And thank you for your time today.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Councilor Smith.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
DCA Lee, um, there was a report that I asked for in a resolution, me and, uh, Councilor Olivia Clark.
And we had a report that came from the previous DCA.
You—.
I know you're the acting DCA— that identifies those issues that contribute to the, um, you know, police officers not getting there in a timely fashion.
And I think that, um, this, this conversation also links into that.
It would have been better for us to have I think we should have that report gone through at the same time that we're having this conversation because I think it's more work.
I think many of the questions that were brought up with the previous presentation can be answered in that report.
It's, it's, you know, we can't keep reinventing the wheel.
This council voted, I believe, 12-0 to have this report done, and we have a report back to the DCA, from the DCA, and I think that that needs to go instead of having this.
This was out of order, and I think we should have had the report read and then all of these entities come together to see what, you know, they could ask the questions of, of the police.
So this is— I'm thinking this is, this is not done in a timely fashion, and, and the sequencing wasn't correct.
Thank you.
And so to ask, I want to be responsive to community, and I appreciate Portland for All bringing up some of those questions.
But I think that I can send you— I will send you a copy of the report, Andras, that was done by the City of Portland already so that you can look through that report.
I don't know if you've seen it at all or if you've gone through it.
Andres Oswalt
Thank you, Councilor.
Yeah, happy to take a closer look.
And always happy to come back to council or this committee to help further.
Loretta Smith
Perfect.
So I need some direction from you, CA Lee, in regards to this conversation, because, um, uh, your department did a lot of work on this over the course of a few months, um, and I think many of those questions have been answered already.
And to, um, have this committee go back in and try to do something different because maybe people don't like the, um, the outcome that was brought up in the report, and if they want you to do a different report or have some different, um, different, um, ways in which we can come to those, to those answers again.
But I, I, I think this is— I don't— I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman.
Um, I wish you would have put this out together because it's, it's kind of It's putting us in a bad situation when we've already answered these questions.
Steve Novick
Councilor Smith, actually, that was my intent to have them together, to have both items today.
I think that I didn't do enough coordination with you, and you were actually— there was a mix-up with the clerk, and we asked for 4/5 to put it back on the agenda, and you said that you needed more time, and I think that that's that's on me for not having consulted with you before it happened.
Loretta Smith
I'm not sure when those conversations took place, but we have been trying to get on this agenda for the longest about that report since the beginning, and we've been pushed off and pushed back.
And I had to finally release the report at my annual Coffee with the Cop and Community.
So this— if you don't have the whole shebang to make the sound, which you don't just do half of the sandwich, right?
Steve Novick
So again, we had, um, we had scheduled both items for today.
There was a mix-up with the clerk's office, and the report item was not formally scheduled, uh, which we learned last week.
So we asked for a forfait to be able to put it back on the agenda, and we couldn't get that.
So—.
Loretta Smith
When was the forfait asked for?
Steve Novick
What?
To place the, um, to place the, uh, to place the report item back on the agenda, which had been inadvertently dropped through miscommunication with the clerk's office.
Loretta Smith
Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry that you had miscommunication with them, um, but I didn't have any communication with anyone about doing a 4/5, uh, but I, I, but at any rate, at any rate, Mr. Chairman, You have to admit that you can't have one without the other.
Steve Novick
Well, uh, Councilor, I mean, we definitely need to straighten out what the communication was between our offices the past few days, but I do think that the Police Bureau should be prepared to answer the question of, you know, why response times are down, are down even though, even though, up even though call times are down.
Loretta Smith
You're right.
And I—.
We have the Police Bureau here, and we— I would have loved to have the chief here at a time when the chief could be here, Mr. Chairman.
Um, so I, I'm just so confused by this whole thing.
It's going to confuse the public when we're not in coordination and we're doing things out of sequence.
Unidentified speaker
Chair Novick, I— can I add some clarification?
Um, the 4/5 was requested on August 26th, I think many of us were out of the office for council closure, so I think that's what happened.
I don't think it's a conspiracy to get one perspective over the other.
That's why we invited the police bureau experts to come and present, and they have the fine details.
They got a half-hour presentation.
That's double the length that the other group was given and more time than these volunteers had to prepare.
I would, I believe that the report that you're talking about was on the recruitment of the additional 400 officers, but I'm unclear about what other things you're referring to.
But I would like for us to get into the substance of this, especially while we have a community member here, because they're volunteering their time.
They're not paid to sit in committee the way that the rest of us are.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor Morillo.
I would— I put myself in the queue to ask the Police Bureau the question, it seems to me that you were saying that there's certain— if I could follow it, it seems there might be 3 factors at work.
1, A reduction in available staff.
2, An increase in the number of calls that require more time.
And 3, perhaps an increase in the amount of time that the bureau has decided to devote to particular calls.
Angelita Morillo
Yes.
Steve Novick
Based on perhaps changes in policy.
So what I kind of anticipated was that in your presentation you would say, here's the extent to which increases in response times is driven by the lack of staff.
Here's the extent to which it is driven by an increase in the number of calls which require a bunch of time.
And here's the extent to which the increase is driven by Police Bureau changes in policy which dedicate more staff and more time to particular types of calls.
Can you provide some sort of approximation of that response today?
Brian Hughes
I can, Chair Novick.
For the record, Brian Hughes, Deputy Chief of the Portland Police Bureau.
I appreciate the chance to come up and answer some of those questions.
And first, I'd like to highlight that the previous presentation where we talked about, or where The Portland for All spoke about priority call response and high priority calls.
That, I believe, is the priorities 1, 2, and 3 put together.
And we broke it down into just the priority 1 analysis as those call types that were up there with the weapon involved are the most serious calls we respond to.
And we classify priority 1 calls as a danger to life right now.
The other 2 categories, priority 2, is someone could get hurt.
That's the metric used for that call priority.
And then priority 3 is a crime happening now with no immediate threat to life.
So those are all 3 put together for high priority calls.
