NATIONAL COPS EVALUATION
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE CASE STUDY:
Portland, Oregon

David Thacher
Harvard University
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management

Case Study Prepared for the Urban Institute

Introduction
The Portland Police Bureau is widely-recognized recognized as a national leader in community policing. The roots of that model already existed in Portland in the 1980s, before it officially underwent the “transition” for which it has become well-known: Portland neighborhoods have long had some access to their police, and the PPB has an established history of problem-solving that predates the idea’s current popularity. On the other hand, the PPB of the 1980s lacked many crucial ingredients of community policing, like a well-developed planning capability, team-based management, and a formal process for tracking community problems. But by 1997, those systems and practices had been dramatically reorganized, and problem-solving and community input had reached new levels in Portland, despite some persistent tensions.

City government had pushed the PPB for some time to make many of these changes, but that push had little effect until the Bureau developed a capable and relatively stable series of Chiefs who had a well-developed vision of what community policing meant. Beginning with Richard Walker and Tom Potter, and continuing today under Charles Moose, PPB leadership has brought this vision to life in two ways: By building support for the new model both inside and outside the Bureau, and by retooling a number of important organizational systems. In all of these efforts, PPB leadership has drawn on the talents of a number of committed and innovative individuals within and outside of the Bureau.

This paper will try to describe and explain the changes that have taken place in Portland. Descriptively, I will try to reconstruct the PPB of the 1980s (section I) and to describe how the department operates today (section III).1 Those descriptions revolve around four major elements of the organization: Its relationship with its environment, its operations, its administrative systems, and its management. In section II, I will try to explain why and how the PPB changed. That discussion will focus on the role of leadership and the COPS grants in effecting the PPB’s changes, but it will also consider other environmental influences, as well as the way in which the existing organizational structure and culture impeded or accelerated change.

I. THE PORTLAND POLICE BUREAU IN THE 1980s

1. Relationship to The Environment

Authorizing Environment
Before its transition to community policing, the PPB was not quite the pure case of professional autonomy that many police departments during that era were. To be sure, particularly in the early part of the 1980s, Portland did express strong allegiance to the “professional model” of policing, and it was centrally concerned with accountability to the law and bureaucratic integrity, rather than to the community. Nevertheless, the PPB, more than many departments, was already working with many neighborhood groups during this period; and it was being held accountable by the local political system (though this happened mostly against its will, and often with mainly disruptive consequences).

City Hall
A tight relationship between the Police Bureau and elected officials is built into Portland’s governmental structure. To be sure, many levels of the Police Bureau are insulated from the political system by civil service laws and tradition. But at the highest level, city government is police management: By Portland’s City Charter, the mayor can both appoint and remove the chief of police at will; and technically, he or she can act as the police commissioner, with day-to-day authority that can potentially trump the police chief’s own power.

Nevertheless, the personalities and ideologies that flesh out this structure have made or broken the actual relationship between the city and the PPB. During the 1980s, they mostly broke it.

Two patterns characterized police-government relations throughout this period. Early on, Chief Ronald Still and Mayor Frank Ivancie worked together to maintain a buffer between the police and city hall. In part this was just a matter of attitude: Within the PPB, Still struck the classic professional posture, focusing on professionalism inside the bureau rather than accountability outside of it; and on the city side, Ivancie apparently allowed and even encouraged a closed style of government in all city bureaus.2 But more concretely, Still and Ivancie together actively tried to block a significant attempt by city council to play a more direct role in police issues. The conflict arose over the recommendations of the Task Force on Police Internal Affairs (appointed in reaction to a recent series of PPB scandals), which called for a Council-appointed citizen’s advisory committee that would review internal affairs cases. Still and Ivancie refused to appoint the committee, but Council banded together to overrule them, creating the Police Internal Affairs Auditing Committee (PIIAC).3 The achievement was not, however, all the council had hoped for right away, as throughout the 1980s PIIAC was considered ineffectual.4

The city’s 1984 mayoral elections promised to revamp the police-city relationship, as winning candidate Bud Clark explicitly ran against Ivancie’s closed government style, and specifically against Still’s closed Police Department.5 Clark immediately appointed his own chief with a mandate to open up the Bureau (the PPB’s entire command staff retired when the populist Clark became their boss), but success did not come quickly. Clark took office at the beginning of a long financial crisis in Portland, and budgetary haggles set the tone for police-city relations; the Bureau repeatedly lobbied for more funds when the city had less and less to give, taking its case directly to the mayor, council, the newspaper, and several city groups.6 The growing tensions came to a head in 1987, when Chief James Davis balked at the recommendations of a city performance audit of the PPB (the first of its kind in Portland), and Clark eventually fired him.7 By the time Clark appointed Richard Walker as chief and finally got community policing underway, he was on his sixth chief in three years.

Thus in the short run, city hall’s growing interest in the PPB met with stiff resistance and led only to turbulence. Members of the Bureau today remember their relationship with city hall as rocky. One recalls, “it was sort of a reluctant relationship in that both sides were kind of leery of each other.” Police from the patrol level to the chief’s office apparently felt that council and the mayor didn’t understand police issues very well, so they viewed the oversight relationship with disdain.
There were, of course, exceptions to the dominant pattern of mutual reluctance, mostly from the city side. Councilmembers sometimes got involved in specific police operations—for example, one councilor assigned an aid to help publicize an anti-prostitution mission—, and city hall reportedly took a direct interest in how the Bureau staffed certain downtown footbeats.8 But for the most part, the city and the Bureau had little dialogue on public safety.

The Community
On the other hand, the PPB had already begun to pay attention to community opinion—and particularly minority opinion—by the late 1960s, when community relations became a national issue in policing. At first, that attention took the form of public relations rather than openness to community direction.9 But before long, the outside world began to put pressure on the PPB to work in a true collaboration with the community. In large part, the story of that slow change is the history of Portland’s citywide system of neighborhood government.

Portland has enjoyed strong neighborhood associations since at least 1974, when mayor Neil Goldschmidt—a strong supporter of community activism—drew on federal Model City funds to establish the city’s Office of Neighborhood Associations (ONA), partly in order to help carry out a state mandate to develop a new land-use plan for the city. ONA’s role evolved somewhat over the years, but in essence it serves as the pinnacle of a three-tiered structure that connects individual neighborhoods to city government. At the top of that structure, ONA itself provides financial support and liaison services for Portland’s neighborhood associations. The next layer consists of a number of nonprofits (today there are five), called “neighborhood coalitions,” that are supervised by an elected board of local citizens; each of the coalitions has a contract with ONA to support the neighborhood associations under its umbrella (for example, the coalitions provide technical support for activities like problem-solving, running meetings, and printing and distributing newsletters). The third and final level is made up of the neighborhood associations (NAs) themselves, which are citizen-run, volunteer organizations that address a wide range of community problems and opportunities. Each association is legally recognized by the city and maintains citizen-written bylaws, which fix things like the NA’s boundaries and its election procedures. Today, ONA’s annual budget exceeds $3 million.

In the late 1970s, with neighborhood activity on the rise, the PPB and a local nonprofit applied to the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) for funding to support several crime prevention specialists. For a few years these specialists worked in community locations under the PPB’s and the nonprofit’s direction, but when LEAA money dried up, they moved over to ONA; the city was pleased with the specialists’ work, and it picked up the costs of the program out of the general fund. Until recently, crime prevention specialists were assigned to the coalition offices, providing the NAs with assistance as they tried to deal with public safety concerns.

Collaboration between the neighborhoods and police grew as time wore on. In ONA’s early years, residents often found police difficult to work with. Sharon McCormack, a crime prevention specialist who has been with the program from its outset, explains that “it was typical for officers to think in traditional terms about what their role was, and [to tell citizens] that their hands were basically tied and there wasn't anything they could do to help solve the problem.” But with prodding and experience, a number of officers eventually became close working partners with the community groups in their beats.

Police-community collaboration got a jump-start from an unlikely source, a 1986 city ordinance that dealt with convenience stores, and which can serve as an example of the sorts of collaboration that took place in the 1980s. The ordinance required new convenience stores that would be open more than 18 hours per day to meet with the community about security concerns, and to prepare a “Good Neighbor” plan outlining how they would deal with them. Neighborhood associations reportedly found the process very useful, and ONA eventually generalized it to create a framework for dealing with any neighborhood problem. For example, a Good Neighbor plan developed in response to a problem apartment complex might include a section in which the apartment manager described how she would improve lighting and physical security in her complex. Officer Thomas Peavey, who the PPB later assigned in committee with other officers to formalize its own problem-solving process, remarks that through these Good Neighbor plans, “the coalitions were kind of doing their own problem solving. Their representatives outside the Police Bureau were out there doing their own partnerships with the community.”

