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What happens to untrustworthy cops?
And who gets to decide who is and who isn’t a trustworthy cop? And why would we, as citizens of Portland, want to keep “untrustworthy” police officers in their positions, which across the board require a staggering amount of public trust in the first place? How can we, as citizens, hold our police force accountable for officers we personally know to be questionable (if not downright unhinged) when our civilian oversight seems less effective than frayed duct tape on a speeding car hood?
These are the questions I was left with after reading The Odd Squad, my guest Lucas Manfield’s cover story for this week’s paper.
Lucas and I will discuss, dissect and disseminate a document called the Brady list, a Supreme Court-ordered list of police that district attorneys keep in order to classify cops who can no longer be trusted to testify. The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office claims it doesn’t keep such a list, but shared something instead called a Potential Impeachment Disclosure index, and the criteria with which cops land on this list is…eccentric?