Portland scrapped a funded, detailed look at police staffing that Council approved in 2021
PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — Next week, Portland voters elect a new mayor and 12 new city councilors. Many of those candidates have made public safety a focal point of their campaign, specifically a commitment to growing a police bureau that is at one of its lowest staffing points in decades.
However, a KATU investigation found that a detailed look at the city’s police staffing level -- approved and funded by City Council three years ago in part to give the city an objective look at its police force -- was scrapped in favor of a deeper look at the workload of the city’s first responder agencies and how 911 calls are dispatched from the Bureau of Emergency Communications.
“I didn’t realize the study wasn’t done; I would like to have a more sophisticated look at this. I’m convinced we need to grow the uniformed police force; however, we have to modernize our approach to policing to include PSR, [public safety specialists], and violence prevention programs to meet community needs,” mayoral candidate Mingus Mapps said, who also voted on the study as a member of Council.
The discussion over police staffing comes as reported crime and police calls for service trend down and response times by officers go up. The police bureau has lost dozens of officers over the last three years to retirements and resignations, making it difficult to grow the number of police officers on the street despite hiring over 200 new officers since the end of 2021.
The study was intended to settle the political debate in 2020 and 2021 over whether the Portland Police Bureau needed more officers. KATU asked Deputy City Administrator for Public Safety Mike Myers why the study was delayed.
“We had some steps that we needed to take as a city to evaluate the workload before the staffing study could even get done,” Myers told KATU.
Myers said that included deciding how to deploy Portland Street Response, ramping up unarmed public safety support specialists within the police bureau and improving online reporting to free up police officers.
Myers said all those things could potentially take work from police officers and that it was premature to do a police staffing study without knowing the impact of those changes.
Earlier this month, Portland Police Chief Bob Day said the city needed at least 1,037 officers, about 150 more than it is currently authorized to have. He based his projection on the city's population and compared Portland’s per capita police officer number to other cities about Portland's size.
However, police staffing experts told KATU that's the wrong metric. Instead, they recommend looking at hard data like call volume, crime, and workload -- the exact things the study seemingly would have done.
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“You have the chief saying, 'I need 'x' number of officers,' based on a metric that experts say is not the right one. Does the city need to go out and do this study so that you can present that to the City Council with some meat behind it?” KATU asked Myers.
“I think the police chief used the ratio per capita for police officers as one example point of where we stand with police officers and the ratio to other cities our size and the number officers that that they have,” Myers said. “I think it's a good visual, but he's not blind to the fact that he knows that he also has to look at our response times, what kind of staffing that he needs per shift per precinct to drive down crime in certain areas.”
KATU analyzed the publicly available police data regarding some of that information.
We looked at January through September in 2020 and this year, since that’s the only data available for this year. Our analysis found call volume dropped 12.8% in that period from 179,785 calls in 2020 to 156,730 this year.
The average response time by police officers to high-priority calls almost doubled from 2020 to this year, from 10 minutes and 24 seconds to 19 minutes and 42 seconds.
The police bureau’s crime dashboard shows the number of reported crimes was slightly lower from January to September this year compared to the same period in 2020, about 44,800 reported crimes in 2020 compared to almost 43,000 this year. Compared to those months in 2022, there were about 11,000 fewer crimes reported to Portland police in 2024.
Police staffing is also down since June 2020 when the police force had 934 sworn members. Today, there are 804 sworn members with about 90 of them in some stage of training. The bureau currently has 77 funded, open positions.
The city has brought on over 200 new officers in the last three years. However, about the same number have left due to retirements and resignations in the same time frame.
Myers said continuing recruitment and improving retention will help the city make progress.
“What is the plan to get the vacancies that are already paid for filled, before we even discuss adding to a bureau that has vacancies?” KATU asked Myers.
“Well, both are important. I think the first thing the chief has from the mayor's office to my office to the chief's office, absolutely, an open opportunity to hire as many as he can as fast as he can. Just like you said, there are vacancies sitting there. He has an aggressive recruitment plan to recruit, hire, and retain good officers here in the city of Portland, and he has no limits on that,” Myers said. “The chief must at the same time be looking two to three to four to five years down the road.”
Myers said any plan to add sworn members to the bureau’s authorized force would need to happen over several years, so the city can figure out how to fund any expansion. He said it was too early to know if the police bureau’s upcoming budget request would include an ask for more officers.
Last week, Mayor Ted Wheeler told every bureau except the public safety bureaus to expect budget cuts between 5% and 8%.
Myers said the chief is currently working on a crime reduction plan to inform his staffing needs and to support any request he sends to city leaders.
