Police Commission discusses sweeps, passive resistance, West Eugene precinct

Presenter: The Eugene Police Commission is asked to help stop homeless sweeps, especially during extreme weather events. With public comment March 13, Bridgette Butler:

Bridgette Butler: I’m Bridgette. I work with Black Thistle Street Aid. I’m the co-director. We’re a medical outreach team in town providing free medical care to folks living on the street. Usually we do roving outreach to encampments or just about anywhere in town.

[00:00:27] I noticed you’ll be talking about behavioral health and mental health crises, which is great and needed. In addressing mental health and behavioral health concerns, first and foremost I want to name that sweeps EPD facilitates with the city of Eugene exacerbate this issue greatly and are inherently traumatic and degrading acts.

[00:00:50] But most concerning to me is the consistent uptick of trespass citations and sweeps during extreme weather events, like heat waves or the ice storm we just had. And so I’m asking the Commission to reconsider EPD’s role in these actions. I’m sure as you’re all aware Eugene has the highest per capita rate of homelessness in our country and this is a very complicated issue, but it’s something that needs to be addressed.

[00:01:15] Your PIO, Melinda McLaughlin had said that EPD is not involved in encampment cleanups or sweeps, but I have personally witnessed EPD at almost every single sweep I’ve been at, which is too many to count at this point.

[00:01:30] I’ve also seen EPD surround a disabled person, like completely surround him, demanding that he clean up his encampment in 15 minutes or less or else face jail time. And this was a person who already had institutional trauma, so he was escalated.

[00:01:45] I’ve seen EPD line people up along public roads and sidewalks for anyone driving by or walking by to see, making a public show of anyone whose belongings are getting thrown out or being ticketed. This has a horrible impact on a person’s mental health or their general will to live or willingness to engage in society.

[00:02:06] I’ve also heard of EPD showing up at encampments late in the evening to threaten people, giving them 15 minutes or less to go. And this is sometimes evenings where there’s freezing temperatures, but warming centers aren’t open. It’s raining.

[00:02:20] And I just want you all to imagine having to pack your belongings in 15 minutes or less at a place you’ve lived for six months or more with a person with a gun on their hip, telling you to move.

[00:02:33] Presenter: Two other public comments asked for consideration in protecting the private property of unhoused persons, and to ask how renters can have a say in trespassing issues. Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner:

[00:02:46] Chris Skinner (Eugene Police Department, chief): I know this is hard and it’s hard for our community, it’s hard for us sometimes to recognize the multitude and various complexities that go into our unhoused population and where they choose to set up their camps and /or reside.

[00:03:02] It’s a multitude of private property, public property, commercial property, ODOT property, Union Pacific or BNSF property. It’s just, it’s like doing long division to figure out what are the requirements for these properties.

[00:03:17] The public property is the property that mostly is being associated with what people are calling sweeps. And I take exception to that because we’re not necessarily, we’re relocating people, asking people to leave after they’ve been properly posted for a period of time and offered resources and services elsewhere.

[00:03:37] And EPD is merely there as oversight because we’ve had as public works crew and the open public space cleanup crew comes in to be able to clean up and close that area, have been met with some levels of hostility. So EPD is there mostly in the sense of safety and security for city staff.

[00:03:54] In a few instances, we’ve been met with some resistance and had to at least ask people to leave and be subject to some kind of law enforcement action if they choose not to leave.

[00:04:05] But it’s not done in a sense that we just arbitrarily show up and decide to move people without proper notice. That, it gets vetted and in almost no cases is that initiated by the Police Department. That’s usually initiated by Parks & Open Space in conjunction with Public Works to be able to do that.

[00:04:23] And I will tell you, the number one call for service in the city of Eugene is trespass call. It outpaces all the calls for service by a wide margin. It’s the only city I’ve ever been a chief at or been a police officer in that it’s been the number one call for service.

[00:04:38] We have a lot of people that call us about people trespassing on their private property, their commercial property, and then what they see is trespass on railroad property and the ODOT property. So you have these people calling that are victims of trespass asking for help. And we try to serve them the best we can.

[00:04:57] And in those cases that is a law enforcement action because it is a class B misdemeanor. With the railroad property, it’s a class A misdemeanor, a criminal trespass in the first degree. And so we try the best we can to meet those folks’ needs and we can’t keep pace with the amount of calls for service that we get.  

[00:05:18] In most, if not all of those cases, we take great care and try and figure out if there’s a shelter space for that person to go to and /or offering some level of services. Oftentimes, property is abandoned and left there for cleanup.

[00:05:34] In other cases, if law enforcement action is taken, (and I mean physical custody, which that’s very rare that we’re taking anybody to jail for these things), we are bound by our policy, which means that we take responsibility for their personal belongings and we inventory those and keep those for safekeeping.

[00:05:52] But we are going to really work hard this next year to pay attention to the number one call for service in our city, which is criminal trespass, and asking people to make sure that they’re choosing not to camp or reside on other people’s personal property or private property in this case.

[00:06:10] And then the separate mechanism is the open public space which has a different threshold with a level of posting and closure that is initiated by the city.

