Policing in Portland: A Community Conversation

POLICING IN PORTLAND: A Community Conversation

March 8 and 9, 2024

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art 15 NE Hancock St. Portland, OR 97212 pica.org

POLICING IN PORTLAND: A Community Conversation

This symposium will bring together panels of local community leaders for discussions on the history of police violence and racist policing in Portland, ongoing attempts to hold police accountable and reform policing practices, and burgeoning efforts to radically reimagine public safety in our communities.

This symposium is part of Policing Justice, which is on view at PICA from February 23 – May 19, 2024.

Land Acknowledgment

PICA acknowledges that Portland is on the traditional homelands of the Multnomah, Oregon City Tumwater, Watlala, Wasco, Kathlamet, Cowlitz, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other Indigenous peoples both recorded and unrecorded. People from these lands were relocated to the Grand Ronde Reservation under the Kalapuya etc., 1855 ratified treaty (also known as the Willamette Valley Treaty) and are now part of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde. The Grand Ronde people maintain a connection to their ancestral homelands and continue their traditional cultural practices. Our region’s Indigenous community now includes people from over 380 Tribes, both local and distant. PICA respectfully offers this acknowledgment as a small step on a path towards recognition and repair, with the understanding that acknowledgment is not a substitute for action. To learn more about land acknowledgments, visit usdac.us.

KEYNOTE LECTURE BY ALEX VITALE

“Community Centered Public Safety: The Movement for a Police Free Future”

Even after the backlash against the call to “defund the police,” cities across the country are investing in a wide range of alternatives to policing that are showing strong results in improving public safety. Cities are hiring more school counselors, creating civilian crisis response teams, and building out community-based antiviolence initiatives. Tensions remain over the degree of community control, but there is now ample evidence to encourage more efforts in this direction in keeping with some of the core demands of the movement in 2020.

Alex S. Vitale is a Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He has spent the last 30 years writing about policing and consulting community-based movements, human and civil rights organizations, and governments internationally. Prof. Vitale is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and The End of Policing.

His academic writings on policing have appeared in Policing and Society, Police Practice and Research, Mobilization, and Contemporary Sociology. He is also a frequent essayist whose writings have been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Vice News, Fortune, and USA Today. He has also appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, PBS, Democracy Now, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

PANEL 1: “WHAT’S WRONG WITH POLICING IN PORTLAND?”

This conversation—among longtime advocates for policing reform and journalists reporting on policing—will explore Portland Police Bureau’s racism, violence, and other misconduct, both historically and during the 2020 uprisings, when thousands of people came together to protest those historic injustices, including PPB’s repeated killing of our most vulnerable citizens and over-policing our unhoused neighbors.

MODERATOR

Mac Smiff

Mac Smiff is a longtime journalist focused on Northwest culture for outlets such as The Oregonian, Portland Mercury, Vortex Music Magazine, and his own vehicle, We Out Here Magazine. Well known for holding police and government entities accountable, as well as his call to Defund The Police, Smiff’s social justice activism has been chronicled by The New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, The Intercept, NPR, Rolling Stone, and others.

A professional problem solver, his hobbies include gardening and raising children who understand basketball analogies.

Carissa Dez is a dedicated advocate for social justice and policing reform. With a background in investigative journalism and involvement in community organizing, Carissa would like to promote accountability, equity, and transparency in law enforcement practices. As a panelist, Carissa brings a wealth of experience and insights to the discussion, aiming to drive positive change and foster safer, more equitable communities for all.

Rian Dundon is a photographer in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of the books Protest City (2023), Fan (2015), and Changsha (2012) and the recipient of a 2020 Magnum Foundation Fellowship. Dundon is a contributing photographer at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. He teaches photography at Clark College in Vancouver, WA.

Jo Ann Hardesty is a veteran and civil rights leader whose compassionate vision brings Portland together. As the first Black woman elected to city council, Commissioner Hardesty

PANELISTS

Carissa Dez, Rian Dundon, Jo Ann Hardesty, Robert Mackey, and Dr. Juniper Sumonis

championed the Portland Street Response, relieving the burden on police to respond to mental health crises. She helped build the coalition that set the national standard for local climate action, and at the height of the George Floyd demonstrations, she crafted a police reform measure that 82% of voters approved. She is a former state representative serving North/Northeast Portland and former President of the Portland NAACP.

Robert Mackey is an investigative journalist who joined Forensic Architecture in 2023. Before that, he was a senior writer at The Intercept and a reporter for The New York Times. His visual investigation of how Fox News and the Trump White House used deceptively edited video of Black Lives Matter protests to smear racial justice protesters won a Mirror Award in 2022.

