Portland Police Chief Mike Marshman spent two hours Friday morning with a faith-based group, exchanging ideas and information about police actions at recent high-profile events that include last week’s officer-involved fatal shooting and street protests against President Donald Trump.
“This is incredibly valuable,” Marshman said after the meeting, “because you have the community telling me their questions, concerns and ideas. I can at times surmise what some of those might be, but to me it’s important to hear directly from the community.”
About a half dozen top-ranking officers accompanied Marshman at the meeting of the Inter-faith Peace & Action Collaborative, held at the North Precinct headquarters near Northeast Killingsworth Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The organization was formed in July by Pastor J.W. Matt Hennessee of Vancouver Avenue First Baptist Church and Portland State University police Officer Marci Jackson to talk about a Portland response to officer-involved shootings in the U.S. and police-community relations.
When Marshman was invited to Friday’s meeting, he was expected to talk with the dozen or so faith leaders and about a dozen more community activists about police actions at protests after Trump’s election and inauguration. The officer-involved shooting last week of 17-year-old Quanice Hayes, an armed robbery suspect, had not happened.
While Marshman talked about the protests and police response, he spent the last minutes of his appearance detailing the investigations and procedures being followed in Hayes’ case as well as any officer-involved shooting.
The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office leads the investigation into the shooting for information to be presented to a grand jury, something that will happen in four to six weeks, he said. Simultaneously, the bureau’s internal affairs division conducts an investigation to determine if police procedure was followed.
“You need a very thorough investigation, the community does,” Marshman said, “and it needs to be done very, very well.
“The community needs to know what happened,” Marshman added, noting that the grand jury’s decision and court transcript would appear on the Police Bureau’s website.
Regarding street protests, Marshman stressed the importance of permits or at least marching plans for public safety reasons. He appeared to downplay the importance of paying for the permit and even submitting to a city bureau.
“We can issue a permit onsite, at no cost,” he said, saying it was most important for police to know the intended route of a march for safety reasons.
“I would like to have people go the same direction as traffic,” he said, to minimize marchers’ interactions with traffic. He noted that one motorist during a post-election march left their vehicle to fire a gun at protesters, hitting and wounding a marcher.
During another march, he said, a protester slammed a baseball bat into a motorist’s windshield. He said police responded swiftly to that incident for the driver’s safety.
“The lady (whose car) got hit with a baseball bat? She could have hit the gas and said, ‘I’m outta here.'”
Marshman and another officer, Assistant Chief Chris Davis, said some of the anger during the post-election marches appeared to be directed at police.
“Obviously, there were a lot of some really strong emotions about what had just happened,” Davis said of the post-election protests. “The police somehow became the focus of those emotions. … Don’t conflate the two. Because, a lot of us are voters. A lot of us voted in ways different from the outcome. And just because we’re local government doesn’t mean we are the incarnate representative of this thing that just happened.”
Political analysts have said law enforcement officers nationwide largely supported Trump’s candidacy. The president delivered a speech Feb. 8 to the Major Cities Chiefs Association saying, among other things, “My message today is that you have a true, true friend in the White House,” and, “Right now many communities in America are facing a public safety crisis.”
Marshman, however, said he knows the bureau has officers who support messages that have been voiced at protests.
“There probably are lot of Portland police officers that are agreeing with the protesters, right? But police can’t have that role as we’re doing our jobs trying to keep the community safe. There are a lot of Portland police officers that I know, if they weren’t working that day, they’d be in there. … I think that get’s lost.”
Before leaving, Marshman said he looked forward to continued talks between the bureau and the group.
–Allan Brettman
abrettman@oregonian.com
503-294-5900
@allanbrettman
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