McCormack recalls an example that revolved around a local high school that had become a neighborhood concern: “The perception was that there were a lot of kids from the school hanging out, speeding down neighborhood streets, hanging out at a local convenience store, and just plain skipping school. There were perceived increases in purchases of alcohol, and it seemed like there was drug dealing around, more litter, and loud noises.” Alerted to the problem by the neighborhood association, McCormack and others in the coalition office called a meeting with the key stakeholders. The resulting Good Neighbor plan outlined responsibilities of several different actors: School officials spoke with the youth and organized a litter patrol, the store owner turned off his video games during school hours, neighbors were encouraged to start a neighborhood watch, and area business owners started a business watch and made some physical improvements to the area as well. Finally, the PPB worked with the city License Bureau to observe and document sales of alcohol to minors. When the identified some apparent violations, the store owner was warned and received training on how better to check IDs.

Though its point person was in ONA rather than the PPB, the example—like many others PPB members report from this period—contains many of the elements of the community policing philosophy that Portland would soon start pushing: Community members were able to raise the sorts of quality-of-life issues that did not fit easily into the 911 system, and they could even take part in the solution. And though today’s well-developed problem-solving structure did not exist at the time, it was not just renegade officers who facilitated such efforts. One PPB member maintains that “the administration always encouraged us to deal with the community.”

To be sure, the Bureau’s receptivity to community input was uneven across the patrol force and management ranks. Moreover, there were organizational barriers to community problem-solving, like the fact that PPB districts did not match the neighborhood association boundaries—a mismatch that some believe made police-community partnerships more difficult and less common than they might have been. Nevertheless, the PPB was far from completely insular, even before community policing took hold as its official philosophy.

The Public
Being open to community collaboration at the beat level did not, however, mean that the PPB had a particularly positive relationship with the public at large. In other words, the department as a whole was not so outward-looking as its constituent parts: It did not proactively try to bolster its public image in any significant way, and it did not open up high-level bureau policymaking to community influence.10

Consider, for example, the PPB’s press relations. Jane Braaten, a civilian trained in journalism who acted as a Bureau spokesperson during its transition to community policing, maintains that during the 1980s, “the primary role for the public information officer was to get information out about crimes that just happened.” More proactive press relations were simply not in the PPB’s operating style. “The idea that you put out a press release to talk about police participation in a community fair or the donation of bikes [to the department] was really, at that time, kind of a foreign idea here,” Braaten explains.
Absent any systematic attempt to put forth a positive public image, much of the image of the PPB that did get out was quite negative—particularly in Portland’s African-American community. Three stories in particular stuck out in public discourse about the Bureau: An incident in the early 1980s in which two officers threw dead opossums on the sidewalk next to a black-owned restaurant (some in the PPB reportedly considered the restaurant to be a focus for criminal activity); the death of a black security guard at the hands of an officer using the carotid-artery chokehold; and a number of T-shirts printed by PPB officers that read “Don’t Choke ‘em, Smoke ‘em,” in response to the department’s ban on the chokehold after the security guard incident. Richard Brown, co-chair of Portland’ Black United Front, explains that partly as a result of these incidents, “the police were always viewed . . . like an occupying force in black communities. . . . Any time there was an issue in our community, we were on one side, and they were on the other side.” Eventually, the “us versus them” tone of police-community relations, coupled with skyrocketing crime rates in many Portland neighborhoods (Portland had one of the highest crime rates in the nation among cities its size), led the black community to register a serious no-confidence vote in city police, as several black leaders openly called for the National Guard to come in to some Portland neighborhoods to help restore order.

Thus despite extensive neighborhood-level collaboration with some communities (extensive, that is, relative to other police departments of this era), the PPB’s overall public image was not particularly good during much of this period. Some in the Bureau blame police-community tensions on the political climate of Portland, traditionally a very liberal city. But whatever the explanation, public opinion was apparently not fully behind the Police Bureau during the period leading up to its transition.

The Task Environment
The examples of beat-level collaboration with the community suggest that some PPB officers looked beyond the criminal justice system for tools in the fight against crime. Officers worked with community institutions like schools, local businesses, and government agencies (the License Bureau, which regulates liquor licenses, has partnered with the PPB and community residents at least since the late 1970s). But many Bureau members think that interagency collaboration was less common before the transition than it is today, and they point to significant gaps in interagency collaboration during the 1980s. Most notably, the PPB apparently did not work with the Bureau of Buildings to apply pressure against drug houses the way it does today.

The PPB was, however, fairly firmly entrenched in the local criminal justice system. Portland police have had a good reputation in the court system; one DA maintains that the department has enjoyed “tremendous creditability in the court system.” And the department has worked with neighboring law enforcement agencies often (which is not to say that these relationships have lacked any conflict; for example, the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office has sometimes looked on the PPB as an encroacher, as the city has gradually annexed county territory). Finally, it has also been very prominent in police professional associations for some time, hosting events like the 1988 International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference.

In sum, where outside input and collaboration is concerned, the PPB of the 1980s was an interesting hybrid of the past and the present. On the one hand, the Bureau clearly had the aspirations to autonomy that most “professional” police departments held: It tried to isolate itself from city politics, made little effort to shape public opinion, and did not engage outside agencies as much as it does today. But on the other hand, outside input—particularly from community groups—already played an important role in the PPB, even if that role would expand under community policing.

2. Operations

Patrol
Patrol officers during this period operated out of one- and two-person cars assigned to [X] districts in Portland’s 3 precincts. Most officers were assigned to a single district for the duration of their assignments—officers could, and still can, bid for new assignments every [X] months—, but some were assigned to “utility” cars that filled in for district cars on their days off. District maps were drawn to equalize travel time and call loads, and did not usually match the boundaries of Portland’s officially-recognized neighborhood associations.

During the 1980s, patrol officers in Portland spent the bulk of their productive time answering 911 calls. In 1985, for example, call response took up 47% of the patrol force’s time, well above the IACP recommendation of 30-35%; subtracting time for administrative tasks, meals, and routine patrol, officers were left with only 13% of their time for “self-initiated activity.”11 The problem was not necessarily one of philosophy, for Portland’s workload was enormous: A PPB study of similar departments at the time found that Portland received 67% more calls per officer than average.12 Interviewed in 1987, then-Lieutenant David Williams explained that in 1985, when the police workload became a political issue, “officers were spending so much time responding to priority one and priority two calls that they were less and less able to do other things. All we were doing was running from call to call; officers and citizens both had expectations that we were going to provide full service, time for follow-up, but we couldn’t, and everybody was very frustrated.”13 Some maintain that the workload issue forestalled Mayor Clark’s intention to make the PPB more community-oriented. In 1987 his aide on police matters, Chuck Duffy, explained: “To the mayor’s way of thinking, community-oriented policing means walking beats and things like that, less relying on direct, heavy-handed law enforcement and more getting at root causes. We recognized the fact that you can’t do it well unless you have an adequate level of police officers, because you’ve got to do the community outreach stuff with police on top of your base of patrol officers, and we’re having trouble with our base.”14
Nevertheless, many PPB patrol officers apparently did some problem-solving work well before the transition to community policing. Interviewed in 1987, Captain Alan Orr expressed a sentiment that many officers repeat today:

Orr went on to explain that around 1984, workload began to interfere with problem-solving, but the reaction of Bureau personnel reflected how abnormal that situation was: “It was a great concern, not only to the lieutenants, but also to the officers on the street, that they were not doing any kind of proactive work” Some officers deny that they participated in or heard about much problem-solving during the 1980s, so it appears that the practice was spread unevenly through the Bureau (particularly during low-morale periods like the turbulent mid-80s). But ONA’s Sharon McCormack, offering the perspective of an outside observer with considerable knowledge of the police, maintains that the PPB was doing “a fair amount” of problem-solving work at this time.

In any case, the PPB’s operational systems recognized problem-solving explicitly: As Orr explains above, officers could write up “mission statements” to propose directed operations aimed at specific community problems. Problems could be nominated (whether for missions or some less formal initiative) in at least three different ways: 1) Individual citizens, neighborhood associations, or ONA’s coalition offices might contact a precinct directly; 2) officers might identify problems from their own observations; and 3) sergeants might request crime analyses for their areas of responsibility, allowing them to identify problem spots that they could then direct officers to follow-up on (Portland had relatively sophisticated crime analysis capabilities early on).

