PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - More than 100 times each year, Portland police label someone a “criminal gang affiliate.”
Police can add a flag in their database without a conviction or an arrest, according to The Oregonian/OregonLive (https://is.gd/9ifAE2 ). They say the practice creates a secret suspects list.
The Oregonian/OregonLive received a modified version of the controversial gang list, minus the names, and letters appealing designations going back to 2012. The Portland Police Bureau tried to keep the records from being released until a reporter appealed to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office.
The data is the first independent look at gang designations in Portland since a federal lawsuit forced the city to restrict the practice two decades ago.
Critics say police use the list to boost surveillance of young men of color based mostly on the social networks they were born into. They say close monitoring of any teenager is likely to turn up some kind of bad behavior, and that disproportionate monitoring of black teens helps ensure they are prosecuted criminally at high rates.
Of the 359 criminal gang affiliates flagged in the database as of August, 81 percent were part of a racial or ethnic minority, an analysis shows. The largest block — 64 percent — was black. Just 7.5 percent of the city’s population is black or black and another race.
C.J. Robbins, a coordinator for Black Male Achievement, an organization working to change city policy on gang labels, said he suspected African Americans were overrepresented. But even he was surprised when presented with the data.
Portland’s policy doesn’t say you have to be a gang member to make the list. It uses the term “gang affiliation.” But Capt. Mike Krantz, who led the police bureau’s Gang Enforcement Team before a promotion, said that in practice the words have the same meaning.
Officers must cite evidence of connections to a criminal gang in the past three years. Police can add someone to the list if the person asserts gang membership, participates in a gang initiation ritual, commits a gang-related crime, or displays two or more observable signs of gang membership.
Police say gang designations keep patrol officers safer because when they run a driver’s name, a gang flag signals they should use caution. Police also say tracking gang members is important to solving gang shootings, a crime for which finding witnesses is notoriously hard without good intelligence. Gang officers say the demographics of the list reflect the people involved in those shootings.
“We aren’t making the situation. We’re just responding to it,” Krantz said.
The documents analyzed by The Oregonian/OregonLive include letters that people wrote to police to challenge a pending gang designation and memos in which Gang Enforcement Team supervisors summarized their conclusions after an appeal hearing.
The documents show that people who challenge a gang designation are likely to prevail. Since 2012, 21 of the 37 people who appealed avoided being listed.
The Oregonian/OregonLive did not have access to officers’ write-ups of the evidence they used when deciding to name someone to the list. Portland officials wanted to charge $15,255.69 for those records.
Chances are, not everyone finds out they have been listed. The bureau sends letters to anyone it proposes to designate a gang member, but the letters aren’t sent by certified mail to establish someone received them.
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Information from: The Oregonian/OregonLive, https://www.oregonlive.com
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