And when we break out the priority 1, I think it gives you a better idea of the more serious nature of the calls we respond to.
And it does show an increase in the priority 1 calls only when you look at that metric.
It's a 23.4% increase from fiscal year 2017 to 2018 to the previous fiscal year.
And as we mentioned in our presentation, those calls are requiring more officers to respond to in order to de-escalate and do everything we can to prioritize life safety and resolve those calls safely.
So that's one area I wanted to highlight.
The other area I want to talk about is the nature of the calls that we've been responding to since 2020.
I think it's no secret here, and you can look at our open data dashboard.
I'm told that we're one of the most transparent agencies with regard to data in the country.
And on the dashboard, you can see a pretty significant increase in homicides.
Many of you were here during the period of 2020 and '21 and '22.
When that number spiked and the actual number tripled in the city of Portland without a matching response or increase in police staff to handle those calls.
And for all of those homicides, those require, as the lieutenant mentioned, officers on scene to contain the crime scene, officers on scene to investigate, and then at times officers from the Special Emergency Reaction Team to go and capture those responsible for those homicides.
And it's ongoing work that continues today.
So there are significant increases on the demand for police nowadays versus 10 years ago, and I want to highlight that.
I also want to point out that the number of officers we have available to respond today is actually less.
We lost a significant amount of officers in 2020 and 2021 and have been building back.
Christian Peterson
Thank you.
Brian Hughes
The staffing levels under the direction of Chief Bob Day.
That results in new officers joining the force.
And when we have approximately 100 of them with field training officers or in some form of training during their 18-month probation, they're not available to answer calls for service.
So while you may see I have officers, a high officer count, 100 of those right off the top are taken away because of chief, you mentioned homicides.
Steve Novick
Homicides are down, thankfully, significantly over the past couple of years.
I think right now we're on pace to have about 30 this year, and in 2022, I believe we had over 90.
How much of an impact do you think the reduction in homicides might have on response times?
Well, I think that's a great question.
Brian Hughes
It's just one piece of the puzzle.
The homicide reduction is, you know, I will acknowledge here on the dais that one homicide is too many for the families that have lost somebody in our community.
So whether it's one or 30, all of them are equally important to me.
But where we're not seeing a reduction is the priority one call response or calls that we receive, the calls with a weapon that were highlighted earlier.
So short answer to your question, it's one piece of the puzzle, but there are other pieces of the puzzle that are still driving call response times.
Steve Novick
Can you give an example of an event where 10 years ago you would've responded with X number of officers and expected to take Y amount of time, and now you require— now you respond with more officers, Expecting to take more time because of your commitment to de-escalation, etc.?
Just sort of walk us through a hypothetical example.
Brian Hughes
Well, I've been with the Bureau almost 25 years now, very long time, grandfatherly-like, as one councilor referred to me at one point.
But back in the beginning of my career, there was not as much de-escalation used on calls for service.
And to me, that increased the likelihood that force events would occur, made it unsafer for the public, made it unsafer for our employees.
And times have changed, and we have the addition of the demonstration liaison officers that now work to de-escalate crowd control situations to the point where we haven't had to use chemical munitions in 6 years.
Steve Novick
The—.
Brian Hughes
Behavioral health aspects of this job.
I would not have thought back in 1998 when I started that we would be pairing mental health clinicians with police officers to go out to de-escalate the most vulnerable and mentally ill people that we interact with to avoid dangerous outcomes.
So things have changed considerably over time, Councilor Novick.
I think just the more intentional thank you.
Steve Novick
Councilor Morillo?
Unidentified speaker
Thank you, Councilor Novick, and thanks for your answers.
I have a few questions for you guys, and then I think one question up on methodology for Andres, just for my own knowledge, because I did not know what a P90 assessment is, and I'm very curious about it.
So prepping you to answer that later.
Thank you, Mayor.
But I, I had similar questions to what Councilor Novick laid out as well.
I would love to see a more precise breakdown of how much the additional time spent is attributable to each potential source of the increase.
So if that's staff, increased response time to certain types of calls, which types of calls it is for and why.
It's great to have This anecdotal discussion, and I think it paints a picture for those of us who are less technical in our knowledge, but these are very technical questions.
And so I would want this trend to be quantified in a future report or maybe in an assessment by the auditor if we want someone who's separate from the Bureau, separate from the political scene to be doing that sort of engagement.
And I was very curious in some of the data as well.
It looks like CERT, which is the high-risk tactical operations, and MEDU, the explosive— dealing with explosions and bombs, I'm assuming— are the highest.
That was really interesting to me.
Why is that going up so much more?
I was surprised to see those being the highest out of all the other calls that we're getting.
Brian Hughes
Well, with the Special Emergency Reaction Team, there's they're constantly going out not only on tactical calls, but the increase in shootings and injury shootings and homicides that we saw resulted in a backend work of investigators determining who did those crimes.
And in order to go safely take those people into custody, oftentimes we'll use the Special Emergency Reaction Team to do that.
So that's where you would see an increase in callouts.
That's a combination of correct me if I'm wrong, Lieutenant Butcher, warrants and callouts, is that right?
Christy Butcher
Christy Butcher, back for the record.
Um, that number that you saw on the slide is the total operations for 2025, and that includes everything from large event support, so, um, supporting like a public order event in an emergency type situation, um, all the way to the, the arrest, the search warrant service, Dignitary protection.
Oftentimes dignitaries come to Portland and they request special services.
That's what CERT provides, some of those services.
So that's the total operations.
And that's not always like a full-blown callout or a full-blown high-risk warrant service.
That can be a smaller number of CERT folks going to assist patrol on a breaching operation or rescuing a kid off a 162nd overpass.
Those are all considered CERT operations.
And additionally, for the MEDU operations, if you have some explosives that your grandfather stored in a shed and now you don't know what to do with them, MEDU gets called out to, to properly dispose of those.
And it's important to note that MEDU responds tri-countywide, including Clark County.
So that number is not just gotcha.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, that's super helpful information.