There were apparently two limits to problem-solving in this era that differentiate it somewhat from what goes on in the PPB today. First, the Bureau seems to have focused mostly on relatively small-scale problems—problems like difficult street corners or drug houses. Second, most problem-solving apparently relied primarily on the patrol officers themselves. Common responses to problem areas included stepped-up patrol, low-level undercover operations by patrol officers, and effecting a zero-tolerance posture in problem areas. Patrol could, of course, turn large problems over to central units like the Drugs and Vice Division, but that seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. One department member who believes that problem-solving was quite common during the period explains that the major difference from today was that “in those days everything fell onto the patrol officer. He had fewer resources. He was expected to deal with the problem within his district.” Nevertheless, as described above, police did work creatively with some outside agencies in solving problems (notably the License Bureau and the county DA’s office); and when neighborhood associations brought ONA’s crime prevention specialists into problem-solving initiatives, the specialists often brought up outside resources that might be of use.

Investigations and Patrol
Investigations in the PPB were centralized during the 1980s, with large units focusing on property crimes and person crimes, and several smaller specialized units (which came and went over time) that focused on specific classes of crime. (Indeed, the Bureau put more of its resources into special units over time, sometimes to the consternation of patrol officers and elected officials.) Some units were geographically-based, though they were still centralized in the sense that they worked out of the downtown office rather than the precincts: A burglary detective, for example, would work and be supervised out of the central office, but she would be assigned cases that came out of a particular precinct. Most investigations started from patrol reports: One detective from the period maintains that because of his unit’s enormous workload, “you wouldn't do any proactive stuff at all.” And only a small proportion of his reports got any attention at all: “It was so overwhelming, you would just take the cream of the crop, only the named suspects, something that was definitely there and you would work that case and then you'd submit it to the DA's office.” At the same time, the detective units were well-respected and, as mentioned earlier, had a good relationship with prosecutors and the courts.

Coordination between investigations and patrol was minimal; again, most investigations began from written reports rather than, say, direct concerns expressed at the precinct level. For example, precinct officers engaged in their own low-level investigations would sometimes find out after-the-fact that a centralized investigation was focusing on the same problem they were, so that their own efforts were wasted. Indeed, investigative units apparently did not even coordinate very closely with each other; for example, DVD often recovered stolen property in drug busts but rarely made an effort to clear cases in property crimes. Each of the PPB’s operational units had a very clear functional responsibility, and bureaucratic boundaries were rarely crossed.

3. Administrative Systems
The terms “reactive” and “proactive” are generally reserved for operational rather than administrative systems in police departments. But in the PPB, that language usefully describes a number of important administrative changes.

Reactive Administration: Strategic Planning and Personnel
With a few exceptions, the PPB of this period had little capacity to do self-initiated strategic planning. Major reorganizations—like the one in 1985 that reshuffled staff, instituted a telephone reporting system, and eliminated units—tended to be responses to immediate fiscal crises rather than attempts to realize well-explicit long-term goals.

That, at least, is the perspective from the unit with official responsibility for planning during the period. According to Assistant Chief David Williams, who took over Planning and Research when he was promoted to Lieutenant in 1985, the unit simply was not expected to do everything its name implied: “A very small group of people, good people,” he remembers.

Williams himself, the unit’s new head, candidly admits that he himself “knew nothing about it [planning]” when he came in.

Indeed, no one in the department had expertise in this area, and Deputy Chief Tom Potter apparently recognized as much when he was making assignments in 1985. At that time Potter installed Williams in Planning and Research with an explicit mandate to develop (in Williams’s words) “a bona fide planning function.” Williams took the mandate seriously, as he explains:

By the time he left the unit in 1987, Williams had accomplished much of what he set out to do. The Bureau still did not develop organization-wide strategic plans, the way it would in the near future. But Planning and Research did undertake planning in more limited areas—things like patrol deployment, staffing needs, and other situational assessments of specific Bureau weaknesses and opportunities. Most important, Williams had developed a departmental capacity that would be centrally important to community policing: Planning and Research would shortly become the Community Policing Unit, and Williams himself, a newly-trained expert in strategic planning, would take a leading role in preparing the department’s Transition Plan.

Reactive Personnel Systems
Though planning in the PPB did start to move beyond its reactive posture in the years before community policing, other administrative systems would not really begin to change until the transition was officially underway. Personnel systems—particularly hiring—are perhaps the clearest case.

Minority hiring provides one example. The PPB has long expressed its intention to bring more minority recruits into the police force; the Bureau’s 1971 annual report maintained that a “top priority for 1972 is the recruitment of minority citizens to the Portland Police Bureau.”16 But despite years of expressing that goal, the Bureau had made little progress by 1990, just before the personnel changes associated with community policing got underway. For example, only 21 of the PPB’s 762 sworn officers were black, and only one of them had risen as far as Lieutenant. The problem was apparently that the department did not have a very aggressive recruitment campaign: Although it was committed to hiring qualified minorities who applied, it simply did not develop a very proactive system for getting minority candidates to apply in the first place.

Bruce Prunk, who oversaw personnel changes during the transition to community policing, summarizes the old systems well by saying that they tended to “screen out” rather than “select in” new recruits. Statistics support this intuition: For example, since the Bureau instituted its new recruitment initiatives and minimum qualifications, the failure rate on its psychological tests has dropped from 37% to 19%. Relatively speaking, the old hiring systems left applications to chance: Recruitment efforts and basic qualifications were both minimal; most of the Bureau’s work in the hiring process came after the initial application was made, in performing background checks and examinations on the somewhat random pool of potential hires that it wound up with.
Many other PPB administrative systems left just as little room to be proactive. Internal affairs responded to and investigated complaints, lacking, for example, an “early warning system” that would flag officers with multiple unsustained reports. Departmental initiative in recruit training was limited by state mandate; since the mid 1970s, Oregon has required all state police agencies to use a statewide training academy rather than developing their own (though Portland has had its own, shorter “supplementary academy” for new hires). And as in most police departments, PPB management lacked (and still lacks) control over patrol assignments—patrol officers can bid into essentially any assignment they choose every [X] years. In all of these systems, management initiative and even discretion was minimal, making it difficult to consciously alter the Bureau in any determined way. Many administrative matters in the PPB essentially ran themselves.

Proactive Administration: Information in the PPB
None of this is to say that Portland was a backwards police department—quite the contrary. In fact, the Bureau’s use of technology and information systems were cutting-edge through much of the 1980s and even earlier.

As early as the 1960s, the PPB maintained extensive information about things like how officers used their time and how many calls of various types came in. The Bureau did not really have any way to use this information at first (for example, it did not regularly reconsider patrol deployment based on the information it was collecting), 17 but it was apparently decades ahead of many other departments even in collecting it systematically. By the 1980s, the PPB had innovative information systems for use not only inside the Bureau, but also by the community.

Steve Beedle, a civilian crime analyst with the Bureau since the early 1980s, agrees that Portland has always been advanced in this area. For example, the PPB could generate geographically-based crime information, and the patrol force used this capability to identify and analyze neighborhood problems. Beedle and others in the Crime Prevention and Patrol Support unit took this idea to its next logical step by experimenting with mapping technology in 1987. The impetus was a need to carry out the evaluation piece of Portland’s CPTED program, funded by BJA as a demonstration program. BJA suggested that Beedle look into a young desktop mapping company (which would later become MapInfo), and from there the PPB was able to develop a rudimentary mapping capability.
Information systems also had a neighborhood-oriented twist. Beedle himself quickly became an information resource for the neighborhood associations, and he explains that the entire unit worked “very closely with the neighborhood coalition offices.” The unit had a few prepared reports that it sent out to the coalition offices and others, but it mainly emphasized special requests from the public, which it tried to funnel through the coalition offices in order to improve coordination and screen out misdirected requests (for example, the PPB would receive requests for traffic information that were better handled by Traffic Management). In the process, the unit developed close working relationships with the neighborhoods.

4. Management
It is particularly difficult after the fact to reconstruct managerial practice—things like the ways in which managers actually used Bureau systems, how they tried to shape the ways in which operators used them, and where discretion was located and encouraged in the PPB. As a result, this section will be brief and impressionistic. Nevertheless, a few things about management during the period are clear.

Leadership in the PPB
The 1980s opened on the tail end of Bruce Baker’s seven-year tenure as Portland’s chief. Baker, the first outsider to head the PPB, had a clear vision of where he wanted the Bureau to go—one that focused particularly on corruption, truthfulness, and modernization.18 But according to one Bureau member, Baker “had tremendous resistance” to the changes he tried to make; he left in 1981 after a vote of no confidence from the union. His successor, Ronald Still, also had a clear vision—Moose writes that he tried to bring a “law and order,” “spit and polish” style to the PPB—, but it was a vision that conflicted with that of Mayor Bud Clark, who won the 1984 Mayoral election. Thus began a pattern of leadership instability that plagued the Bureau throughout the decade. Indeed, Portland had six chiefs of police (two were interim) from the time Clark took office until 1987, when Richard Walker became chief and started the first slow but substantial steps towards community policing.

