News The Portland City Council is set to consider next Wednesday whether to pay $170,000 to a former rookie cop who claims she faced retaliation by the police bureau after a trainer complained about her nipples. As previously reported in WW, Nicole Whitley filed suit against the city and the Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Training in 2007. The department runs the Oregon Public Safety ...   More

News The Multnomah County District Attorney's Office just announced that a grand jury today declined to indict Portland Police Officer Jason Walters in the March 22 fatal shooting of Jackie Collins. No great surprise, given that a Portland cop hasn't been indicted in recent memory for on-duty use of force. Nevertheless, here's the news release: Early this afternoon the Multnomah County Grand Jury ...   More

News It's Jason Walters — the officer who fatally shot 58-year-old Jackie Collins in the Hoyt Arboretum on March 22. Detective Mary Wheat, a police spokeswoman, says Walters was named officer of the month in recognition of service to the residents of Southwest Portland. The award was given before Walters shot and killed Collins, who police say was approaching Walters at close range with a small ...   More

News ...   More

News With all eyes this week on Monday's fatal Portland police shooting of Jackie Collins at Hoyt Arboretum, we wanted to check on cops' progress probing another recent police shooting — the Jan. 29 death of Aaron Campbell (photo above). Bottom line: the internal investigation into Campbell's death is moving at near-light speed compared with the three-plus years it took police to reach findings ...   More

News The city Human Rights Commission on Thursday heard three cops sound off on their concerns about City Hall's efforts to improve police oversight. "We have an emergency situation going on in our relations with the community," Assistant Chief Brian Martinek told the commission. "We agree with that. But we aren't sure if this ordinance is the way to address that problem." As reported last week, ...   More

News Commissioners Amanda Fritz and Dan Saltzman will present a new report, possibly as soon as April 7, outlining proposed changes to Portland Police Bureau policy on responding to incidents with mentally ill Portlanders. The work of drafting the recommendations, which will include a pilot program for pairing cops with social workers on service calls that involve people in mental-health crisis, predates ...   More

News Three days after police fatally shot a man in the Hoyt Arboretum, there are signs — literally — that tension between cops and citizens continues to build. This is the top half of a poster found last night pasted to a Portland Tribune newspaper box on Southeast Division Street. Here's the bottom half of the poster, including references to the fatal shooting of Aaron Campbell and ...   More

News Portland Police Chief Rosie Sizer has reversed course and says the police bureau will accept a citizen panel's findings that the officer who fatally shot Aaron Campbell wrongly fired his Taser in an earlier case. In a brief letter (PDF) sent Tuesday to the city's Independent Police Review Division, Sizer says the bureau accepts three findings by the citizen committee. Among the three findings ...   More

News Battered by public outcry over two shooting deaths this year, Portland police are characterizing a recent call as a potentially violent encounter that cops successfully defused. The case, as described in a police news release Saturday, is markedly similar to the circumstances when the cops fatally shot Aaron Campbell on Jan. 29. Campbell was reported armed and suicidal, and possibly a danger ...   More