Thanks for that.
And for whoever wants to answer this, I'm not sure who the best person is to direct this to, but I'm curious about, you know, police are struggling to respond to our 911 calls.
The call response time has gotten a lot longer.
You're saying you're too understaffed to answer those calls.
So how have self-initiated calls gone up if people If your team is unable to respond to 911 calls that are going through the system right now, and what types of self-initiated calls are people taking on?
Brian Hughes
Provide some context.
Christian Peterson
Hello, Christian Peterson, for the record.
The type of calls that they are taking on can range from a lot of, a lot of different types of calls.
They can be them self-initiating and doing follow-up on investigations.
Like, like earlier mentioned, homicide, you have to do a lot of follow-up.
Any kind of follow-up that— for burglary, for example, we don't— we just recently started, uh, standing up a burglary task force, but prior to that, that would all be done by officers responding and doing follow-up.
So any kind of follow-up activity, any kind of activity where we're trying to interdict crime behavior.
So if we're doing enforcement missions, walking patrols, engaging with high-crime areas, all of that would be in that bucket of self-initiated.
So the goal, and Chief Day brought this up when he first got back, was to bring back the, uh, the thought of getting out of your car and getting back and engaging with the community, being part of the community, and really focusing on trying to stop crime before it occurs.
So being, being actively engaged instead of just responding.
So therefore, by doing that, we eventually will drive down our demand and therefore be able to respond to calls faster.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
So I think what I'm asking of you moving forward, and maybe you'll come back and do another presentation, is that I want to know exactly what the self-initiated calls are, because my understanding is that the top self-initiated calls tend to be traffic stops, and traffic stops tend to disproportionately impact Black Portlanders and people of color within the City of Portland.
So I'm just very curious about what the different types of self-initiated calls are when you are saying that you are unable to respond to 911 emergency crisis calls.
We need a breakdown of that and a breakdown of which types of officers and police bureau members are answering calls, because I'm assuming that the detectives who are doing follow-up on a homicide are not the same people that are assigned to do 911 call responses.
I'm assuming they're are going to the scene and doing other types of things, right?
So we wouldn't be talking about the same pool of people.
So having that breakdown is gonna be really critical in my opinion.
Not all of the deployments are created equal.
There are obviously different issues that impact the city differently and people differently.
So it's one thing to say that someone like CERT is getting deployed and more, More frequently, more often, all the things, but we need to understand why.
And they might not always be the right responders for those calls, right?
So that's something that I'm curious about.
Can I get any information from you, even if it's— I know this is not going to be official data because it's not in the presentation and we clearly need to do a follow-up, but can we get a breakdown of these types of deployments?
So, um, moving forward, Councilor, we're happy to provide that to your office.
Okay.
Um, yeah, I think I— yeah, I have a lot of just follow-up questions on what types of calls we're doing and why.
Um, because it's still— maybe I'm being a simpleton about the data, but it's not mathing to me as far as our 911 calls are going down police call response times are going up, and then on top of that, self-initiated calls are going up, but we don't know what types of self-initiated calls there are.
And so that is all very nebulous to me in a way that I'm going to need more of that data before I draw any conclusions on the types of calls.
And now I'm going to address Andres because I had a question about methodology for the Portland for All analysis.
If you're still online with us, I was just curious about what the P90 analysis was and if you could explain that in lay terms for us non-data experts.
Andres Oswalt
Of course, Councilor.
Happy to do my best.
But did want to start with first speaking to the Police Bureau presentation.
I think the level of detail they shared today is new and really appreciated.
We'd love to see more of it.
Like the Police Bureau mentioned, we used high priority calls in our analysis, which mirrors the categorization in the report that Councilor Smith requested of high, medium, and low priority calls.
And even there, you see that the response time to high priority calls in that report has continued to go up.
We used P90, so 90th percentile.
And so what that is saying is What amount of time are 90% of calls responded to by?
And this comes from FHIR.
There's a national standard that I think you're all familiar with, I believe, of FHIR calls should be responded ideally within 6.5 minutes.
And the idea is that in an emergency, every second counts.
And so the thought was to apply the consistent application that exists in FHIR to police with the same rationale.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Andres Oswalt
Of when people are having a true emergency, when 911 dispatch is assigning a call to police.
It's really critical that every call that is high priority be responded to quickly.
And again, I'm using high priority.
The actual specific level of call might be a more helpful way for this council to have the conversation.
But the rationale and the reason we focused on P90 is because if a call truly is critical, if it is important, then A timely response has to happen consistently.
And so using that same standard from FHIR, making sure that 90% of calls are responded to in a timely way, was the methodology that we used for tracking time.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you so much for that clarification.
And I see we have more hands in the queue, so I will stop talking now.
Thank you.
Steve Novick
Sorry to interrupt.
I've lost sound.
Is that the system or is it me?
Unidentified speaker
It's you.
Can you hear me saying that?
Okay, we will teams chat you, and I can take over facilitating if that's helpful.
Um, Councilor Kanal, I see your hand is up.
Okay, while we work to get— and hopefully, uh, Councilor Novick can get the transcript, or, or at least in the interim while the sound's getting thank you, everybody, for being here.
Thanks to the presenters.
I wanted to start with just an opinion, and this is an opinion on agenda setting.
And I stress it's an opinion because it's not a rule, and you can only point of order a rule statement.
I want to get that out of the way ahead of time.
I think it's really important that we resolve the question of do we need to have staffing changes?
Sameer Kanal
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
Before we start talking about reports on what staffing changes might require.
And so in terms of the causality, I think this is the correct order to talk about, because if you listen through the presentation from Andres, you will see a lot of disproving of some of the assumptions that have been put forward about what staffing looks like because of that consideration being necessary before determining not only what it would take to change the staffing levels, but also what the target staffing number would be.
Um, so I, I appreciate the order that was, that was drawn here.
Um, and that's the, uh, non-rules opinion I wanted to get out there.
