City Council Entrance Interview: Eli Arnold

Seeks to represent: District 4 (westside)

Job: Portland Police Bureau officer working in the Central Bike Squad and Neighborhood Response Team

Fun fact: Arnold’s first helicopter ride was for flight training to become a U.S. Army Blackhawk pilot.

Eli Arnold wanted peace. He had spent 17 years in the Army as a human intelligence team leader to a helicopter pilot, serving in Afghanistan to Germany.

“I was tired of endless war on the horizon. I wanted to do something constructive,” he tells WW. “I wanted deep connections for myself and my kids.”

So, perhaps counterintuitively, Arnold became a cop patrolling downtown Portland in 2017. He’s been assigned to the Portland Police Bureau’s Central Bike Squad now for almost three years. He is also a part of the Enhanced Crisis Intervention Team, a specialty that only takes volunteers and requires officers to do additional mental health-related training.

Being a police officer in Portland carries stigma, which Arnold understands.

“People assume that police want to punish people,” Arnold says. “I’ve had a thousand conversations with custodies in the back of the police car, and I tell them that today is done, but I genuinely hope they wake up tomorrow and choose something better for themself.”

Arnold says he’s running for City Council because “Portland is a great city, but our leaders have bungled every major crisis we’ve faced in the last five years.”

He’s received $40,000 in matching funds from the Small Donors Election program. In total, his campaign has raised just over $70,000. He’s received contributions from Kristen Snowden, chief deputy district attorney for Multnomah County; Homer Williams, the developer behind the Pearl and South Waterfront districts; and a number of downtown developers.

He’s snagged endorsements from the Portland police and firefighters’ unions.

We talked to Arnold about why he’s running for City Council. His responses have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

WW: What are your top three priorities if elected?

Eli Arnold: First priority is ending street camping. We’ve got a missing step in our response, and that’s triage. If we had a natural disaster tomorrow, we wouldn’t leave thousands of hurt people on the streets. We need emergency shelters or designated camping locations.

My next priority is public safety. We need to increase the number of police officers per capita so we can regain the ability to engage in proactive community policing. Portland Fire and the Bureau of Emergency Communications both have staffing issues that need to be addressed, and we need to keep up the pressure on the county to resolve the ambulance shortage.

My third priority is livability. We need to make Portland a more desirable place to live, work or own a business. So we live in a high-tax city, but it doesn’t feel like we’re getting good returns right now.

What aspects of the city’s current approach to drug use and overdose deaths do you support and what would you change?

Fentanyl is the focus here. It comes down to consequences and alternatives. I’ve worked to identify and arrest dozens of fentanyl dealers. And I can tell you, we need help from the Multnomah County district attorney to remove them more effectively. They come right back to the street because there’s no real expectation of consequences. And then we also need a sobering center and a real deflection program.

And on the back end, we need greater drug treatment capacity. If somebody says they’re ready to get clean, we ought to be able to whisk them away to treatment.

Do you support the city staying in the Joint Office of Homeless Services? What’s your plan to address homelessness?

I am very skeptical of the Joint Office. We’re nine years into the declared emergency and we’ve never had more people sleeping on the street. Just recently, they announced that they needed three years to develop software to start tracking who’s homeless in the city by name, which is just unacceptable. You could do it with an Excel spreadsheet.

I’m fine with pulling out of the Joint Office. And I think the city needs to focus on that upfront triage response. Set up some designated camping sites, register people by name, and then we can work on the stage two and stage three programs.

Would you change the Portland Clean Energy Fund and, if so, how?

I voted for PCEF. It’s collecting seven times more than was projected. So I would move the rest to plug the city’s budget holes.

Which current City Council member do you and your policies most align with? Please specify just one.

I’d say Rene Gonzalez. Volunteering on his campaign was my first experience with Portland politics. He was kind enough to sit down with me and talk through what running for council would mean for my family.

Is the city doing enough to bring back downtown and economic development? If not, what should it be doing that it’s not?

We’ve got to end the street camping and all the chaos that comes along with it. We gotta calm down with the sort of experimental taxes. We also need to make permitting as fast and predictable as possible. Then we can start looking at really improving public and cultural spaces.

How do you want police to respond to the riots in November if Trump wins?

I took my daughters to the Women’s March in 2016—there’s a difference between protesters and vandals. I think the city can get ahead of this kind of thing by working with protest leaders to help set clear expectations and help them avoid getting their message hijacked by outsiders and vandals.

We need the district attorney on board. We need predictable consequences for criminal behavior.

How do you plan to win this election?

I intend to keep talking to people in sort of an unvarnished way, about what all of this looks like, up close, not just driving by on the highway.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Arnold received donations from the Democratic Party of Oregon.The reported transaction was a finance expenditure, not a donation, to a political action committee affiliated with the DPO. WW regrets the error.

See the other Portland City Council Candidates here!