Looking Back at 2022 with Portland Copwatch
This year our main focus has been on the Police Accountability Commission (which we’ll mostly refer to in this show as the PAC, or P-A-C), an all-civilian volunteer group that is tasked with creating a proposal for a new community-centered police oversight system in Portland with significantly increased power and funding compared to the current system, which is based around the Independent Police Review (IPR) and its appeals board, the Citizen Review Committee (CRC). The new system was mandated by voters in November 2020, but must still be voted on by the city council in 2023. While our focus has been on the PAC, plenty of other stuff has been happening around the issue of policing in Portland. To talk through some of those developments, we spoke with two members of the longstanding watchdog group Portland Copwatch, Dan Handelman and Philip Chachka.
We spoke for about an hour, so the full version will be posted here, and includes more discussion about the current oversight system, a number of lawsuits, the Department of Justice settlement, and the Portland Police Association (PPA). Also, we should note that Dan Handelman is himself a member of the Police Accountability Commission, and also that this interview was recorded on December 23, so please note that any year-in-review data will be short one week.
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- KBOO