In terms of the content of this, I really appreciate, um, the content here of both presentations.
I think the Strategic Services Division is, as, uh, Deputy Chief mentioned, one of the most transparent in the country in terms of data.
I would love to see see that data presented here a little bit more when we continue this conversation, because there wasn't actually in the police presentation as much on the times.
There was a lot on complexity, which I appreciate as one of the responses here.
As we go through the, the, the—.
Steve Novick
Both presentations.
Staffing conversation.
Christian Peterson
Strategic service.
Unidentified speaker
As we go through the, the conversation around staffing at the at the Police Bureau, and I mention this not to talk about desired staffing levels, but how staff is used, which is in PPB's open data staffing report and is incredibly easy to see, and I appreciate that.
We're talking about, it talks about the number of patrol officers.
So there's 814 sworn officers at police.
This is directly off the website from officer up to chief.
Of which 568 are not supervisors, investigators, specialized units, and command staff.
And within those 568, you have 314 marked as patrol officers.
So a lot of this has to do with how the, the organization is done, who's actually in a position to respond here.
And that excludes the difference between the 314 and the 568 appears to be 98 officers in training, 134 officers assigned to specialized roles, That appears to be the delta between the 314 and the 568.
So my first question is, those officers that are assigned to specialized roles, are they not also responding to some of the calls for service either as secondary support or as the case may be if they're on duty?
I recall when I was doing both sit-alongs at BOEC, and ride-alongs, the idea that maybe there's a second support vehicle coming that might be otherwise— because otherwise, when there's no call related to that specialized role, what would they be doing?
Brian Hughes
Thank you for the question, Councilor Kanal.
Brian Hughes, for the record.
No, there— we have officers positioned in a variety of different functions in the police bureau, like training.
So I have officers right now at the training division that are administering the range for new recruits, teaching them how to use their firearm.
And that officer currently training those recruits would not be available.
That's a good analysis of that officer.
Other officers, as we have one officer assigned to community engagement, would be working towards building relationships with our different advisory communities and assisting officers in figuring out the best community events to attend.
In an emergency situation where the police bureau is Is kind of like back in 2020 with all hands on deck for a prolonged period like that, then we're able to pull all the officers in and kind of prioritize what we're gonna be able to do.
But you can see already by taking the officer away from doing the training to the new officers, that's gonna push the amount of time that that officer can hit the street out even further.
Sameer Kanal
Sure.
Brian Hughes
And we had to do some of that in 2020, but it was kind of a triaging situation.
Unidentified speaker
That makes sense.
For like the focus intervention team, those types of units, would they be considered part of the officers assigned to specialized roles?
Brian Hughes
They would be.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, and at times when a FIT officer is on duty, but there's nothing that directly relates to their particular area of focus, gun violence, right?
If there's a call that's near the area that they are currently stationed around the city, they might be part of the response to that traditional BOEC call, right?
Brian Hughes
Sure, they could be.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, so that to me implies some but not all, and we can— I'd love to dig into the data as to whether it's 1 out of 134 or 133 out of 134, somewhere in between, um, are available.
And that's helpful to know because obviously they're going to go do the, the FIT stuff when there's a call related to that.
Um, You kind of see, if you go into the report, it talks about the number of patrol officers estimated on the street at any given moment, which obviously takes into account leave and things like that as well, and how you get to the 314 number.
I do agree with Christian that there's cause for optimism because those 98 officers in training are working their way through the pipeline.
There's, I believe, 69 vacancies right now, roughly, which is one of the lowest numbers we've had in years.
And so the net is, I believe, 5 to 10 officers a quarter getting, you know, with, in terms of separations and retirements and things like that and new recruits.
But obviously each new recruit takes time.
So that is good news.
And I just wanted to kind of get that all on the record here.
With relation to self-initiated stops, are they all classified in the Priority 2 area still, or has that changed?
Brian Hughes
For self-initiated?
Sameer Kanal
Yeah.
Brian Hughes
Just stops?
Like, are we talking traffic?
Unidentified speaker
Sorry, calls.
Self-initiated calls.
Brian Hughes
No, self-initiated calls can be a variety of different priorities depending on what the officer is self-initiating.
One of the things that I took a look at recently for the mayor's office was self-initiated welfare checks for— in kind of in line with his See Care Connect efforts.
And we have just in the month of August, 115 different times where officers saw a person in need and went out to take care and help that person and get resources to them, that would be prioritized as a, I think, priority 2?
Priority 2.
If that was the only thing they were doing is a welfare check.
If they see somebody walking around with a gun and the officer initiates the contact with that, that is going to be a person with a weapon call prioritized as probably a priority 1 call.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
And if someone calls in a welfare check, someone has not been seen in a while, they're probably in their house, but we don't know, that would not normally be a Priority 2 call, would it?
Brian Hughes
I think it depends on the factors I mentioned earlier with what describes a Priority 1, 2, or 3.
If there's additional information that they can hear somebody inside that may be struggling, that'd probably increase the priority.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, so maybe to put a finer point on it, does the fact that a Um, a call, quote unquote, because it is self-initiated, does that change the priority level in and of itself?
Brian Hughes
Not in and of itself, no.
Additional factors do.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Um, I, I'm not— I, I want to— I may have misheard how the SSD presentation was on this particular point.
Um, the increase in self-initiated stops, I, I don't think that was intended to be presented as a positive.
I'm not 100% sure.
The increase in self-initiated stops seems to be one of the big factors that's contributing to the problem.
You know, unrequested interaction that's being initiated by officers has gone pretty significantly up since the major decline in 2020.
And so I'm not sure how that's a positive.
I may have misheard you, so I just wanted to get that on the record.
Brian Hughes
Councilor, before before Christian talks, I want to hit some points that you just made there about characterizing what that self-initiated activity is as unwanted.
Sameer Kanal
I said unrequested.
Brian Hughes
Or unrequested, excuse me, unrequested.
A person down on the street struggling in need of care, for an officer to self-initiate that, that would go into that self-initiated category of work.