Dr. Juniper Simonis has a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University and is the Owner & Lead Scientist of DAPPER Stats, a Portland, OR-based quantitative ecology consulting company. They are also the Founder & Director of the Chemical Weapons Research Center, a research, education, and activism organization focused on understanding the impact of chemical weapons on people, communities, and the environment.

When not working, Dr. Simonis plays competitive roller derby and is a current member of the four-time, currently defending world champion and #1 ranked Rose City Rollers Wheels of Justice. Alongside competing, Juniper has been recognized for their activism and advocacy for the inclusion of transgender athletes.

PANEL 2: “POLICE REFORM AND ACCOUNTABILITY: WHERE ARE WE?”

This conversation—among local civil rights attorneys and other police watchdogs—will cover attempts to hold police accountable for wrongdoing and reform policing practices. The panelists will discuss lawsuits against PPB and settlements paid by the City of Portland, as well as provide updates on the Police Accountability Commission and Portland Street Response’s ongoing battles with the current City Council.

MODERATOR

Candace Avalos

Candace Avalos is a first-generation American “Blacktina,” daughter of Black Americans from the south and Guatemalan immigrants. Mi nombre en español es Candis Ávalos. Originally from Virginia, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern Foreign Languages, with a focus on Spanish and Italian, and a Master of Education degree in College Student Personnel Administration from James Madison University. Prior to her current career as a nonprofit executive leader, Avalos started her career as an educator. She worked at Portland State University for eight years, providing civic engagement education and advising support for student leaders. She lives in East Portland and is an active member of her community. Avalos previously served as chair of the Citizen Review Committee and Charter Review Commission for the City of Portland and is currently on the boards of the Coalition of Communities of Color and Street Roots. Her hobbies include perfecting her Guatemalan recipes, reading social justice literature, playing kickball in her fast-pitch league, and exploring Portland’s parks.

J. Ashlee Albies has been practicing civil rights and employeeside employment law for almost 20 years. She has devoted her legal career to advocating for clients who have been harmed by discrimination, retaliation, or unfair treatment by an employer or by the government. Ashlee has a long history of civil rights advocacy—working to use the legal system, and her legal knowledge, to advance human rights. She has provided legal support to many mass demonstrations in Portland and nationally, and represents community groups and individuals seeking to hold police accountable. Albies also helped organize legal seminars for prisoners and the Life Without Parole Storytelling Project at Oregon State Penitentiary in 2019. She regularly offers community education and continuing legal education seminars on the First Amendment, free speech, creative uses of the law, trial advocacy, and civil rights litigation.

Dan Handelman is a co-founding member of Peace and Justice Works and its police accountability project group Portland

J. Ashlee Albies, Dan Handelman, Katherine McDowell, and Elliott Young

Copwatch. In 1991, he also helped co-found Flying Focus Video Collective, which has produced a program on cable access every week on social justice topics. Dan attended nearly every police oversight meeting in the City since 1992 (PIIAC 1992-2001/Citizen Review Committee 2001-present). He was appointed to sit on four City commissions looking at the oversight system—Mayor Katz’s Work Group in 2000, on stakeholder groups in 2010 and 2016, and the Police Accountability Commission in 2021-2023. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for Justice and Police Reform.

Katherine McDowell’s practice focuses on energy regulatory matters and related litigation. She advises and represents utilities and energy companies on a full range of regulatory and administrative law issues, including ratemaking, resource development, and acquisition, compliance with environmental mandates, industry restructuring, and utility mergers and acquisitions. She has represented clients before regulatory commissions throughout the West, including Oregon, Washington, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, and Arizona, and at the Bonneville Power Administration and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Katherine also handles appeals from administrative agency final orders.

Elliott Young is a Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. Professor Young is the author of Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII, and Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border, as well as co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is a co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, the Migration Scholar Collaborative (MiSC), and the Migration and Asylum Lab (MAL) at Stanford University. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 600 asylum cases and was a co-chair of the Portland Committee on Community Engaged Policing (PCCEP).

PANEL 3: “REIMAGINING COMMUNITY SAFETY”

This conversation—led by nonprofit leaders and other visionaries from our community—will consider alternative ways to promote community safety without relying on police, such as mental health and addiction treatment, housing abundance, and restorative justice practices.