The result of this instability at the top was turbulence and lack of direction at almost every other level. Commander Mark Paresi, who spent a year during the mid-1980s as a Lieutenant at East Precinct, explains how this problem manifested at his level:

An audit of the PPB, conducted in 1989 by the Institute for Law and Justice, summarized the difficulty by referring to “a ‘chief du jour’ system of management” that led to “undermined command credibility.”19 Even at the time the audit came out, two years into Walker’s tenure, ILJ concluded that the department lacked direction.

Supervision and Discretion
Portland has espoused a decentralized and participatory management style at least since Bruce Baker was Chief in the 1970s. But ambivalence about such ideas have apparently been just as constant.

On the one hand, Portland’s precincts have for the most part enjoyed considerable autonomy in things like deployment, budgeting, and operational activities. The Bureau did flip-flop on a number of key issues during the 1980s. For example, for a short time the precincts lost their authority to allocate officers across shifts as they saw fit; and at one point the chief’s office eliminated input from precinct commanders when it made yearly decisions about personnel budgets (instead it relied on a computer model to allocate personnel resources across the Bureau).20 Nevertheless, precincts did enjoy quite a bit of operational freedom. For example, precinct captains could authorize undercover work by patrol officers, remove district officers from 911 responsibilities (usually by bringing in another officer on overtime to cover their calls), or temporarily reorganize shifts to facilitate problem-solving work. One Bureau member describes such flexible work as “a common practice that was going on at that time.”

On the other hand, many in the Bureau have a vague sense that decisionmaking in the PPB was more rigid and centralized than it is today. One maintains: “It used to be that ideas came top down. All the planning and everything was done by the Lieutenants and Sergeants.” Moreover, many other Bureau members believe that front-line supervision was more distant, less supportive, and more focused on “stats” in the past—today’s view of front-line supervisors as “facilitators” or even “partners” was, they argue, largely absent. Such memories are always subject to distortion, but outside observers at the time came to many of the same conclusions; for example, the1989 ILJ study concluded that Bureau management had long been too centralized.21 Thus although the sort of decentralized, participatory management that community policing values apparently had some foundation in the PPB of the 1980s, it was not fully ingrained in the way Portland managers worked.

II. THE TRANSITION

More than in many police departments, community policing in Portland was a group effort, so its trajectory cannot be traced solely in terms of the career of any one individual. There were certainly key figures—notably Tom Potter, who took over the PPB as chief in 1990, and who was a guiding force for community policing for at least three years before that time. Nevertheless, the PPB, which had a history of leadership instability, consciously tried to detach community policing from particular people. As a result, this section will review Portland’s transition conceptually, exploring three parallel tracks: The evolution of the idea of community policing; the development of support for it (both inside and outside the Bureau); and its operational implementation.

1. Evolution of a Vision
Much of the groundwork for community policing had clearly been laid years before Portland officially adopted that style of operating. But even as a matter of explicit philosophy, community policing’s roots were planted no later than 1984—even if it would take at least six years from that point before even a partly coherent vision would evolve.

False Starts
Bud Clark’s 1984 mayoral campaign set the tone for police reform in the coming years. Clark, a political novice who owned a well-known Portland tavern, campaigned on a populist platform that called for a more open style of government, and one of its major planks focused on the PPB. Elected against all expectations, Clark quickly announced his intention to open up the Bureau, in part by appointing a “more community oriented” chief.22

But this intention ran aground of at least two problems. The first was budgetary: Clark took office just as Portland’s economy was failing, and he immediately had to make cuts in the Bureau. Those cuts—particularly firing 16 patrol officers—put Clark and his new Chief, Penny Harrington, at odds with the Bureau in general, and with its union in particular. Lingering budgetary problems also laid behind the rocky relationship Clark had with his next non-interim chief, James Davis.
But the second problem was probably more substantial: Neither Clark nor the chiefs he appointed had a very well-developed vision of what a “community-oriented Police Bureau” might mean. Harrington’s case is illustrative. While Clark purportedly appointed her because of her demonstrated commitment to local communities, she clearly held on to elements of the traditional mindset. For example, when new UCR data showed Portland’s crime rates rising during a year when crime was falling nationally, Harrington blamed the problem on lack of jail space in Multnomah County, and she was unable to articulate an alternative approach to the city’s growing problem with crime.23 Moreover, Clark himself apparently did not have a very concrete idea of what he wanted from the department, as he called for little other than “openness” and a “community-oriented” posture.24

Crises in the Traditional Model
But despite such difficulties, the impulse for something like community policing did not fade away. Many inside the Bureau point to a number of outside forces that kept pressure on them to find a new model of policing.

Most important, evidence mounted that the current model was failing. For one, tension with the community—particularly African-Americans—undoubtedly weighed heavily on the PPB. But this tension had simmered for a long time without producing a fundamental reorientation of Bureau philosophy. What did change as the 1980s wore on was crime, as Assistant Chief David Williams (who played a major role in the early stages of the transition) explains:

At the same time, consensus was growing that the criminal justice system simply could not handle the surging crime problem. Jail space in Multnomah County had long been a problem, and convicts were regularly being released early to make room for more serious offenders. In many arrests where the suspect already had fingerprints and photographs on file, he would not be taken into custody at all, but given a citation with a court date and released. Moose writes that “community policing offered hope to this situation because it included the expectation that repeat arrests could be reduced by solving problems by other means.”25 This was not simply an abstract pressure on the department to find alternative dispositions: The shortage of space affected officers directly, as their radios would (and still do) regularly call out that Multnomah County Jail had gone “one-to-one,” meaning that no more prisoners could be taken until one was discharged. Officers might then have to guard anyone they arrested for hours before the jail could take the suspect, so they faced a very tangible pressure to turn to solutions other than arrest.

In any case, Williams reports on the seeming consensus that emerged:

Against this background, the PPB’s leadership changed again in April of 1987, when Clark fired Chief Davis over a dispute rooted in the budget crisis. The immediate reason was Davis’s threat to file suit to gain access to the source materials behind a performance audit of the Bureau, which had criticized its management and argued that its budget requests were excessive. Clark had called a breakfast meeting with Davis to order him to back off on the suit, and when Davis balked, the Mayor fired him on the spot. Within three hours he had sworn in Richard Walker, an ex-PPB Deputy Chief who had retired from the Bureau when Clark took office in 1985, and who at the time was working as the executive assistant to City Commissioner Dick Bogle.

The First Steps
Compared with earlier appointments, the three-hour “search” for Walker must have seemed haphazard—even considering that Clark had recently become well-acquainted with Walker in recent months as the two had worked together in city government. Nevertheless, it was under Walker that community policing finally gained its first real momentum in Portland. To be sure, the new Chief did not take his position with a fully-developed vision of where the department would go;26 and his tenure saw more intellectual than tangible progress towards community policing. But according to Moose, Walker was the first of Clark’s many appointments fully to realize that “he was expected to use his knowledge of the Bureau and his law enforcement experience to implement the will of the mayor,” which was “to open City Hall and other bureaucracies (including the police) to the regular citizens of Portland.”27 In any case, Walker soon appointed Captain Tom Potter to head the new Community Policing Division, with a mandate to investigate the idea and determine how Portland could proceed with it.

Testing Out the Strategy
Before Potter had made much headway on this task, a frustrated group of residents in Portland’s Overlook Neighborhood provided what would become an important push towards community policing. Long plagued by prostitution problems on nearby North Interstate Avenue, Overlook residents held a public forum late in 1987 to air their grievances and demand action from the city. Alan Orr, then commander of North Precinct (which included the Overlook Neighborhood), remembers the event vividly:

Potter soon took over North Precinct, and he continued to work with the community to forge a strategy for dealing with Overlook’s problems.

The initiative ultimately included a wide range of partners: Residents began the city’s first official citizen foot patrol in the area, and although officers initially resisted the idea, ONA worked closely with the Bureau to design training for the patrol; eventually, most officers accepted and even welcomed it. Motel owners agreed to new restrictions on room occupancy designed to exclude prostitution from the rooms. The city passed an ordinance that enabled police to tow johns’ cars, and this new tool was widely publicized in local media. Finally, on the police side, the PPB added a foot patrol to the area and agreed to conduct monthly inspections of motels to help ensure that they complied with their end of the agreement. The effort proceeded slowly at first, but within twelve months the area saw a dramatic reduction in prostitution, and the Overlook group was very satisfied with the police response. Equally important, the PPB had its first high-profile success story in community problem-solving—a story that would figure prominently in future attempts to spread community policing throughout the Bureau.