A person whose car was broken into and the officer comes back the next week to try and find out who did it, Yes.
And follow up with a business that may have surveillance footage.
It's rare that we're able to do that given our call load right now, but the officers are trying.
That would be another self-initiated call for service.
Traffic stops in high crash corridors where we're having a record number of traffic deaths, especially this year involving motorcycles.
Stopping motorcycles for dangerous driving behavior would also be initiate— a self-initiated activity.
Christian Peterson
So I just want to kind of pinpoint that it's yeah, uh, Christian Peterson, for the record, uh, no, I, I'm sorry if it came across as if I'm saying that stops because I said that all self-initiated activity was a goal and we wanted to see officers engaged.
There was a period of time post-COVID where there was, uh, a belief that, that police were being more reserved.
The goal was to engage, get out of your car, be more involved, be a conduit to crime prevention, not just be reactive to the needs of the community.
And so that is why when I was saying an increase in self-initiated activity is a positive, it's because it's giving more opportunity for us to follow up on crimes.
It's giving us more of an opportunity to engage with the community.
It's giving us more opportunity to be out there I appreciate that clarification, both parts of that clarification.
Unidentified speaker
I think I would love to see more disaggregation of that data.
When I lived in Portsmouth, there's an OnPoint credit union on the south side of Lombard.
Driving to pick up a pizza one time, and so drove by it, drove right by it maybe 10 minutes later, and as I'm driving by it, the one side, there's a police officer standing there with his gun drawn.
Officer coming in because there's a person who's, uh, sleeping in a sleeping bag kind of on the edge of the thing.
And in the 10 minutes I come back and there are now 4 vehicles there, police officers, uh, from all 4 of them.
I think I counted 7 as I drove by.
I'm sure there was an 8th if there are 2 per vehicle.
Um, and I assume from my— from the question I asked at the time, um, not on the dais, that that was a self-initiated call because of just the nature of it coming in.
Steve Novick
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
But it may not have been.
Either way, I think it, it highlights something which is, uh, adjacent to this, which is the number of officers.
And I really appreciate that that was in this, this, uh, uh, presentation, because there are times where I, I've, I've had this asked of me in several different, um, public meetings, neighborhood associations, etc.
Why is it that we see 6, 8, 10 police officers, um, responding to something that is depending on one's viewpoint, either not in need of that many, or as I'll say, in the case of a person sleeping in a sleeping bag, not really necessary for a police response at all.
And I think seeing that increase go up, and I'm glad you picked— I'm sure there's a reason why it was 2017-18 and not '16-'17 or '18-'19, you know, why it's that year.
But, but it seems like for the things that are not increasing in complexity, I recognize that there's complexity of higher priority calls.
That makes sense to me.
But for some of the things that are either consistent or just low in the complexity level, it seems like reducing the number of police officers responding to something is— should be a significant priority.
Because what we're seeing here, we're talking about available staffing, right?
Which has to do with the total number of staff, has to do with who's on leave, has to do with how you're applying resources around the city between patrol and non-patrol, between the precincts.
It also has to do with the call volume that comes to the bureau, right?
And so I'm— and then it has to do with how the response is in terms of does this take 2 officers, does it take 8, right?
And I've also been on ride-alongs where I've seen, you know, a gun violence situation where there were 4 or 5 vehicles responding, which makes perfect sense to me in that sort of situation.
And so I'm curious how the what the goal is in terms of reducing the number of officers responding to the things that are either low complexity or are consistent complexity, and we're still seeing the call volume go up.
If you look at your slides, there's a couple of those.
Brian Hughes
Yeah, thank you for the question, Councilor Kanal.
Um, I, I hear what you're saying about the people see a lot of police officers on a call and have questions.
When I was the commander of Central Precinct, Councilor Zimmerman and Councilor Murillo both had my cell phone to be able to call me at any time and ask, and I tried to be as responsive as possible.
And I hope that rings true for you up in North Precinct with Commander Leisure and Captain Burley.
Loretta Smith
Awesome.
Brian Hughes
They should be great resources for you in helping to deconflict kind of what we're doing, what's going on.
Oftentimes we can have frank communications with the hope that you can then inform your constituents and kind of bring, you know, fears down in the community.
The operational needs surrounding the amount of officers that are on a call, What we typically see is information comes into BOEC and it's not a complete police report that tells us everything that's going to happen.
And so with patrol response, what we will often see is a lot of officers responding on unknown or limited information and having to guess at how, how the call could play out.
We want to err on the side of safety, both for employee wellness and community wellness and have enough officers there when we can to safely resolve a situation.
So I think there's a lot of that going on as well.
We do encourage our supervisors to, once the scene has stabilized, to reduce the officer footprint to return them for calls for service.
So have you had some successes with interacting with Captain Burley and Commander Leisure, I hope?
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, more so in the context of North Precinct with Commander Leisure.
Captain Burleigh on previous roles.
Brian Hughes
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
So yeah, but I mean, as recently as yesterday.
So I think I didn't want to— I don't think that that's the most critical component.
I don't think it'll have the biggest impact if fixed.
So I appreciate the response.
I do think it's worth having that conversation.
I did want to note 2 other things, but, um, and just to make sure I understood correctly, I think Lieutenant Blucher said that CERT can also be involved in responding to public order events.
Brian Hughes
They can.
We would, uh, you know, public order events, we have a crowd management incident commander that would take a look at the nature of the event, and then they would determine what resources would be needed to appropriately manage and handle that event.
It's not uncommon for us to have CERT team members on standby just in case something awful were to happen, just so we can be ready and prepared.
So that's what she was referring to.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, I understand it in the context of readiness, so I appreciate that.
The other 2 big takeaways I had besides the conversation around self-initiated calls and the number of officers, one is about protest response, and I think we— and the other is about mental health calls and broadly You know, the appropriate responder for each type of call.
