Public safety

For a restaurant owner in Cully, public safety means people camping outside her door and breaking into cars. For a mother in Northeast Portland, it means whether her kids are safe walking to school. The county spends more than $350 million a year on the justice system. I spent over a decade inside it.

What the county is responsible for

The county's role in public safety is different from the city's. The city runs the police department. The county runs the justice system: the Department of Community Justice, which handles parole, probation, and juvenile justice; the two county jails; the District Attorney's office; and the Sheriff's Office. It also manages emergency preparedness and funds the behavioral health services connected to public safety.

The FY 2027 proposed budget cuts the District Attorney's office by 5%, roughly $3.5 million and 18 positions. The DA has called it the largest reduction in the office's history. Jail capacity is maintained at 1,130 beds. Crime rates have declined, but the systems producing those results are being asked to do more with less.

What I've seen

I managed domestic violence, DUI, parole, probation, and sex offender caseloads in the Department of Community Justice. The crimes were serious. Murder, manslaughter, assault, rape, theft. Probation officers carried heavy caseloads and dealt with people in crisis every day. The job was managing people coming out of jail and prison and trying to keep them from going back. After about a decade, I couldn't do it anymore. I moved to the Health Department.

The system leaned punitive. There were people inside it who believed in rehabilitation, but the structure was built around compliance and consequences. Whether someone actually reintegrated after leaving was harder to measure, and we didn't track it very well. What I did see was that the juvenile side showed more results than the adult side.

A few years ago, I conducted a safety survey in the Cully neighborhood. I'd worked on community safety in the district with police officers at the Northeast Precinct. We asked residents directly: what makes you feel safe? People talked about drug activities happening yards from where they lived, about needing cameras, about youth violence and car break-ins and assaults where nobody responded. The common thread was that they wanted someone paying attention to their neighborhood.

That survey led to Bienestar Youth Services, a program I created with no directive and no budget. I fund it by redirecting resources from my existing programs and recruiting volunteers. We work with about 50 kids, ages 7 to 18, in Cully and the surrounding areas, most of them first-generation Americans from immigrant communities. For the first time, we're seeing gang recruitment reach into these communities, something that didn't exist a generation ago.

The program costs a fraction of processing one juvenile through the justice system. Every kid who stays in school and stays out of trouble is one fewer person entering it.

Opportunities

Tracking whether people who leave the justice system actually reintegrate, find work, stay housed, stay out, should be standard. When it is, it shows the public whether the investment is working, and it shows the officers and case managers what their work is producing.

The Cully survey showed that residents know what their neighborhoods need: cameras, community safety networks, youth programs. Those investments are far less expensive than the justice system, and they keep people, especially young people, from entering it in the first place.

When the county doesn't have enough behavioral health professionals, police end up responding to mental health crises. That's not what they're trained for, and the outcomes are worse for everyone, the person in crisis and the officer.

Commissioners vote on the budget every year. That's where these changes start.