The Philosophy of Community Policing
While the Interstate project was pushing the department operationally, two other events were pushing key players philosophically. The first was a trip to Japan by Potter, sponsored by the Eisenhower Foundation, which was part of a world tour focusing on policing practices. Potter was tipped-off to the opportunity by Ed Blackburn, then ONA’s Crime Prevention Coordinator, who had connections with Eisenhower. Through the tour, the Community Policing Division head not only got to observe the Japanese policing system directly (at the time it was clearly a world model for the emerging idea of community policing); he also got to learn from many of his fellow travelers who were at the forefront of community policing in this country, including Houston police chief Lee Brown.

Second, Mayor Clark got his own education in community policing by chance, at a 1988 Mayors’ Conference that included several presentations on community policing. Houston’s Brown was among the presenters, so Clark got essentially the same perspective on community policing that Potter himself had just been exposed to. (Indeed, it is not surprising that Portland got so much help from Brown: Before becoming chief in Houston, Brown had tried to implement team policing as the Sheriff in Multnomah County, which encompasses Portland. In fact, some of Brown’s old officers had since transferred over to the PPB.) In any case, the conference marked a turning point for Clark, who finally learned a vocabulary for communicating his long-held conviction that the PPB should be more “community-oriented”.28

A Plan for the Plan
Immediately after the conference, in December of 1988, Clark wrote a memo to the Bureau directing it to prepare a strategic management plan that focused on community policing. He and Walker quickly appointed a small group that would take on the task, with Potter at the head. The initial group included a number of PPB members, including ranks from officer to Lieutenant (one, Dave Williams, was actually a Captain who had just been demoted as part of a recent round of budget cuts), as well as two Portland State Professors who were to help formulate the plan. Clark and Walker also created an advisory committee called the Community Policing Work Group, which included members of the PPB, ONA, and the Mayor’s Office, as well as a number of community leaders. This committee met weekly, acting as a sounding board for the ideas Potter’s team was developing.

Potter’s mandate was purposefully vague—indeed, developing a plan of action was precisely what his team was charged with doing. But the group did start off with one clear objective, which Williams explains as “consider[ing] another way of doing policing, something that was more in partnership with the community as a whole, more open to the community, more community-driven.” So the group embarked on an investigation that sought to refine that goal and to develop a blueprint for getting there—in other words, a strategic plan that would guide the Bureau through its transition to community policing.

From the outset, the group decided that this investigation could not simply be a means to an end, but that it needed to embody the values it sought to realize. As Williams explains, “the process of developing the plan itself was a strategy to begin to align the community and the department towards that end—towards becoming a community policing department.” And the same logic applied inside the organization: “The process sometimes can be equally or maybe even more valuable than the outcome. . . . Because the process helps shape the attitudes and behaviors you're looking for. So you've got to live it as you go, you can't just live it at the end.” In part the intention seems to have been to build support by offering voice—the intention to move towards “community policing” was not negotiable, and the Bureau did want people to “buy in” to that. But Potter and his team also wanted to use community and Bureau members to help them clarify precisely where the PPB was going. As Williams explains, “One of the things we want[ed] to define from this participation is what community policing should look like for Portland. . . . Every city should define it for itself, because it may not always be the same for every community.”

Consequently, the group itself would not make the substantive decisions; instead it would set up the framework within which the various communities could do so. In Williams’s words, the group developed “a plan for the plan” that set out some basic parameters:

Focusing particularly on these issues—identifying the groups and individuals who should participate, getting their cooperation, and developing a framework for participation—, the team produced a critical path chart that would guide the actual plan’s development. Team members did not want to venture far from formal matters like these, since they felt strongly that the PPB’s vision needed to emerge from a broadly participatory process that involved the entire Portland community.

But they did not leave every substantive decision up in the air. For example, from the start the group decided that community policing would be implemented Bureau-wide—the PPB would not start out with an experimental “special unit” as some other departments had. As Williams explains it, this commitment stemmed from two sources: First, a firm belief—bolstered by initial research—that “community policing was the only way to go”; and second, a belief that special units were impermanent because they were tied to personalities:

In any case, with a minimal set of commitments like this one, and a plan for the plan that would guide the participatory process, Portland finally embarked on community policing in earnest.

The Transition Plan
Dave Williams’s experience in the mid-1980s as head of Planning and Research had made him the Bureau’s expert in planning, and Potter seized on his skills to oversee the transition plan. Williams describes the charge as a daunting one: “It was a tough [role]. There weren't enough hours in the day, it was tremendously stressful,” he remembers. But with help from the rest of his team, particularly Portland State’s Jim Marshall, Williams was ultimately able to carry it out.

The critical path chart that the community policing group had developed laid out the information the Bureau needed to gather, and Williams used this “plan for the plan” to structure the enormous task before him. Most significantly, Williams divided the information-gathering load among 12 different committees, each charged with soliciting opinion and developing recommendations on a different substantive area.29 Williams formed the committees by selecting one or two people as committee chairs and then directing them to select the remaining participants (within certain constraints). As he remembers it, his main goal was to pick chairs with strong work ethics:

Indeed, the transition plan itself would break new ground in the Bureau, rethinking fundamental issues like the role each rank should play and how to deal with the media. Williams believed that this initiative did not require existing expertise and authority—quite the contrary: It required dedicated workers who were prepared to take risks as the Bureau entered uncharted territory.

The committee heads, in turn, got to fill the remaining positions within a simple framework; Williams explains that he allowed wide discretion in these choices, “as long as there were some community people involved, some Bureau people involved, both sworn and non-sworn, to represent those points of view. Other than that they could have whoever they want.” Getting participants from the community participants proved to be a particularly difficult task, according to Williams: “Quite honestly we didn’t get a huge amount of participation, but we always invited people,” he remembers. “We had the invitations there and they had the opportunity to participate. [But] you couldn’t get, out of 500,000 people, a proper sampling all of the time. It just wasn’t going to happen. But you did the best you could with what you have.” The problem did not appear to be access, for although police themselves could not always identify the best community representatives, ONA helped the Bureau extensively; it not only put its own staff on many PPB transition committees, but its coalition offices also helped to identify community members who might participate in the Bureau’s planning process.

In any case, in the end the PPB assembled 12 committees of 5 to 35 people each, with participants from a number of different city agencies, community groups and institutions, and businesses (including the media). Membership was diverse in terms of the attitudes people held, as well; for example, Williams notes that many members actively opposed community policing at the outset: “In a lot of cases there were a mix of people in those committees—people who weren't sure about community policing, or they liked it, or in some cases outright resisted it.”

Williams pushed each committee to produce its products quickly: “I gave them very short time lines, in some cases only 30 days, which means that they had to meet frequently to get this product out; otherwise they would be strung out forever. And it was an impossible demand, but they did it.” Other than this, he took a hands-off approach: “Basically I would introduce the first meeting with them, introduce the two chairs. ‘This is what we’re asking you to do.’ Take questions and all of that to try to alleviate some of the fears, concerns, or whatever, and then get out of the way and just let them do their job. And they did it.” In the end, the final products were all he had hoped for, despite initial grumbling that he had given them an impossible task: “By the time they finished their product they were proud of it, it was excellent,” he remembers. “And a lot of those people that were naysayers were now coming on board. And so they did a wonderful job and they managed to come through on all of this stuff.” The conversion of the “naysayers” was particularly satisfying for Williams, who had always valued the planning exercise as much for its process as for its product.

When the committee reports were completed, Williams and his team distilled them into a draft version of the plan, circulated hundreds of copies throughout the community for comments, and reworked the draft into the final document. The resulting Community Policing Transition Plan announced a program of action for the next five years, organized around five major goals that collectively defined community policing for Portland: Partnership, empowerment, problem-solving, accountability, and service orientation (see attachment 1). Overall, the vision of policing that emerged in Portland was centrally concerned with community partnerships. For example, the new mission statement announced in the plan gave a central place to community-police collaboration: “The mission of the Portland Police Bureau is to work with all citizens to preserve life, maintain human rights, protect property, and promote individual responsibility and community commitment.”30 In any case, the goals (later redefined as “values”) would eventually become a touchstone of policing in Portland. For example, the Bureau’s early demonstration projects were chosen and evaluated based on their contribution to all five values, and a poster version of its mission statement displays the values and their definitions throughout the Bureau. Most important, the values would serve as the guiding vision for Portland’s top managers as they built support for community policing and developed new organizational innovations.