I think, um, we've talked about this a million times, so I won't go into a ton of detail, but we need to be moving at a greater level of, of haste to achieve the goals that we all say we want in terms of Portland Street Response and some of the other responders that we're talking about taking on these calls.
I understand there have been just— it keeps being a 2-year plan and we're always in year 1 of it, it feels like.
We need to be at the end of that plan and achieve the goal at some point in the near future.
And that's part of why the council took the action we did last June to really put some pressure to try and achieve it.
And it's been disappointing to see it slow, slowly implemented in terms of the staffing levels and in terms of the call reallocation.
I did— there has been better news on the welfare check.
Steve Novick
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
Conversation, and I want to acknowledge that.
I really appreciate that.
I think that's— that has an overlap with behavioral health, but they're not the same.
They're not a circle.
They are still a Venn diagram.
So the behavioral health component is definitely broadly there as an important priority that doesn't appear to be going that way.
And I hope that's part of the hiring decisions that are being made for permanent DCA over there as well.
Andres Oswalt
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
In terms of protest response, I mean, it— I think this is a, a broader conversation we need to have.
I understand RRT does work on natural and man-made disasters in addition to some of the— I was troubled by the way it was described as providing safe public events, um, especially in the context of ICE protests recently, where the RRT's role— or I should say, it's not always clear what team, so I don't want to pin it on that one team— but PPB's role broadly has not been in the protective state of— for folks from the violence they're per— they're receiving from the federal government right now.
Um, they've been documenting it, and that's been very helpful.
But I— the amount of police resources, including evidently CERT, that are going towards people exercising their First Amendment rights is something we should be working on reducing and finding better ways to respond to that.
Not only for its own benefit on First Amendment rights and public safety in those contexts, but also from the perspective of freeing up police resources for the things that I think would have a 99%, uh, polling, you know, result if we asked, should police respond to it?
We obviously— those calls that you went through, um, and I really appreciate the, the 18-hour, like, the, the timestamps on that, those types of calls, ideally someone's responding to that.
And not being taken up with by something that doesn't need a police response at all.
And I think the 2 big places I'm seeing through this data and other data is, is responding to people exercising their First Amendment rights and behavioral health.
I just wanted to get that on the record.
Thank you, Chair.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Smith.
Loretta Smith
I didn't say legacy.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
So I don't think this is the last time we're going to discuss this issue.
And one thing I want to say is that I don't assume that self-initiated calls being up even while response times are down is bad, because I think that if people are getting out of their cars in areas of high crime, that can prevent crime.
But I do think that in a follow-up presentation, we should have a discussion about the extent to which— I mean, and also, by the way, I think I've been on the record numerous times saying that I don't think that we should make a religion of response times.
I think that there are goals that in some cases should be prioritized over response times, like de-escalating a situation.
And making sure that we have enough people there to handle the situation.
And I also want to note that I'm certainly willing to believe that the increase in really acute behavioral health situations has been a problem with the police bureau, as it's been a problem for housing providers.
I mean, I've heard from— I had a separate conversation with Chief Day that sort of initiated this discussion today.
About 8 weeks ago, he was talking about how we've got more people with severe mental health issues that are simply harder to deal with and take more time to deal with in situations that do require a police response than we did some years ago.
But I think that in— at some future point, we should have a discussion where maybe we counselors provide some questions to answer in advance where we get sort of a breakdown of here's the extent to which the increase in response times is due to our prioritizing having more people taking more time in certain situations.
Here's the extent to which we think it can be accounted for by there simply being more complicated situations that require, that require a greater response.
I think that we've begun to address that a bit today, but I'd like to do it in a more organized fashion in the future.
And again, I don't think it's a bad idea for this committee to spend more than one session talking about police response times, given that it's a pretty big deal.
Mr. Oswald, I see you have your hand up.
Andres Oswalt
Yeah, thank you, Chair.
Just one more contribution to this conversation.
In particular, uh, 2 pieces of data that Portland for All did not have access to or know if it existed that we thought would be helpful, one of which has been shown today, which is the number of officers by response time.
And I think digging into that data of how many police officers are responding to each type of call and looking at that year over year will be helpful to the conversation.
And then the other was, uh, how long officers are spending on different call types.
There are states like California that require that reporting.
And so those were just 2 specific pieces of information that we didn't have that we thought would help paint a fuller picture.
And it sounds like one of those does exist and might be helpful to council, and the other one might be worth exploring as well.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
And following up on that, Chief Hughes, do you think that it would be possible to uh, come up with something like, in 2019, we had X number of calls that took up X amount of officer hours, and in 2025, we had Y number of calls that took Y amount of officer hours, for patrol officers in particular?
Brian Hughes
Sure, we could come up with that number.
Steve Novick
Okay.
Uh, Councilor Kanal, you had something else?
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, thanks.
Unidentified speaker
I forgot to note 2 things, 3 things, 2 for Andreas.
One, I appreciate the P90 conversation.
We had a recent conver— well, not recent, a few months ago about, it's not just fire that uses a similar stat, but the 90% of calls answered within 15 seconds at BOEC, which is also relevant to this.
And I think we didn't really dig into the part about waiting for an officer to be available.
Loretta Smith
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
Which I think is, is relevant.
You, you character— categorized it into 2 parts.
Um, I've seen BOEC's data where they've categorized it into 4 parts, where it's the amount of time that the caller's waiting, the amount of time that BOEC is engaged with them before the, the dispatch starts, then there's the, the part you're talking about, then there's the part of, of getting there.
And I think that, that would be really— I would love to, to have that I think we should have that conversation again, Chair, in the future, because I think there's— that helps disaggregate the part that is about staffing availability.
And if so, whether it's BOEC staffing availability or PPB as well.
And that's just a helpful thing.
I did want to ask you, the cost per call thing, that's not— I don't think that's adjusted for inflation.
Loretta Smith
Correct.
Unidentified speaker
Please advise me if I'm wrong on that.
It looks like there's a 43% increase in 6 years, which sounds like a lot.
There's about 29% increase in inflation as well.
