Part of a series on North Precinct
At a standing-room-only Public Safety Action Committee meeting in late January, Chris Duffy addressed North Portland’s concerns about crime.

“No matter what the crime numbers seem to be on paper, people are not seeing our police on the streets,” said Duffy, the chair of the Arbor Lodge Neighborhood Association. “The police are dashing from one end of the peninsula to East County and back again, and people are not getting the day-to-day communication with officers they expect.”

While the number of Portland police officers are up, Portland Police Bureau representatives have been saying for months that overall crime rates are down. Statistics from the PPB website and the bureau’s crime analysts corroborate those statements. But property crime in certain North and Northeast neighborhoods is up, and residents reeling from the loss of the old North Precinct in St. Johns are feeling increasingly vulnerable within the new police structure.

However, growing engagement by citizens in public safety groups, combined with the arrests of several prolific criminals and a new online tool for reporting crime, may help combat the recent rash of criminal activity.

Numbers don’t lie

Sgt. Greg Stewart, a crime analyst with PPB, reported that from November 2009 to January 2010 the peninsula has seen “abnormal” rates of burglaries.  There were 24 more burglaries in the St. Johns patrol area alone in 2009 than in 2008. Part 1 crimes - burglary, larceny, rape - were up 8 percent on the Peninsula in 2009 over 2008. (Conversely, Part 1 crime appears to have fallen during the second half of the year in inner North/Northeast, also known as the Albina community.) 

Many peninsula residents attribute this spike to the decrease in officers patrolling their neighborhoods, but according to North Precinct Commander Jim Ferraris, that’s just not true.

In his presentation at January’s PSAC meeting, Ferraris said that the number of police officers in the new North Precinct — 133 —  has increased by 12 over the combined number of officers in the old North and Northeast precincts.  

Police Chief Rosie Sizer noted that consolidating the city’s five precincts into three and eliminating certain assignments had allowed PPB to put every new officer it hired on the street, which had in turn led to shorter response times across the city. She also touched upon one silver lining of the economic downturn.

“A bad economy is a good sign for police hiring and recruiting,” said Sizer. “Suddenly, a civil service job looks highly appealing to people. We’re now as close to full staffing as we have been since 2000.” 

Even so, there are occasions when neighborhoods go uncovered.  Duffy told the story of an Overlook business owner who was alerted to a break-in at her store, called 9-1-1, and drove to the scene. She arrived there before the police, who told her that their response time was so long because they had come from a different patrol district. Nobody had been covering hers.

Ferraris explained that while each of the precinct’s 20 patrol districts is assigned its own officer, on occasion certain patrol districts have to be “zeroed out” due to greater need elsewhere, and their officers moved to a district that has received more calls for police assistance. 

Ferraris acknowledged the practice’s negative impact on public perception of police and told the crowd at the PSAC meeting that he would “have a conversation [at the precinct] amongst ourselves about being more visible.”

Citizen response

But fighting crime isn’t the sole purview of the police, according to Celeste Carey, a crime prevention coordinator with the Office of Neighborhood Involvement’s Crime Prevention Office.

Carey shared some basic public safety tools with residents of the Concordia neighborhood last month, emphasizing that most classic of community policing tactics — Neighborhood Watch groups — as one of the most effective ways of fighting crime block by block.

“The basic premise is, know your neighbor and trust your instincts,” said Carey.  “Work together on a foot patrol. Just getting out and saying hello works.”

Jenna Forzley, owner of Atomic Pizza and president of the Overlook Business District Association, said that her neighborhood has benefited from the city’s neighborhood watch trainings, as well as the establishment of a Livability Team, a volunteer group which periodically cleans up graffiti and trash in the neighborhood. 

According to Crime Prevention Coordinator Mark Wells, there are 35 active Neighborhood Watch groups in North and Northeast.

But Forzley thinks it’s not enough.

“We’re doing what we can, and we appreciate our officers,” said Forzley, “but they’re spread very thin.” She also thinks that the Bureau’s assessment of North/Northeast crime is only half right. 

“The city has said that crime is down, but I think the reality is that reported crime is down,” Forzley said, echoing many other North Portlanders who believe that much of the crime in their neighborhoods is going unreported.  

She has high hopes that the city’s new online crime reporting system will change that.

‘The rest of the team’

Introduced to the public in mid-January, the easy-to-use tool allows anyone with an Internet connection to fill out a property crime report online for free and submit it to the PPB in seconds.  Within 72 hours, PPB will review the report and email the reporting citizen a PDF of the approved crime report and case number.

The bureau is banking on the system’s convenience — far easier than dialing the city’s 2-1-1 nonemergency number and waiting for an operator to take the call — to increase the number of crimes that are reported, and thus the accuracy of crime statistics and effectiveness of police response. 

Sizer and other PPB officials have called the new system a “game-changer,” a low-cost tool with wide reach at a time when the bureau is staring at a $2.8 million budget cut.   

In addition, Angela Wagnon, a crime prevention coordinator formerly stationed in East Portland, has moved to North, giving each precinct four community-police liaisons and providing residents of North and Northeast more recourse in their fight against crime. (see page 4)

Stephanie Reynolds, ONI's Crime Prevention manager, said Wagnon would spend her first few weeks doing ride-alongs, getting to know the precinct’s geography, and making the rounds at neighborhood association meetings. 

Sizer acknowledged that no matter how well PPB staff handle police service and crime response, their success is contingent on that of other public safety agencies run by the cash-strapped Multnomah County. 

“The county has 30 percent fewer jail beds than eight years ago, and fewer parole and probation officers,” said Sizer. (See Sentinel December ’09) “We’re only as good as the rest of the team, and the rest of the team have suffered massively.”

Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk, whose office has been decimated by budget cuts, said that from a criminal justice standpoint, “the cut in probation officers is a huge part of the problem.” Fewer officers means less oversight, he argued, and thus more criminals who get released back on the streets early and are likely to offend again.

“We need more eyes on the whole public safety system,” said Schrunk at the PSAC meeting, encouraging citizens to participate in the budget process and advocate for PPB and the DA’s office.

Wells echoed this sentiment, quoting the 19th-century British Police Commander Robert Peel:

“The police are the public and the public are the police.”