There were, of course, details as well as grand statements. With the five goals as the main structure, the plan announced 27 objectives and some 300 specific activities (called “strategies”) for the Bureau to undertake over the next five years. Williams and his team had prioritized the various activities to make sure that the pieces they saw as crucial got attention; he explains:

In any case, the plan established accountability for the strategies by assigning each one to a lead division in the Bureau (though it recognized that many divisions might play a role in them); each of these divisions reported monthly to the Chief and the Transition Committee on their progress. Moreover, the Bureau as a whole would provide quarterly implementation updates to city council, which officially adopted the plan by a unanimous resolution on January 31, 1990.

Assessment and Refinement of the Vision
While the Transition Plan provided the first and perhaps most significant statement of where the PPB was headed, the Bureau remained open to refining it (some PPB members refer to it as a “living document”). So starting in 1994, the PPB would revisit its strategic plan every two years, essentially repeating the original process and producing a completely new document. Commander Mark Paresi, who oversaw the first such effort, explains that by revisiting the plan, the Bureau hoped to hone its vision:

Thus, the strategic vision that would guide the PPB was opened up to continuous evolution.

The Role of Research
Subsequent strategic planning sessions followed the same model as the transition plan, relying heavily on participatory dialogue to develop the vision that would guide the department. But starting with the ‘94-‘96 plan, the Bureau also tried to expand the role more formalized analyses would play in the process. Research and assessment had played a role in the initial transition plan, to be sure, as committees gathered voluminous information about their respective tasks, and the so-called “menu committee” searched nationally for evidence of how community policing could be implemented and what impacts different strategies seemed to have. But over time, the Bureau clearly became more self-conscious about trying to evaluate its own ideas, and using those evaluations in its mid-course reviews of its overall strategies. Speaking specifically of the use of Bureau-wide performance indicators, Williams explains the evolution as follows: “The first year or two, it wasn’t as important as it was later because we were just getting started. After the third or fourth year, [we started asking], ‘How are we doing?’ We needed to figure out if we were on the money here or we were missing it by a country mile.” In the event, the Bureau approached evaluation in several ways, including its closely-watched demonstration projects, a growing number of program evaluations (such as an outside evaluation of its “partnership agreements”), and several surveys and focus groups that focused on community members, PPB employees, and the staff of other city agencies.31

In the opinion of many Bureau members, some of these techniques appeared more valuable than others. For example, the Bureau undertook an extensive evaluation of its Central Eastside demonstration project, intending to identify good models of community problem-solving that could be replicated throughout the city. But one Bureau member explains that the results, though positive, were not completely convincing:

Given such ambiguities in “hard research,” together with the sometimes prohibitive cost of evaluating small programs, evaluation apparently did not play a dominant role in the planning process. What did emerge from project evaluations like these was a new set of community desires that the Bureau had not previously taken much note of. In Central Eastside, for example, businesses and residents raised concerns about the placement of project-related social services, whose impacts on local neighborhoods they felt had not been considered sufficiently.

Indeed, more than the traditional “objective evaluations,” Portland apparently relied heavily on the many stakeholder surveys it undertook—surveys that went after subjective perceptions and desires directly. The Bureau became a sophisticated consumer of such studies, interpreting their own results in comparison with comparable studies in other agencies (not just the police), and developing longitudinal databases that allowed them to scan for trends over time. The surveys did not substitute for the dialogue that fundamentally underlay the transition plan. Jane Braaten, a supervisor in Planning and Support who had responsibility for key sections of the ’96-’98 plan, explains: “It gives us another pulse on the community to go out and do a formal survey to at least check, ‘Are we seeing a dramatic increase in this or are we not? Or [is it] actually the same vocal group?’ Which doesn’t mean we diminish the vocal group. It just gives us that check and balance on information that we are getting.” So the surveys, the evaluations, the vocal groups, and everything else fed into the overarching dialogue that was at the core of each planning process.

Two Trials of Succession
Because of its recent history, Portland faced a felt need not just to develop a vision for community policing, but also to institutionalize it in a way that it would withstand the Bureau’s inevitable changes of the guard. Indeed, leadership instability had become such an endemic problem in Portland that after only three years as chief, Richard Walker was seen as a force of stability and continuity in the Bureau. As a result, when rumors began to surface in the fall of 1990 that he might retire, there was concern that the progress of recent years—however slow—might be lost. Not much had yet been accomplished operationally in community policing, and the task of building support had a ways to go as well. But important aspects of the community policing vision had begun to crystallize, and its proponents did not want to lose that.

Any fears that community policing might be a casualty of Walker’s retirement proved unfounded, though, when Clark named Tom Potter as the new chief. As much as anyone in the Bureau, Potter was community policing in Portland: He had headed up the community policing division since its inception, overseen the transition plan with the help of Dave Williams, and participated in the earliest “official” community problem-solving exercise in the Overlook Neighborhood. An articulate speaker, Potter had become well-known and -liked in the community: He had not only the desire to build bridges to the rest of the city, the fundamental goal behind the transition plan; he also had the ability to do so. Indeed, Clark explained his choice of Potter in terms “his commitment to working with citizens to solve crime problems.”32 And in any case, Clark and the City Council (through resolutions it had passed regarding community policing, including the transition plan) explicitly directed Potter to “move police in a direction where they join with Portlanders in solving the causes of crime, instead of just responding to calls.”33 Ultimately, the years under Potter would prove enormously productive in implementing the vision expressed in the transition plan, and building support for that vision inside and outside the Bureau—as described in detail below.

But less than three years later, in the Spring of 1993, the city would go through even more turmoil and uncertainty when Potter announced his plans to retire. In addition to Potter’s unsurpassable association with community policing, two factors made this particular succession uncertain: First, a new mayor, Vera Katz, had recently replaced Clark, so it was not self-evident that the old mayor’s vision for the police would survive; and second, Katz had decided that the search would be a national one. The prospect of an outsider running the Bureau struck some as potentially ruinous. As Patrick Donaldson, executive director of the city’s Citizens Crime Commission, explained, “I can't believe that anyone outside the Portland Police Bureau is more knowledgeable about the vision that has been evolving over the last five years than the command staff and rank and file of the Portland Police Bureau.”34 Even in the case of internal candidates, Donaldson wondered: “Who will take over that vision, and will they want to own it or modify it? [While some in the Bureau are dedicated to Potter's philosophy], others tend to puppet it, sort of adapting to the party line."35

The major competition appeared to be between David Williams, the close associate of Potter who had overseen the transition plan, and Charles Moose, who as commander of North Precinct had given community policing some operational life—and in the process developed some of the crucial administrative and operational innovations that would help implement community policing. The process of choosing between these two insiders, as well as the many other candidates who applied, involved extensive input from community representatives, elected officials, and different groups within the PPB. In the end, Katz chose Moose for the job, citing his commitment to working with the community and the operational imagination he had shown in North precinct.
In Moose’s own eyes, the transition was notable for its smoothness:

So by the time Potter retired, the PPB had a substantial cadre of high-level managers who were all committed to substantially the same vision, and who intended to carry forward the changes outlined in the Bureau’s strategic plans. Perhaps this vision could not have survived the hyperactive pace of instability that Portland had seen in the mid-1980s. But transition to a new chief did not mean that community policing would fall apart or change course, at least on the level of ideas.

2. Building Support for the Vision
One of the main ways that Portland tried to enforce this continuity was by building strong constituencies for community policing inside and outside the PPB. This strategy took many forms that this section will review; but most dramatically, it involved an intensive public dialogue that culminated in a resolution by city council, setting out in broad terms the path the PPB would take. Assistant Chief Bruce Prunk, who oversaw personnel in the Bureau before taking on his current position, explains the reasoning behind this approach:

Williams reinforces the special importance of outside support in this strategy, explaining: “It was important to get a buy-off from all of the politicians and all of the community leaders, including the citizens. Because . . . as mayors and council members come and go, police chiefs come and go, you’ve got something that has been supported by council resolution that says ‘This is what we think is important for this city.’”

Thus from the outset, Portland’s upper management saw the development of outside support as an integral part of implementing community policing. This support would not simply provide the police increased legitimacy in taking on the new tasks they set for themselves. More specifically, it would provide an unflappable force that would enforce the vision when internal forces challenged it. It is hard to believe that the Bureau’s recent history of rapid leadership turnover was not in the transition team’s mind as they agreed on this approach. To be sure, there were other important reasons to solicit outside support: Since community policing in Portland would rely heavily on collaboration with neighborhood groups (Portland did not intend to follow an insular problem-solving model), community buy-in was clearly crucial. And because many felt the Bureau needed more officers to do community policing, City Council would literally have to buy in. But the first goal was to develop a constituency for change.