[00:06:21] So I understand that when you see EPD officers on scene, it can feel like it is their activity or their action that they’ve initiated, but I can assure you that largely we’re there in support of other activity that the city is going through.

[00:06:36] So we’ll continue to be ethical, moral, and legal about our behavior. And as always, if there’s policy adjustments that need to be made, we will entertain those.

[00:06:47] The one thing I would remind people that are listening and for the police commission is your influence is around policy language, not necessarily operations and how we run the operations. And sometimes they can be very close cousins to each other and feel very, very much like you want to influence operations.

[00:07:06] But we determined operationally what we feel like is the best approach and then we asked you to help us build really good equitable policy language around that. And in most cases, we already have a really good baseline for policy and we’re happy to break those open and make the tweaks where we need to as the Commission decides that that’s important to do.

[00:07:27] Presenter: Police Commissioner Sean Shivers:

[00:07:30] Sean Shivers (Eugene Police Commission): It sounds like Public Works is one of the driving forces behind what folks are calling sweeps. So they don’t have a commission, it sounds like. So do they just contact Public Works directly if they have feedback?

[00:07:44] Presenter: Chief Skinner:

[00:07:45] Chris Skinner (Eugene Police Department, chief): Parks & Open Space is a part of the Public Works Department. Their policies, procedures around closing down open public property is informed by the city attorney’s office, they set the guidelines for that. And that’s deeply rooted in case law and mostly 9th (U.S.) Circuit (Court of Appeals) case law here on the West Coast.

[00:08:08] And so if there are issues with the closing of a certain area and the posting of a certain area after the obligatory amount of time coming in and asking people to leave, and in most cases people have already left by the time the waiting period is over. If they have issue with the city initiating those closures, then that’s where I would point them, is to Parks & Open Space.

[00:08:33] Presenter: Police Commissioner Clay Neal:

[00:08:36] Clay Neal (Eugene Police Commission): Previous case law required that there were options for individuals when asked to move from public property. The new Supreme Court decision has allowed for broader authority of cities and police departments in terms of asking people to move without providing resources.

Is that something that’s coming into play in our community? Or do you find that there are actually resources for people that you are coming into contact with, that they are electing to sometimes take and sometimes not take?

[00:09:08] Presenter: Chief Skinner:

[00:09:09] Chris Skinner (Eugene Police Department, chief): Oregon adopted the 9th (U.S.) Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which started in Grants Pass. The Supreme Court has overturned that, but we’re still operating under the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision right now.

[00:09:22] But I would say that that decision never suggested that it was incumbent on the city or a jurisdiction to provide an inventory so robust that it would provide for everybody’s needs.

[00:09:35] I think what it intended to do is for an entity to try and provide to the best of their ability, financially, a place for people to go, if asked to move. And we have spaces open frequently that we’ve asked people if they would like to go somewhere else.

[00:09:52] And in some instances people are taking us up on it and unfortunately in many instances they’re choosing not to. But we’re acutely aware of when we have space and where we have space, and we ask people if they’d like us to point them in that direction for resources. And it’s anybody’s guess whether it’s a yes or no.

[00:10:10] Presenter: Commissioner Neal:

[00:10:12] Clay Neal (Eugene Police Commission): The Civilian Review Board met on Tuesday, and we reviewed a case that included the use of pepper spray.

[00:10:19] It was a very thorough investigation that the chain of command found, through that investigation, that the officer was working within policy. And the auditor’s office disagreed and said it was a sustained violation of policy.

And two Civilian Review Board members sided with the chain of command saying it was within policy, and three said it should have been a sustained violation of policy. So just to give you a context of how we felt about that. I think there’s an interesting sort of read of the policy and how it’s enacted on the ground.

[00:10:50] The interesting part of the pepper spray policy was this question of: How do you define passive resistance? And that was where the nuance was in the decision-making between the auditor’s office and the chain of command at the Police Department.

[00:11:05] So just something to note that that was an interesting discussion that is maybe worth looking at in terms of policy going forward.

[00:11:13] Presenter: Chief Skinner said the Police Department is looking at creating a West Eugene precinct.

[00:11:18] Chris Skinner (Eugene Police Department, chief): We are building a business case for a precinct that would move part of our operations out to West Eugene.

[00:11:26] We see a huge amount of property theft out on West 11th. For instance, the Target store out there, nationwide Target experiences anywhere from 3% to 4% loss through shoplift. This Target experiences close to 17% loss of shoplift and there’s just things walking out the door. Walmart’s in the same spot.

[00:11:48] So we are building a business case to try and move some police resources out there and maybe collocate with some special equipment that we need a place for.

[00:12:23] We occupy a building in the area of Second and Lincoln right now that if we can get out of there, it’s city-owned property, that would free up a building that’s in a strategic location for housing development in and around the downtown area. And so there’s some real upside to being able to move that and we want to be on both sides of the river. Makes a lot of sense—Country Club (Road) is not the greatest place to deploy from when you’re trying to get to West Eugene.

[00:12:23] Presenter: At the Police Commission March 13, questions about sweeps, questions about passive resistance, and news about a proposal for a precinct in West Eugene.