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The ACLU of Oregon is going toe-to-toe with the union that represents Portland police officers over a pair of ballot initiatives filed last month that aim to neutralize a future police oversight body and bolster the city’s officer ranks.
For the second time in a week, the American Civil Liberties Union chapter filed a challenge today in Multnomah County Circuit Court to a police union-backed ballot initiative. The ballot initiative in question seeks to fundamentally alter the powers and function of a police oversight body that’s supposed to begin work next year. Just last week, the ACLU of Oregon filed a similar court challenge to another police union-backed initiative that seeks, chiefly, to increase the city’s police officer numbers.
The ACLU filed its challenge on behalf of the Rev. Dr. LeRoy Haynes Jr., a pastor at the Allen Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and chair of the Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for Justice and Police Reform.
The future oversight board the Portland Police Association seeks to alter is the product of a fall 2020 ballot measure approved by 82% of Portland voters during the social unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd. In its original iteration, the board would contain 33 members, bars members of law enforcement and family of law enforcement from participating, and would have the powers to investigate and penalize misconduct by Portland Police Bureau officers.
If placed on the November ballot and passed by voters, the police union’s initiative would render the future oversight body unrecognizable. It would give the power of officer discipline to the chief of police and turn the body into a police recruitment and retention workgroup. That’s a stark departure from what voters envisioned in 2020 as a community-driven accountability body that acts independently of the police bureau.
The ACLU of Oregon is asking that a Multnomah County judge rule the police union’s ballot initiative does not comply with Oregon law. Among the ACLU’s arguments: that the ballot title is misleading, inaccurately characterizing an undercutting of the oversight body as simply a broadening of duties.
“Voters should not have to read between the lines to figure out the major effect of the Initiative, which collectively convert the board from a fully independent and empowered community police oversight bureau to an advisory committee,” the filing reads. “This Court is the sole recourse for the public electorate to correct the harmful and misleading ballot title and place accurate information about the Initiative and its major effects before the voters.”
The ACLU in its filing says the initiative backers grossly mischaracterized just how much this would alter the police oversight body: “All portions of the ballot title are insufficient or unfair because fail to inform the voters about, or materially downplay, the significant repeals of existing Board authority that the Initiative would effectuate.”
Aaron Schmautz, president of the PPA, says the union’s twin ballot initiatives would “move us forward together.”
“Portlanders are begging for a public safety system that is accountable, responsive, and functional,” Schmautz says. “It is remarkable that the ACLU is afraid of people using their democratic rights to express their views.”