MODERATOR

Amber Boydston

Amber Boydston is a Portland-born Abolitionist educator, with an Irish mother and an Ethiopian father who has taught and facilitated trainings around social justice and equity for 25 years since she was a young teen. Her organization, Spirited Justice, focuses on police abolition in addition to the abolition of all anti-Black and oppressive systems. She works with businesses interested in decolonizing how they sustain their practice within communities, in addition to teaching inside and outside of the educational industrial complex, elementary through higher ed. Amber’s work focuses largely on healing the epigenetic impacts of colonialization and combating ACE’s (adverse childhood experiences) that People of the Global Majority experience through the sanctioned systems of fascism and genocide. She weaves in large amounts of breath and meditation practice with her education, supporting the journey of Liberation across the Global Majority diaspora. As a parent and lifelong learner, Amber is incredibly passionate about remaining curious, using her access to open doors, and keeping the pressure on creating the kinds of worlds in praxis that we hope to one day leave behind for the youth.

Sterling Cunio is an award-winning author, playwright, and poet. An Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, Pen America Arts for Social Justice Fellow, and a World Yes Jammer whose work has been published in The Marshall Project, L.A. Book Review, and performed by various artists, including Grammy award-winning musician Antonio Sanchez. Sterling sits on the board of Directors of Oregon’s Transformative Justice Community and acts as lead facilitator for Regroup, a support and empowerment network of Returning Citizens that played an instrumental role in abolishing the authorization of slavery from Oregon’s constitution. Along with currently working for Church at The Park in Salem, serving its houseless community, Sterling also works as a lead consultant on the Ubuntu Climate Initiative, a global climate resilience movement focusing on Reuniting people and the planet through joy, art, and sustainability.

Kayin Talton Davis started off in an artistic direction from a very young age, but later learned her love for math and science and pursued a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering at Portland State University. Her design projects were always influenced by a drive to be accessible to all. She started the Soapbox Theory in 2001 as a way to express herself creatively. Through these mediums, her interest is always in creating something that is positive, helpful,

PANELISTS

Sterling Cunio, Kayin Talton Davis, Tristen Edwards, Sarah T. Hamid, and Chris Riser

and accessible to all, but especially children from culturally underrepresented communities.

Tristen Edwards is an attorney at Metropolitan Public Defender, where she represents individuals charged with major felony crimes and works on policy issues related to promoting the use of restorative justice as an alternative to prosecution. Tristen is a Coordinating Committee Member of the Restorative Justice Coalition of Oregon, and leads the coalition’s legislative advocacy efforts. She also serves on Governor Kotek’s Racial Justice Council’s Criminal Justice Reform Committee. She chairs the Council’s Subcommittee on the Department of Corrections, which focuses on supporting restorative justice efforts led by incarcerated men. Tristen holds a strong commitment to diversity and is the founder and chair of the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Association’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. Tristen has been recognized for her work amplifying the voices of marginalized people and promoting effective and compassionate responses to harm by the Oregon New Lawyers Division, the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Association, and Oregon Women Lawyers.

Sarah T. Hamid (she/her/no preference) is an immigrant, Muslim, and Abolitionist working at the intersection of technology and global/domestic warfare. Currently the PDX Lead Organizer for Freedom to Thrive, she co-founded and helps advise the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, an archiving and knowledge-sharing network for organizers building community defense against the design, roll-out, and experimentation of carceral technologies, and serves on the coordinating team for the inside/outside research collaboration, the Prison Tech Research Group. Sarah also sits on the board of the Lucy Parsons Lab in Chicago and helped create the #8toAbolition campaign: a police and prison abolition resource built during the 2020 uprisings against state violence.

Chris Riser is a human, husband, father, and educator living and working on the stolen lands of the Chinook, Clackamas, Kalapuya, Kathlamet, Molalla, Multnomah, Tualatin, and other peoples who have been here since time immemorial. He works in the field of education as a means of planting the seeds for a world that does not yet exist. He currently serves as the Administrator of HOLLA School in East Portland, with a mission to change the academic narratives for Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth.

February 23 – May 19, 2024

Portland, OR

Curators: Nina Amstutz and Cleo Davis

Consulting Curator/Producer: Kristan Kennedy

Programs Manager / Exhibition Design: Erté deGarces

Technical Director: Molly Gardner

Curatorial/Production Assistant: Liz “L” Quezada

Graphic Design: Nia Musiba and Jakob Dawahare

Curatorial Intern: Mithila Tambe

Prepators / Technical Staff

Britt Abuya

Bill Boese

Rory Breshears

John Foster Cartwright

Beckey Chapman

Alan Cline

Ali Gradischer

Allison Knight-Blaine

Mat Larimer

Mollly Mattern

Teddy Overalls

Irene Ramirez

Freddy Wyss

PICA Staff

Jakob Dawahare

Erté deGarces

Erin Boberg Doughton

Arminda Gandara

Molly Gardner

Jeff Hu

Kristan Kennedy

Samantha Ollstein

Van Pham

Liz “L” Quezada

Reuben Roqueñi

Ashley Schmidt

Leslie Vigeant

Many thanks to Roya Amirsoleymani and Victoria Frey

PICA Board

Lynne Bredfeldt Haider

Courtney Dailey

Andrew Dickson

Phoebe Ebright

bart fitzgerald

Allie Furlotti

Emily Fusaro

Shir Grisanti

Peter Gronguist

Shelly Kapoor

Shawna Lipton

Andre Middleton

Cristi Miles

Kevin Washington

Donate to PICA Support Artists. Support Contemporary Art. Support PICA.