Do we have data?
Is that inflation adjusted?
And do we have data on how much of that is related to overtime usage?
Yeah.
Andres Oswalt
Yeah, I do not have the answer to if we adjusted for inflation, and I think Thomas had to hop off.
So I'm not sure is the answer.
I do think it's worth looking into.
We were just taking a raw cut of what information can we find publicly available and taking the total budget.
In the total budget, that of course includes the money that council has authorized for overtime.
And so it's really just reflecting total expenses on the police bureau divided by the number of calls.
And then to your first point on P90 and bullet response time, That is accurate and helpful.
We were piecing together information from different places, and the Police Bureau data lived in a different place than the BOIC data.
But part of what we wanted to illustrate is since there have been such longstanding conversations about BOIC and 911 staffing and 911 turnaround time, we wanted to remove that from the equation and say if we just looked at once a call is handed to police, what happens?
Because we think that that is a conversation that is newer.
But I agree that displaying it in those 4 parts would probably be the best way to have an apples-to-apples comparison and look at the whole thing together.
Unidentified speaker
Thanks.
And then finally, in the previous topic, there was a question Councilor Smith asked about if fire and then if police had mandatory overtime.
And I wanted to just kind of revisit that for a second.
When the response came that police does not have mandatory overtime, Can you speak to, is that a statement about what is allowed or a statement about what's being used?
How, talk, can you explain a little bit more about that?
Brian Hughes
Sure.
And I apologize to the councilor, to the council and the city administrator for blurting that out in the back of the room.
I just, the question came up and I wanted it answered.
So to put some clarity around that, the way the context that you were discussing it up here would be mandatory overtime to fill shifts.
And we are one of the few agencies that does not do that.
We do have the ability to hold police officers over in an emergency situation or to cancel their days off in an emergency situation, but in the traditional sense of mandatory overtime, we don't do that.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, and can you maybe define what you mean by the traditional sense just for clarity for everyone?
Brian Hughes
You bet.
Where we're short, for example, on a patrol shift this afternoon, if our minimums, we believe that we should have 18 officers.
If we're only able to get 12 officers to fill that shift, we wouldn't force 6 people off their days off to come in to get us to the mandatory.
We would just be in triage mode for that shift, which we have been for quite some time.
We're getting better, but that's what it looks like for us.
Unidentified speaker
And so when the 6 officers that would otherwise not be on that shift are on that shift, it's because you basically put the call out and 6 people volunteer?
Is that—.
Brian Hughes
That's correct, in alignment with union contract rules and, you know, Seniority, things like that.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
Well, and on that subject, I do, I do want to note a lot of what we're talking about here about the, the desired future status should be noted will require conversations that relate to the, the labor side of this, um, obviously with PPA, PPCOA, but also with, uh, Pro-Tech and, and, you know, CPBW, all the other unions that are involved in, in not just this, um, uh, bureau but also the relevant other bureaus.
And we haven't mentioned that yet.
I wanted to get that Thank you, Councilor.
Steve Novick
Councilor Zimmerman.
Eric Zimmerman
Thanks, Chair.
Um, this topic of mandatory overtime and, and of, I'll say, like, manning of posts is one I want to spend a little bit of time here on.
So as you mentioned, Chief, you said, you know, we've got an afternoon patrol where we say we need to have 18 officers on it.
Are we talking about are you talking about across the city or in one of our precincts when you say that type of number?
Brian Hughes
That'd be one precinct.
I think Central Precinct is right around that number.
Eric Zimmerman
Okay.
I want to take some time here because I think this is an important distinction for the public to understand and one that really gets lost in some nuance.
And so what we're saying in the Fire Bureau side of things is, in order to have every fire station appropriately staffed so that they can meet their goals for response when a 911 call comes in, they have said that they are willing to tell their employees, their firefighters, that we must fill a post, and a post being a position that has to have an employee in it who's ready to respond in order to meet that public safety aspect.
And, and I think generally as a community we have accepted that because all of us want the fire station that is closest to us to be prepared to get in the truck and to get to our home if we such need the call.
I have found it strange in this community that we have not done the same thing for police.
And I've been on ride-alongs where I was a little shocked at the staffing number on a given day.
And getting to the point, I mean, I am a big proponent of filling all of our vacancies.
I think we have been on the gas on that.
I think the Bureau is doing a great job of making Portland Police an employer of choice for those who want to go into law enforcement.
So hats off there.
But I do think that this is an important part of the community conversation when it comes to available units, available Officers, and why do we accept a different standard for our non-fire first responders?
I think this is a robust part of where the conversation should actually go, because everything else we talk about is slightly skewed to a lesser outcome if we have set a minimum, right?
I've never been a part of any organization who strived for the minimum.
Steve Novick
Right.
Eric Zimmerman
A minimum is worst-case scenario, you can do the job.
Anything below that is failure, and you're trying to prevent tragedy.
So we've set a minimum because somewhere in the bureau or somewhere in the city leadership, we've said this is the minimum to be an effective agency, and yet we allow the agency to continually not meet the minimum because of this, this issue.
I think that is healthy for a robust conversation about where do we want to go, both with our employees who are police officers, but with the command staff, with the, with the mayor's team.
Because if you're, if you're seeking the minimum, that isn't where I want to be, right?
So I think about that in terms of we often get into the, did we spend a lot of money on overtime, did we not?
I want to spend more time knowing how many days did we not meet the minimum?
How many shifts a day did we not meet the minimum?
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Eric Zimmerman
When I was at Multnomah County a long time ago, before matrixing was the norm, the sheriff used to almost like red alert the county commissioners every time the jail moved into a matrixing situation.
A matrixing is basically, by law, people who should be held, but because of capacity reasons, the sheriff has to make a judgment call about who gets released.
Nobody would describe that as anything but a terrible situation because it means pretty serious folks who should be behind bars for a certain amount of time are being released so that we can get more serious people fit into the system.
That used to be so rare in our community that the sheriff would send an alert to the county commissioners and their chiefs of staff saying we're about to matrix.
