The city of Portland will soon have a new police oversight program that replaces the existing Independent Police Review (IPR). But what will happen to the 14 workers who now staff IPR isn’t clear.
Bargaining between AFSCME Local 189 and the City of Portland over their future employment has hit a wall.
On Aug. 19, the 11 unionized IPR workers voted unanimously to authorize a strike. The unit declared impasse and submitted their final offer to the Oregon Employment Relations Board on Sept. 12. They could go on a strike as soon as mid-October.
Portland voters approved a ballot measure in 2020 that replaces the IPR program with a new Office of Community-based Police Accountability.
Voters approved plans to create an entirely new oversight system, not just expand the authority of the IPR. But union leaders say the city can’t lay off workers just to rehire for essentially the same positions.
“They seem to think that they can change the name on the door, and somehow the people behind it don’t work here anymore,” Local 189 President Rob Martineau told the crowd at a Sept. 17 practice picket. AFSCME Local 189 represents around 1,100 city employees under three contracts, including the IPR unit.
IPR workers want their next union contract to ensure that they’re offered equivalent jobs in the new oversight system.
The city’s latest offer, submitted Sept. 25, would guarantee IPR workers will get interviews for positions in the new oversight system and “find or create” equivalent positions with the city for workers who don’t get hired by the new system. But it also says that after the director of the new oversight system is hired, the city and union can reopen bargaining on potential direct appointments to positions in the new system.
City spokesperson Alison Perkins said the city offered the re-opener because city code for the new oversight system says the director will appoint staff. “Reopening allows the City to bring the Director appropriately into the conversation once that position is in place,” Perkins said.
Gayla Jennings, Local 189 chapter chair for the unit, said it wasn’t clear how the city would find sustainable equivalent positions in other departments when the city is forecasting tight budgets in the coming years. (The city administrator recently announced a hiring freeze running from Oct. 1 through next June.) For investigators in particular, there isn’t a similar position elsewhere in the city, Jennings said.
At the practice picket, Jennings said IPR workers have remained committed to their work through years of unfair attacks on their work, “all the while feeling that our credibility has been unfairly damaged (and) enduring mistreatment, disparagement and unwarranted, personal and baseless attacks.”
A prominent criticism of IPR has been that the program does not have enough authority and can’t impose discipline. That’s true, Jennings said, but she noted that former leaders of IPR and the auditor’s office (which housed IPR until 2022) had asked city council for more authority long before the 2020 ballot measure that created the new system.
Like its predecessor, the new Office of Community-based Police Accountability will investigate complaints filed against police officers. But the Community Board for Police Accountability, the board that will hear those investigations, will have the power to discipline police officers, not just make recommendations as in the current system. The new system will have a bigger budget, equal to at least 5% of the police bureau’s budget. It will also investigate in-custody deaths and uses of deadly force, which IPR does not directly investigate.
Portland City Council appointed board members for the Community Board for Police Accountability in June, but background checks and training are still ongoing as of September. Once in place, the board will lead recruitment for a program director, then other staff will be hired.
