Skip to main content
Almost exactly a year after the Portland Police Bureau’s internal affairs division initiated the investigation, the city released the full internal affairs case file generated from its inquiry into the identities and motivations of the city employees who leaked confidential information from an incident report that falsely named Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty as the driver in a March 2021 hit-and-run crash.
The release follows last week’s news that Mayor Ted Wheeler fired Portland Police Officer Brian Hunzeker, the former Portland Police Association president who had resigned from the union last March, citing only “a serious, isolated mistake.”
The case file also contained the imposed discipline letters sent to two other Portland Police Bureau officers involved: Kerri Ottoman, who received a one-day suspension without pay, and Ken Le, who received a letter of reprimand Jan. 27.
Here are three takeaways from over 800 pages of records:
1. Seven PPB employees had accessed the initial CAD record for a “potentially illegitimate purpose.”
About a week after the fender bender, on March 12, 2021, internal affairs investigators identified 22 Police Bureau staff—sworn and non-sworn—who accessed the computer-aided dispatch record in the hours after the initial complaint. (The CAD, as it’s known, is the dispatch record logging system.)
Fifteen of those employees likely accessed the record as part of their official duties, according to a March 12 list generated by investigators. The remaining seven were suspected of accessing it for a “potentially illegitimate purpose.” Six of the seven are sworn officers, and one is an analyst in the bureau’s Behavioral Health Unit.
Ottoman viewed the CAD record twice, and Hunzeker viewed it three times, according to the records. (Investigators later determined the other five who accessed the CAD record did not violate bureau directives.)
The investigators did not include Le on this list, because he was one of the officers who conducted the initial investigation into the hit-and-run itself and compiled the police report. In other words, he had direct access to the information at hand as part of his official duties that night. Le was also one of two PPB officers who showed up at Hardesty’s home and knocked on her door in an attempt to get a statement from her in the early morning hours of March 4, according to his interview with investigators.
This finding also shows the city suspected Hunzeker’s involvement as early as March 12. Four days later, on March 16, the PPA announced his resignation as union president.
2. Hunzeker named two PPA members who tipped him off in the first place.
In a May 24 interview with internal affairs—his first of three—Hunzeker said he initially learned of the allegation against Hardesty around 7:45 am on March 4, when a member of his union sent him a text message.
“And the substance of the text?” internal affairs investigator Jon Rhodes asked.
Hunzeker responded: “Very simple. Rumor is, or something to the effect of, generic rumor is Commissioner Hardesty was involved—might have been, or was, involved in a hit-and-run.”
Then, Hunzeker told investigators, he asked another PPA member to send him the case number so he could confirm it. The union member did.
“And so that solidified my knowledge that the case actually occurred, or the call actually occurred,” Hunzeker said.
He named both of the PPA members during the interview. WW is withholding their names because the city never named them as possible witnesses in the case.
Then, at around 8:30 am, Hunzeker texted Maxine Bernstein, a reporter at The Oregonian, asking “if she had a moment to talk.” Shortly thereafter, the two spoke on the phone, Hunzeker said during the interview.
He also told investigators that, on March 4, he was at PPB’s Training Division to set up video equipment for contract negotiations between the city and the PPA, which took place over Zoom.
The union had set up shop at the Training Division temporarily “due to ongoing riots and them attempting to burn down our building during our negotiations,” Hunzeker said. From that location, using a PPB-owned computer, he accessed the CAD record at around 2 pm.
At 2:10 pm, he told investigators, he took a screenshot of the record using his PPA-issued cell phone and texted the photo to Bernstein.
“And so, I saw—and I’m a police officer reading this, and I’m trying to navigate through what the officer taking the call sees it. It lists Commissioner Hardesty as the suspect. Gives the car, body style, unknown plates,” Hunzeker said. “What I did, is I took my phone and I shrunk it and I took a picture of this section right here.”
3. Hunzeker was partly motivated by Hardesty’s criticism of police.
During the May 2021 interview, investigators pressed Hunzeker on his motivation for leaking to The Oregonian.
“So, I reached out to Maxine with many different reasons,” he said. “I don’t know if one supersedes the other.”
Hunzeker said the “underlying reason” for sharing the information was his “young, naïve inability to manage a large organization, as such, and I made a bad decision on information that I had.” He reiterated throughout the interview that he had been elected union president only four months earlier, in November 2020.
Investigators pressed him on the role Hardesty’s longtime criticism of PPB played in his decision to share the confidential information. He told them that her past comments had harmed PPA members.
“She was the leading person on the council to defund—a successful defunding of the Portland Police Bureau,” he said.
Hunzeker again pointed to his greenness as president.
“And so, when this information came out—Commissioner Hardesty has been extremely critical of our membership,” Hunzeker said. “I represent a membership that is trying to do the best they can with budget constraints. They’re trying to do the best they can with limited resources, short staffing. The membership that I represent has been under attack since June 2020.”
During his second interview, on June 18, 2021, Rhodes asked Hunzeker: Would you have tipped off The Oregonian if the hit-and-run allegation had named a different city commissioner than Hardesty?
“That’s a good question,” Hunzeker said. “I’m going to pause for just a moment to give you a clear answer.”
He said it would depend on whether the information would have a “negative or positive influence on my membership.”
Hunzeker continued, explaining that, in his role as PPA president, he had passed on information about a reported crime in which a civilian identified a public official as a suspect. But he also acknowledged that the union could have benefited if Hardesty was, in fact, the suspect in the hit-in-run.
“I believe that if this matter—I believe it was of public concern and if it were true, it would have an impact on the policy changes that that public official has advocated for, whether they were for or against the police in their specific capacity,” Hunzeker said. “I was never, as the Portland Police Association president, ever trying to target any one city official. It is an accurate assessment that as a public official her very vocal discord and dislike of the police has a negative effect on my membership and that her capacity as a public official, if this were true, this rumor were true, could potentially have less impact—negative impact—on my membership.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that seven PPB officers were suspected of accessing the CAD record for a “potentially illegitimate purpose.” The seven employees included six officers and one analyst with the bureau’s Behavioral Health Unit. WW regrets the error.