The path through Waterfront Park and the Eastbank Esplanade will see more effective police patrols, thanks to a new collaboration between the Portland Police Bureau and Portland Parks & Recreation.
According to the PPB, members of its Central Bike Squad have been doing walking beats in Portland parks every week for the past several months. It came about when a sergeant on the Central Precinct Bike Squad would do hikes in Washington Park and Forest Park during his on-duty wellness time. (Each PPB officer is given one hour per shift to focus on personal wellness.) During those hikes, the officer met City of Portland park rangers and struck up a friendship with them.
It took a few years of conversations and on-again, off-again partnerships for specific crime issues, but the PPB says the idea was recently rekindled by a park ranger supervisor.
The problem for Portland Park rangers is they often get pushback from some park users when the request identification for various rule violations. And since rangers aren’t law enforcement officers, they have no legal mechanism to compel someone to identify themselves. That’s where police officers come in.
“So the Rangers asked the Officers to go out with them from time to time and patrol Pioneer Square, the North Park Blocks or Couch Park because that’s where most of the issues were,” wrote PPB Public Information Officer Sgt. Kevin Allen in an email about the initiative sent to local media outlets today. “It’s a powerful partnership because some problems can be dealt with by the Rangers, others are better handled by Police, and sometimes a combination of both. And it shows inter-Bureau collaboration and alignment under our shared values of public safety for the community.”
Sgt. Allen said there have been numerous examples of how this collaboration has led to the ability of both bureaus to more effectively reduce crime and address issues in parks.
Safety on central city paths has been a big concern for many bicycle riders over the years.
Have you seen these new walking beats in action? Have you noticed any improvement in safety in Waterfront Park or the Esplanade?
Thanks for reading.
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Wait: are you saying that Portland law-enforcement agencies do not NORMALLY coordinate with each other?
I would expect park rangers to call in PPB every time they observe an issue that needs to be addressed.
As far as I’m concerned the Park Rangers aren’t much help. I called them once for an ongoing problem in a park, they don’t even answer the phone. They have a voicemail. They never responded. It’s just another failed Joanne Hardesty legacy in my opinion.
I’ve often had very good responses, but also some non-responses, and a couple that made things worse. One problem is that they don’t answer the phone on weekends and evenings, when I think a lot of park issues arise. I also don’t know if they even patrol at those times. If I’m not seeing them on weekends because they’re out patrolling at places with more problems, great. But not sure if that’s true.
I was in Atlanta this last weekend and I noted that just the mere presence of police on bicycles on the busiest trails got people to behave respectfully even on the busiest and most chaotic section of the Atlanta Beltline (on Easter Sunday it had far more people walking, running, scooting, dog walking, and bicycling per square foot than the busiest Portland Sunday Parkways I’ve ever seen.)
Truly not a snarky question: is that a normal ratio of city staff to citizen? The top picture it’s 4:1 and the bottom picture it’s 7:1. That seems wildly excessive for a number of reasons:
1. The cost would be off the charts. A 15 minute conversation with someone camping costs tax payers $75 or so
2. It would create a power perception problem. Folks already are often scared of law enforcement. Have seven of them around you would be intensely intimidating and make any kind of normal human interaction more difficult
I understand the idea of working in pairs, but those photos depict something totally different. Super interested to hear what people think about this observation and totally happy to be told I’m off base.
What do the photos depict? I don’t know what’s going on… do you?
I can’t address what’s happening in the top picture but someone is getting arrested in the bottom one. There tends to be more police involved when something like that is happening.
Keep in mind that these photos are from PPB themselves. They’re probably meant to convey the message, “See how we’re on top of things?”
I will add that I don’t think your $75 talking point is a good one.These people are already out on the job. That salary money is already being spent. It’s not like they’re charging by the interaction.
Hmmm, pretty clearly I wasn’t articulate there. My apologies.
@watts The point about what those photos depict is that these patrols apparently aren’t pairs, but work in groups of at least four? Or seven? Or more? That struck me as a ton of staff for interacting with one person and I was curious if that’s protocol? Staged for these photos? Other?
@carter yeah, if these are ppb photos the. Perhaps it is just staged. My point about $75 per is that that is super expensive and they could get a lot more out of our tax dollars if they were operating in many smaller groups, like pairs. Simply more miles covered.
“those photos depict is that these patrols apparently aren’t pairs, but work in groups of at least four? ”
I don’t know how rangers and police generally patrol, but I don’t know how you determine that from these photos without a lot more information about what preceded them. For what it’s worth, when I’ve seen rangers out and about, they are generally in pairs.
It seems entirely plausible that if a situation is developing, that more folks would turn up to lend a hand if they are needed. But I can’t tell if that’s what happened just by looking at these pictures.
I think your observation is good.
Way back in 2012 I was at a Portland city council session where they were casually discussing that every time the city responded to a heart attack, arrest, and any other emergency, which they are obliged to by federal law, it was costing the city an average $24,000 per incident in terms of vehicles, salaries, costs from other agencies, overtime, supervision, maintenance, depreciation, rent, retirement benefits, and insurance premiums, and that East Portland was eating up a disproportionate amount of this funding, and anything the city could do to make city residents healthier and less prone to incidents would on the long term save the city gobs of cash.
If anything, the $75 is a vast underestimate.
We need 4x more police than what we have now and strict enforcement. I won’t ride on trails anymore. I see men masturbating, urinating, starting fires in trails, open drug use, and weapons. 20 year resident of Portland who was a daily bike commenter. Not safe anymore for a solo woman bicyclist. After my tire was punctured by a syringe I gave up. Bike got stolen shortly after anyway from locked garage. Portland has decriminalized crime.
Agree 100%. I have reduced my riding significantly as I don’t feel safe. And the new City Council is already looking at how they can cut the public safety/police budget instead of cutting non-core elements of municipal services. That’s what we get for electing people that have very adversarial positions against our law enforcement professionals (Kanal, Avalos, Morillo, Green, Koyama-Lame, etc)
Mitch Green in particular is more interested in intervening on an issue that happened before he was in office and trying to bully a public university ala Trump, to worry about anyone’s safety on our streets, bike paths or parks.
Yep, Max Steele just wrote about this and it got picked up by The Oregonian as well. I find it concerning these type of people are leading our city.
https://portlanddissent.substack.com/p/mitch-green-makes-a-threat