“[An] analysis of Portland Police Bureau data, which covers roughly the past two and a half years,” reported Willamette Week on Wednesday, “shows that … [Officer Christopher] Humphreys, a seven-year veteran, has used force more often than almost all of the other the 785 officers in the database.”
That data existed, the paper explained, because “[a] few years ago, the bureau started requiring that police officers file a report every time they used physical force against a suspect”.
In fact, the notion that officers should file these reports was one of the 89 recommendations by the Police Assessment Resource Center (PARC), hired by the City in 2002 and whose report was issued in the months following the officer-involved shooting death of Kendra James, which certainly increased public attention to, and support for, the recommendations.
That recommendation was part of pair of recommendations which together said that “the PPB should require officers to report in writing each instance in which they draw and point a firearm at another” and that “[t]he PPB should require its officers to record their use of force on a separate Use of Force Report”.
At the time, the president of the eponymous Robert King’s House of Wingnuttery could be heard complaining about the fear that (in the words of one newspaper) “the extra report-writing will inhibit police from using … force when necessary and put them and others at harm.”
We now have a clear example, thanks to Willamette Week, of why this particular Police Assessment Resource Center recommendation was considered so important. And it was implemented to some degree because of Kendra James’ death, or at least, to some degree, in her name.
Thanks to Willamette Week, we also now know just what it really was Robert King was so afraid of.
The truth.