Today it happens on any day that ends in Y, and that is a change.
We've gotten used to this norm.
I'm afraid we've gotten used councilmember Herbold.
We're used to this norm of always being below the minimum staffing.
And so I would deeply be in support of let's start advertising and tracking for the greater Portland public, for our city administrator as he's getting his feet under him in terms of what is Portland like, for our public, for our advisory boards, everybody.
How often, how many shifts per day, or how many shifts per week does Portland Police— is Portland Police not able to meet minimum staffing requirements because we don't have a mandatory overtime standard.
That at least would help us understand the severity of the concern.
Is this a once-a-month thing or is it a once-a-day thing?
And I think the public has some vested interest in that answer.
I know I certainly do.
So I don't know where we could go with that, Mr. City Administrator, with the chief, but I would deeply be interested in how many times are we not meeting the minimum?
Because that at least allows me to have a reasonable conversation with you and the command staff, with the police union leadership whose workers will be deeply affected if something were to change.
But what would this look like and why have we accepted a difference from fire?
Because these are our 2 first responding agencies that we have seen a big difference for.
So I just think this is an important topic.
I'm glad that it came up.
In terms of the difference in the question, I'm very interested in where we can go from there, and I've appreciated what you've brought forward for the rest of the day.
And keep, keep the work up there, Chief.
Thanks.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Smith.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
I want to thank you, Councilor Zimmerman, for reminding me of that process and what we had to go through at Multnomah County.
I was going to say the same thing.
Why is it that the fire bureau has automatic overtime and the police, they don't.
I know that there's an issue around staffing that we just don't have the staff to do it as well.
But if we had something put in the budget like fire does, fire has overtime money put in their budget as overtime.
And so I agree, and I think you said it more eloquently than I did, Councilor Zimmerman.
I agree that I think that we need to look into some of those opportunities about the how, the mechanics of it.
Thank you so much.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Morillo.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you, Chair Novick.
I really appreciate the conversation that we had today, and I think it's a good ongoing conversation to have.
So I agree with you, Chair, that we should because we have to make staffing and budgeting decisions with very rare resources, and so we have to have those tough discussions with all our bureaus and all our city employees and all of our services.
And I think a question that has sort of arisen for me out of this conversation as well is that you talked about the mayor's, you know, making sure that there is— if there's any person who is laying down on the street, that city employees are stopping and intervening and helping that person.
Yeah, I think that's a great point.
And I think that that is a lovely concept.
But unfortunately, I also think that if the police bureau is getting directives to do what should be social work, to me that indicates that we are sending our most expensive employees who are the least trained in handling mental health calls and doing engagement for unhoused neighbors to respond to those calls.
To me, that actually indicates that we need to expand Portland Street Response so that they can handle most of those calls for service, and then the police bureau can handle violent crime, theft, following up on if someone's car was stolen, that type of thing.
Because it doesn't make sense that our police should be everything to everyone.
You can't be service workers and addressing mental health crisis and right.
There has to be a balance, and I think that it does concern me to hear that we are potentially sending our most expensive employees who don't necessarily always have the training to do that type of work to engage with some of our most vulnerable populations.
That doesn't add up to me.
So I would love more clarity on those self-initiated calls.
I would love more clarity on if that directive is going to be rescinded.
Coming from the mayor's office, uh, because to me, we have Portland Street Response for a reason, and we need to make sure that we're utilizing them to their full potential.
Thank you.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
I put myself in the queue just to address the question of why the police expansion cost report wasn't on the agenda today.
I referred to it earlier as a miscommunication with the clerk's office.
That's not actually true.
It's a technical issue.
I'm reading the email that Kevin Alvarez sent to all of us last week.
The item missed the filing deadline because of a system error on eCouncil.
The revision log showed it moved from elected review straight to draft under an anonymous user, which pulled it out of the normal filing path.
So there was a request for 4/5 agreement to put it on the agenda, which it should have been.
And for whatever reason, we did not get 4/5.
So I just wanted to clarify that.
Councilor Kanal, do you have some closing thoughts?
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, I just wanted to respond to Councilor Zimmerman's point.
I really appreciate that.
And I would like to do it.
I did want to note, I think when we talk about staffing shortages or overages, not that we're talking about that here, it's a comparison between, as I think the phrase was, minimum staffing requirements and what actually is.
And I think there's an importance to look at also what the minimum staffing requirements are as well and where that number came from.
There was a police staffing study that was initiated a couple years ago.
And was not finished in the Public Safety Service area.
I would love to revisit that and get back into that.
Part of that relates to the conversation about who's the right responder for each type of call, because you can't set the minimum staffing levels until you know what they're responding to in any bureau.
But part of it also, you know, we did talk about it a little bit with Chief Day several months ago, and primarily the source for what— when we ask how many officers do you need at a time in a place, right.
Sameer Kanal
Right.
Unidentified speaker
What's the math that goes into that?
And as we were talking about it, one of the primary factors, if not the primary factor, and this is what Chief Day said on the record here, is historical staffing patterns.
That obviously how it's been done historically is going to influence what happens now.
I think that's fair that that's a factor.
I'm not disputing that, but I also think it's important for us to, to look at how we can update that given that there's now a Portland Street Response.
Given that there's now a chat, given that there's now more complexity to some types of calls and, and, you know, different, um, teams that used to exist.
So I, I hope that we're able to, when we're comparing those 2 numbers in the discussion Councilor Zimmerman requested, which I do support having, that we're able to look at both, uh, independently and then compare the 2.
Thanks.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Smith, is that a legacy hand?
Loretta Smith
Yes.
Steve Novick
All right.
Um, thank you everybody for your participation and your comments and thoughts today.
Um, I think that at this point, um, I can give everybody 14 minutes back in their day and bring this meeting of the Community and Public Safety Committee to a close.
Thank you all very much.
I will not rap a gavel because that'll freak my dog out.
Take care, everybody.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.