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Problem: Gun homicides continue to rise.
Idea: Smother likely shooters with attention.
In 2012, Oakland, a city beset by shootings, tried an experiment. With the help of outside consultants, police identified 400 people responsible for most of the city’s homicides—mainly members of local gangs.
The city set up meetings with them, pushing likely shooters into social service programs and offering life coaches.
It worked. Oakland murder rate plummeted, and the city has been held up as a model of how targeted interventions can have a huge impact on crime. The nonprofit consulting firm that worked with Oakland, the California Partnership for Safe Communities, began pitching its services to other cities, including Portland.
Mayor Ted Wheeler has adopted some of the nonprofit’s ideas in Safer Summer PDX, his anti-gun violence program, which has handed ex-gang leaders consulting contracts to convince young men not to follow their path—and keep tabs on those who do.
So far, the results haven’t been encouraging. Portland homicides surpassed last year’s record. Oakland, too, has had a resurgence of shootings.
Not because the idea of targeting likely shooters for intervention was flawed, but because Oakland didn’t stick with it. The San Francisco Chronicle found that as homicides surged in Oakland, pandemic restrictions shuttered many of the city’s new anti-violence programs.
Portland has seen the same pattern. When homicides dropped in Portland and across the country in the late ‘90s, experts pointed to similar new policing methods as one of the reasons.
David Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, helped Portland implement those reforms more than two decades ago. “Portland had those same fundamentals on the ground when they did their own version of what was then called Operation Ceasefire—they got enormous violence reductions, and they let it fall apart,” he says.
Portland might be making the same mistake again. Nike Greene left her job as head of Portland’s Office of Youth Violence Prevention in November. Her resignation letter gave little reason for her decision, but emails obtained by WW show that Greene expressed frustration in September that the city had handed off oversight of ex-gang leaders’ contracts to her, “expecting our office to pick up the pieces with very little support.”
The internal frictions are concerning, given that the city has barely started implementing Greene’s plan.
Before she left, Greene had taken a contingent of city officials to Oakland to learn what worked—and laid out a road map for implementing the city’s “cease-fire” program here in Portland. She called it the “PDX Blueprint,” a “focused deterrence model” that encourages cooperation between the Police Bureau and city officials to aim services toward gang members and people likely to engage in violence.
Her ideas have the support of the cops. “It is building relationships within your community and getting to know people and holding people accountable in a way that is benevolent,” explains Sgt. Aaron Schmautz, who heads the police union.
The extent to which Wheeler will embrace it remains to be seen. Sgt. Ken Duilio of the Police Bureau warned in an email to Mike Myers, head of Portland’s Community Safety Division, that the plan “needs to be the Mayor’s baby.”
Lisa Freeman, a manager in the division, wrote in an earlier email to Greene regarding the contracts, “I am committed to get you whatever you need to make this work.” A spokesperson tells WW the city is working on a “longer-term plan for gun violence” and that more details will be announced in the next few weeks.