In any case, Potter took the need to build support for community policing seriously even before he became Chief. ONA’s Sharon McCormack, who often spoke with Potter about the issue, recalls his sense that “one of the riddles was going to be, ‘How do we convince City Council that this is an important shift to make? And how do we convince the Police Bureau that it makes sense to do? And how do we educate citizens that this might be a shift that really will have benefits for everybody?’” The following three sections focus on several ways that Potter and the rest of the PPB tried to build support for community policing externally, turning afterwards to a discussion of how the Bureau tried to build support for community policing internally.

Speaking to the Neighborhoods and City Hall
McCormack herself soon became involved in the answer to these questions, as Potter turned to ONA for help.36 She and her office helped the Bureau make links and build support with the outside world in many ways, like identifying community members to participate in the strategic plan; participating in a “community policing work group” that Potter’s initial planning team used as a sounding board; and most fundamentally, helping to operationalize community policing by acting as a partner in Portland’s many neighborhoods. But the most concrete and public way in which ONA advanced Potter’s early program for bringing the community on board was by organizing a series of public forums that solicited public input about community policing. These forums were held in the spring of 1989 and were attended by elected officials, Bureau personnel, and hundreds of community members.

Potter brought the idea for the forums to ONA late in 1988, shortly after Clark sent out the memo that directed the PPB develop a community policing strategic plan. McCormack remembers that Potter “knew that it would make sense to introduce this idea [i.e., community policing] through neighborhood groups and begin to garner some . . . support;” moreover, support from the community “could then result in mobilization of citizens to testify at City Council.” Thus Potter envisioned a strategy of building support in Portland’s neighborhoods, hoping that this grassroots strategy would ultimately influence city government.
To carry out the plan, Potter turned to the city’s well-established window to the neighborhoods, the Office of Neighborhood Associations. McCormack remembers

According to McCormack, ONA bought into the project readily. Public safety was a central issue in many Portland neighborhoods, and many of their neighborhood associations had already successfully worked with the police (as described above). Thus with help from the nonprofit Portland Organizing Project, ONA set out to run five community meetings that would showcase successful police-community partnerships, invite discussion about community policing, and thus disseminate the PPB’s new direction throughout the city.

According to McCormack, the forums were “very well-attended” by neighborhood residents, who were joined by high-level Bureau personnel, the Mayor, and a number of city councilors. Each event was chaired by a neighborhood resident, rather than a PPB representative, and this person steered the discussion towards two overarching issues: General neighborhood concerns about public safety, and the emerging idea of community policing. Many who attended knew nothing about community policing and framed their complaints in quite traditional terms—raising concerns like the speed of 911 responses and the insufficient number of officers who patrolled their streets. As McCormack remembers it, “some of the citizens weren't necessarily coming because they already bought community policing. They were just [in favor of] anything that was going to help make things more efficient, give them more access, and put more officers on the street.”

But in the end, the forums were apparently successful in starting a new type of dialogue about how the police and the community could work together. McCormack maintains that many neighborhood participants

The Bureau surveyed those who participated and found that the great majority were satisfied with the forums. In any case, community interest in the Bureau’s plans was sufficiently piqued to mobilize the political support Potter had wanted. The first demonstration of that fact came in the summer of 1989, when Council considered a resolution to adopt a definition of community policing (developed in part from the forums themselves), and to support the Bureau’s strategic planning process. Neighborhood residents reportedly called and sent letters to their council representatives in great numbers; McCormack recalls that

McCormack maintains that overall, “Council was impressed with the level of support,” and it unanimously voted in favor of the proposed resolution, which put city government on record as supporting community policing and the Bureau’s ongoing planning process.37 Within six months, Council would approve two more community policing resolutions (one adopting expected outcomes of the effort, and another officially recognizing the completed transition plan) and approve “Operation Jumpstart”—an effort to hire 60 new officers and 40 replacement officers in order to give community policing the push many Bureau members felt it needed.

Opening up the Bureau
Potter, however, would not rest on these achievements, and when he became Chief of Police in November of 1990, the Bureau’s efforts to build bridges with the community took off. Many of these efforts can be described in terms of the evolution of the Community Policing Division (later renamed Planning and Support), which for the sake of convenience can be viewed through the eyes of manager Jane Braaten.

The PPB hired Braaten in the summer of 1990, a few months before Potter took office as Chief, and she took her mandate from the transition plan, which described a program of public education and internal education about community policing. In particular, Braaten and others in the Community Policing Division wanted to bring the community policing message to four audiences: The Bureau itself, the general public, elected officials, and the media. “Those were the areas that through triage you figure out, ‘Where are you hurting the most and where do you need to make the most progress to be the most effective?’” In any case, with a background in journalism and work experience in city government, she brought with her special knowledge about two of these four main audiences.

Braaten took on several of these efforts over the course of her (continuing) tenure in the Bureau. Internally, she oversaw the development of a departmental newsletter that would diffuse the idea of community policing within the PPB, and she also helped design awards ceremonies and external publicity in a way that would encourage people inside the Bureau about it. On the media front, she arranged regular meetings with assignment editors in order to share concerns and build better relationships; she worked with Potter to redefine the role of the Bureau’s Public Information Officer; and she took emerging community policing stories directly to the media in press releases and bulletins. Finally, Braaten sought to increase the Bureau’s visibility in City Council by issuing regular, timely reports about the progress of community policing, in addition to the usual annual reports.

The PPB also took the community policing case to audiences outside of the city itself, notably by organizing regional and national conferences about major issues in policing. In part, this work in the professional community simply helped build stronger ties to national figures from who the Bureau could (and did) learn. But it also represented a conscious attempt to institutionalize community policing nationally; as Braaten explains:

Portland’s growing national stature was a source of pride in the Bureau, but it also created a sense of obligation and urgency, as well as an opportunity. If there were signs of trouble in national circles, Portland had reason to be worried: It might be hard to sustain a local effort if the national image of community policing waned. But because of its visibility, the Bureau did not have to stand by idly.

The Chief’s Forum
On the local front, one Bureau effort where Braaten took a leading role is a particularly important example of the way the Bureau sought to gain credibility with the general public: The development of a policy-level advisory committee called the Chief’s Forum, consisting of representatives from both the Bureau and the community at large. As Braaten explains it, the germ of the idea emerged during Chief Walker’s tenure, but the Forum did not take shape until the month that Potter took office: “The name Chief’s Forum had cropped up somewhere in the summer of 1990,” she remembers. “But the way that it was envisioned at that time was more of a very informal kind of a kitchen cabinet. ‘I will call in some sort of business leaders in the community and meet with them periodically and those will be my advisors.’” Braaten was skeptical of that model, and she raised her concerns with Potter, who she worked under at the time in the Community Policing Division: “He and I talked and I said, ‘I think that if they want to do that they should call it a different name because when you use the word Forum it conveys a different [meaning].’”

The conversation apparently stuck in Potter’s mind, for as soon he was sworn in as Chief (on November 19, 1990), he immediately directed Braaten to get the Chief’s Forum running:

In writing the concept paper, Braaten tried to address a number of concerns that were surfacing about the idea at the time. On the police side, some Bureau members expressed concerns that the Forum would be a sort of citizen review board that micromanaged the Bureau and took an exclusively critical posture. On the community side, concerns were raised that the Forum might just be a “rubber stamp” for the Chief’s agenda; and some worried that the Forum would usurp the work of existing committees. Finally, Braaten and Potter themselves worried about the caliber of participation: How could they ensure that members would take the assignment seriously and have clout in the communities they represented?

The core of the idea, which would hopefully address all of these concerns, was to have a Forum made up of diverse interests—including both the community and the police—in which each group got to select its own membership. Braaten explains that the Chief put police on the Forum in order to meet their concerns about creating an entirely critical and uninformed civilian review board; police, she argues, are able to raise issues like officer safety that citizens might not think of. To deal with the opposite concern, that the Forum would be a rubber stamp for police projects, the PPB gave up control over the Forum’s membership. Specifically, Braaten’s paper outlined nine “areas of interest” that would be represented (including groups like “neighborhoods,” “business,” and “community”), and it designated a particular body or individual with the power to appoint the representatives for each area. (For example, “community” representatives were appointed by City Council members, and neighborhood representatives were appointed by ONA’s officially-recognized coalition offices.) Since the Bureau had no control over who served on the Forum, it could not dictate what position the Forum would take on any particular issue. Moreover, the Forum itself could vote to expand its membership to include new groups (for example, it did this for the elderly when that community raised concerns that it was not represented.)