ABOUT POLICING JUSTICE

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) announces a major exhibition, Policing Justice. Guest curated by Nina Amstutz, Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon, and Cleo Davis, local social construct artist, designer, educator, historian, and community leader, this exhibition examines policing practices in Portland, Oregon, and their relationship to longer local and national histories of oppression through the lens of artists who call Portland their home and those who have witnessed and documented police brutality across the globe.

The extended George Floyd protests in 2020, which lasted longer in Portland than in any other city in America and were met with over 6000+ documented instances of police use of force, serve as a point of departure to explore Portland’s history of policing in relation to racial, environmental, spatial, and juvenile justice.

Local artists and activist groups reflect on these situated histories through a series of commissioned installations, including work by Don’t Shoot Portland, Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. in collaboration with Blue, and Cleo Davis and Kayin Talton Davis in collaboration with Robert Clarke and Kimberly Moreland. Complementing these regional collaborations, a selection of works on loan by Alfredo Jaar, Sandy Rodriguez, and Carrie Mae Weems will situate what happened in Portland in a national context. Policing Justice will also showcase a two-part video installation by the British research and arts organization Forensic Architecture, which includes an investigation into the Portland Police Bureau’s use of tear gas against protesters in 2020, and a new work produced for this exhibition, investigating the 2022 murder of antifascist activist June Knightly, produced in collaboration with a number of June’s friends and fellow activists. The exhibition will be accompanied by an active programming schedule, including a symposium, film series, workshops, and panel discussions, which center on locally impacted communities.

FRIDAY, MARCH 8

6PM Keynote Lecture by Alex Vitale: “Community Centered Public Safety: The Movement for a Police Free Future” Reception to follow

POLICING JUSTICE GALLERY HOURS

PICA

Thursday, 12 – 6PM

Friday, 12 – 6PM

Saturday, 12 – 4PM

Sunday, 12 – 4PM

WORKSHOP

Saturday, March 23, 4 – 8PM

PICA

Artist Power and Practices

Hosted by Don’t Shoot Portland and M. Martinez Photo, Artist Power and Practices brings together five different creators to facilitate a community conversation around the power artists hold, and to examine the ethics around creating. The event invites visual storytellers to discuss ethical practices while collaborating and connecting with other Portland creatives.

SATURDAY, MARCH 9

12:15PM Introduction from the curators Nina Amstutz and Cleo Davis

12:30PM PANEL 1: “What’s Wrong With Policing In Portland?”

FILM SERIES

Clinton Street Theater

Thursday, March 21, 7 – 10PM

Feature: Arresting Power: Resisting Police Violence in Portland, Oregon (2015) Shorts: State of Oregon (2017) Defund the Police Practical Abolition

Thursday, April 4, 7 – 10PM

Feature: Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse (2013)

Shorts: Just a Dog (2016) Split Jury (2023)

Thursday, April 18, 7 – 10PM

Feature: Do Not Resist (2016)

Shorts: Conditioned Response (2017) The Hunted and the Hated: An Inside Look at the NYPD’s Stop-and-Frisk Policy (2012)

2:00PM PANEL 2: “Police Reform And Accountability: Where Are We?”

3:30PM PANEL 3: “Reimagining Community Safety”

Ubuntu by Sterling Cunio

Closing Remarks by Alex Vitale

PODCAST LAUNCH & LISTENING SESSION

PICA Annex

Saturday, April 27, 1 – 3PM

Fight the Power, Do No Harm: The Story of the Black Cross Healthcare Collective

Join us for an in-person group listening session of the new audio documentary about Black Cross Healthcare Collective (BCHC)—a Portland-based healthcare collective. BCHC held citizen science trials and found a remedy to neutralize pepper spray, which is used as the antidote to chemical weapon exposure in the streets. Produced by Jodi Darby, Honna Veerkamp, and Erin Yanke.

Information at pica.org/ events/policingjustice

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE PROGRAM SCHEDULE