Ore. Police Chief Vows to Raise Staffing to Level not Seen in over 2 Decades

Portland Police Chief Bob Day is pledging to bring the police force to a staffing level that it hasn’t seen in more than two decades.

Specifically, Day has requested city funding for 1,037 officers, up from the current 881, based on calculations in an internal analysis that don’t take into account expected budget cuts at the city.

“It is time to build PPB to an appropriate size and create a healthy agency where its members have time to connect with the community and focus on effective crime reduction strategies,” Day wrote in a post on X on Tuesday.

Day’s announcement comes amid a heightened election season in which Portland voters will choose a new mayor and a slate of city commissioners under a new form of government. Many candidates have voiced support for increasing the size of the Police Bureau, but mayoral candidate Rene Gonzalez, who is also a city commissioner, has largely stood alone in giving specifics. At a Portland Metro Chamber-sponsored debate Sept. 12, he said the bureau should employ at least 1,000 officers and perhaps as many as 1,200.

“When you don’t have enough police, you’re doing triage and you got to pick your battles, and it’s totally unsatisfactory for our community,” Gonzalez said in an Oct. 1 interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive. “As a system and as a community, we have to continue to invest in ways and lead in ways that retain good people in law enforcement.”

The closest the Police Bureau has come to 1,000 officers was in 2002 when it had 995. The number has fluctuated since then but has gone down recently, from 934 officers in 2020 to 793 in 2021, due to temporary budget cuts that were part of a police reform package and a wave of retirements and resignations following mass demonstrations against police brutality. Hiring also grounded to a halt then as the bureau worked to rebuild its recruitment program.

That number has more or less stayed the same since then. Right now, the bureau has a total of 795 sworn officers of different ranks, with 86 vacancies, out of 881 positions allocated in the city budget. Day has said that retirements, a tough recruiting environment and a long training period for new officers has hindered their ability to fill vacancies quickly. It can take as long as 18 months to train new members, and the bureau has rehired retired officers in some cases to fill staffing gaps.

The problem isn’t unique to Portland. Police departments across the country point to a variety of factors to explain low recruitment levels. Some job seekers want better work-life balance. The public perception of police and challenges in the hiring process also contribute to the problem, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Because of staffing gaps, the Portland Police Bureau has had to make decisions about where to deploy resources as the city experienced a record-breaking surge in homicides. It has disbanded its property crimes unit and disbanded and then reestablished both its cold case unit and its traffic unit.

The Police Bureau in recent years has relied on overtime to fill patrol shifts. In the analysis Day released Tuesday, it noted that more officers can help reduce reliance on overtime, improve response times and increase the ability for officers to follow-up on cases. The city’s budget office has said overtime has routinely pushed personnel spending over budget.

The authorized sworn number in the analysis was calculated by dividing Portland’s population of roughly 650,000 by 1,000 and multiplying it by the average number of officers per 1,000 for comparable cities. The analysis used Seattle, Denver, Sacramento, Albuquerque, Fresno, Mesa and Oakland for comparison.

The analysis noted that Portland in 2023 had the lowest ratio of officers to 1,000 people among those cities at 1.23. Denver had the highest at 2.1.

Day has said, however, that next year he expects the bureau will increase its numbers, and he said he does not expect to see the level of retirements that have occurred in recent years. He said he believes the bureau can get close to 1,000 officers by the end of 2026.

“That will give us flexibility to maybe expand some of these units,” Day said in an Oct. 3 interview. “I’d like to see growth in our traffic division, growth in our investigations and our ability around case clearance.”

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