Finally, Braaten tried to ensure a committed and powerful membership by setting a tone with the initial appointments. The Citizen’s Crime Commission, which appointed the two business representatives, helped accomplish this goal when it announced its first appointment as Fred Stickel, publisher of the Oregonian and a well-known figure in Portland’s public life. Braaten made sure other appointment-makers knew about the CCC’s choice:

That is not to say that the Forum was stacked with pro-police partisans. For example, Mayor Clark’s initial appointment was Richard Brown, co-chair of the Black United Front, and someone who had been a strong critic of the police. Though today Brown works closely with the PPB on many fronts, he candidly admits to having a different perspective in years past—indeed, to being one of the many people in Portland who didn’t think the police “do anything right”:

In any case, it was hard to argue that the Forum was “stacked” with police partisans with members like Brown, who argued on behalf of communities that felt particularly slighted by them.

In its early years the 22-member Forum had a full agenda, since the transition forced the Bureau to rethink many long-standing policies. Beginning with the budget issues for which Potter had rushed its formation, the Forum considered things like hiring, use of force, and the Bureau’s drug enforcement policy. Though Forum input was non-binding, it was reportedly taken very seriously. For example, when the PPB considered revising its drug policy, Potter consulted with the Forum, and its members insisted that the policy explicitly state that police should pay attention to neighborhood-level dealing; while the Drug unit had traditionally emphasized mid- to high-level dealers, most Forum members felt that low-level dealing had the most direct impact on quality-of-life. With respect to hiring, Assistant Chief Bruce Prunk maintains that he took Forum input very seriously: “We’re not going to make [a] policy decision, obviously, if there’s a lot of public resistance to it,” he explains. In any case, a year into its operation, outside observers felt that the forum did have clout; For example, City Councilor Mike Lindberg maintained, “It’s clear that’s where the action is, that’s where the power is. [Its recommendations] carry a lot of weight.”38

Apart from the benefit of a fresh perspective, the PPB has hoped to gain at least two things from the Forum. The first was a set of new links between the Bureau and Portland’s many communities. Braaten gives the example of a precinct Commander who faced a problem involving the sexual minorities community: “The nice thing is that the Commander could look at the Chief's Forum roster [which includes a representative from the sexual minorities community] and say, ‘I need to start getting involved with this community so we can do some problem solving . . . And I know who to contact now. It is not just an unknown community to me.’” Thus the Forum provided direct ties to community leaders, who could in turn help the PPB gain access to many different social circles in the city.

But the core way the PPB has hoped to benefit from the Forum is the generation of legitimacy: By incorporating independent community input into its highest-level policy decisions, and simply by opening up decisionmaking to public eyes, the Bureau has tried to improve its image in the public eye. Braaten maintains:

Braaten recalls one example when the Forum was able to defuse a potentially explosive pair of events:

Reporters from the Oregonian and other local media outlets attend most Forum meetings (which are open to the public), so such discussions get relayed throughout Portland. In any case, by providing a regular communication link between the Bureau and various segments of the Portland community, the PPB could respond to crises like this one immediately, hopefully putting a potentially damaging incident in perspective.

Internal Support
In any case, throughout this initial period, Tom Potter in particular—both before and after he became Chief—pushed many efforts to build outside support for community policing. The effort was so substantial that by the time he retired, even Potter’s critics admitted that he had gained “wide community support”—something that was “a tremendous accomplishment.”39 The effort paid off not just in terms of the abstract goals of building legitimacy and networks, and institutionalizing the commitment to change. More concretely, it helped get crucial support from the outside groups that controlled needed resources. Budgetary resources like Operation Jumpstart were part of the story. But equally important were the innumerable miscellaneous actions that outside groups took to support PPB efforts—things like the multiple city ordinances that supported problem-solving work (such as the “Drug Free Zones” described below); the concrete, project-level cooperation that police would need from the Bureau of Buildings and other agency partners; and the public support elected officials and community leaders provided the Bureau when its community policing efforts came under attack. In all of these ways, the effort to build outside support showed tangible results.

But building support for community policing inside the organization proved to be a challenge for several reasons. There were the usual sources of resistance: The cultural objection from officers that “I wasn’t hired to be a social worker”; the complaints that there wasn’t enough time and there weren’t enough resources; and the argument that the new style might be good for the community, but that it didn’t help the officers themselves. But in Portland, community policing also faced resistance because it became tied up with the issue of gay rights—a cause that some PPB officers rejected. In particular, Chief Potter marched in a gay rights parade and appeared on a gay cable access show early on in his tenure as chief, in order to show support for the sexual minorities community. These stands did not hurt the Chief’s popularity much in the community at large (except with the conservative Oregon Citizen’s Alliance), and many inside the Bureau supported Potter as well. But there was a sizable group in the PPB who resented his stands on gay rights. Consequently, Potter’s own ability to build support for community policing was partially undermined. So although he personally tried to build support for community policing inside the Bureau—for example, he would deliver the message directly to the rank-and-file by attending precinct roll calls—, he lacked credibility with part of his audience for reasons unrelated to the message.
Whatever the underlying causes, resistance was severe in the early days of community policing. Officer Thomas Peavey encountered it first hand as he helped administer the Bureau’s first round of employee surveys, while assigned to the PPB Planning and Support Division:

Bureau management and others committed to community policing faced an unmistakable need to build support for the idea among the rank-and-file. They confronted a clear question: What will it take to get street officers to buy in to the vision that had been expressed in the transition plan?

Two dominant strategies quickly emerged: Publicizing examples of success, and “alignment through involvement”—essentially forcing resistant officers to get involved in hands-on projects and hopefully converting them to the cause in the process. There were other tactics for building internal support, to be sure: Potter’s rounds to roll call, the department’s new internal newsletter, participatory planning, training, and so on. But as high-level managers and others talk about how the PPB spread the new vision through its ranks, these two strategies stand out prominently.

Publicizing Success
Asked how the Community Policing Support unit he worked in tried to build internal commitment to the plan’s ideas, Assistant Chief Williams echoes the sentiments of many in the Bureau: “You have to pay tremendous attention for those things that are in that direction [i.e., community policing]. And then reinforce them by complimenting, nurturing, those kinds of things. And then celebrate those things, publicize them with commendations. Anything in any way you can.” Managers throughout the Bureau, particularly precinct commanders, used this strategy on a daily basis, providing informal encouragement to officers and advertising their successes to others who were less committed to the new style of policing. But Williams explains that the Bureau also seized on the existing commendation system, which brought the Bureau and the community together every six months to recognize individual officers. In the past this system had mostly been used to recognize the acts of valor and heroism that most police departments emphasize (and which Portland still does recognize). But under Potter, these events were increasingly used to recognize and advertise good community policing work. Many in the Bureau report making a particular effort to identify “officers that [were] well-respected by other officers,” as one explained the logic. “We wanted to get people with some credibility.”

For example, early on in the community policing program, the PPB commended one officer on a number of occasions, and he quickly became a local celebrity; ONA’s Sharon McCormack explains how the associated publicity for community policing helped spread it through the department:

In effect, the award ceremonies and less formal commendations sought to drill in one basic message: Community policing gets results, and officers whose work you respect are doing it. Repeated exposure, top managers felt, would diffuse that message throughout the ranks and gradually wear down resistance.

All of this was reinforced by changing personnel policies that governed more tangible rewards—particularly promotions. In this realm, Chief Potter, and Chief Moose after him, were able to dip into some unused flexibility in Oregon’s civil service system. All candidates for promotion in the PPB take a civil service test, and the Bureau had traditionally chosen the top scorer for the job. But though no Chief in recent memory had ever done it, the rules actually allowed him or her to promote any of the top five scorers (a provision known as the “Rule of Five”). Moose explains that he and Potter seized on this flexibility to help get buy-in to community policing: “Tom [Potter] went to great pains, and I've gone to great pains, [to make it clear] that if you're not doing community policing, if you're not committed to the philosophy, if you haven't demonstrated it in your day to day work, then your name could come up number one on a promotion list, and it doesn't matter. If number five has been living the goals and the philosophy of the organization, then we're promoting number five.” There was great resistance to this idea in the early years, and many doubted that the administration would actually follow it through. But PPB management stuck to its policy, beginning with Moose himself, who did not top the civil service test but who Potter promoted anyhow, on the grounds that Moose had shown extraordinary commitment to and innovation in community policing. Moose explains that “you take a lot of hits” for going against tradition that way, but that it was crucial during the transition because it helped to convince officers that the Bureau was serious about community policing.

Alignment through Involvement
Officer Peavey’s own explanation for the hostility he faced was that these officers had not had personal experience with community policing. “They’re unwilling to buy the results unless they have the individual experience,” he explains. “So if you're going to have success in community policing, everybody has to become involved in a problem solving process of some type or another.” Peavey himself had that experience when he participated in Operation Target under then-Commander Moose at North Precinct.