Portland Police Shootings Pile Up

When Mayor Sam Adams took over management of the Police Bureau last May, we wrote the task has potential political risks but also potential political rewards if the "mayor demonstrates to Portlanders that he can manage the bureau most fraught with potential peril."

The mayor said then that "This is not like any other assignment. There'll be bumps along the way, I'm sure.”

At the midway point of Adams' four-year term, the past couple of weeks have produced more than bumps, four shootings to be exact. In order ...

1) On Sunday afternoon, Jan. 2 police officers in southeast Portland fatally shot a 60-year-old man they said was threatening to kill a security officer and refusing to leave. The man was in a nearby closed-down car wash when police say he emerged from a room displaying a large knife. They sayhe refused commands to drop the knife, and that they deployed a Taser on him when he came toward them. They then shot him with handguns when the Tasers were ineffective. Investigators say the man, whose identify was not immediately released, threatened two days earlier to kill the same security officer who called 9-1-1 on Sunday.

2) That fatal police shooting followed an incident in the early morning of Jan. 1 in which an officer responding to the fatal shooting of Club 915 bouncer Ruben Mata, 32, discharged his firearm "In the course of interacting with persons associated with the shooting," according to police. Nobody was struck by that shot outside the downtown club. And police have arrested Kevin Charles Moffett, 31, in the slaying of Mata.

3) The two weekend incidents came in the wake of Portland police wounding 34-year-old Marcus Lagozzino with gunshots in Southwest Portland on Dec. 27 after he assaulted his parents and threatened police with a machete.

4) And on Dec. 17, police fatally shot 46-year-old Darryel Dwayne Ferguson outside an east Portland apartment after officers saw him wield a replica gun. Last week, a Multnomah County grand jury cleared the officers of any wrongdoing, concluding the shooting was justified.

(Photo above courtesy of KATU)