PORTLAND, OR – An investigation by a Portland local NBC affiliate, KGW, found that the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) was severely lacking in response to three separate mid-September gun incidents near a high school.
The response times for two calls were 25 minutes and an hour and 20 minutes for the gun-related calls, which is high even for their currently low average response times. The third call saw no police response at all- just a phone call and voicemail to the school staff caller around 9:50pm, which was approximately eight hours after the call to 911 was made.
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Due to staffing levels, PPB has been averaging 15.6 minutes to respond to high priority calls in 2022, a number that is higher than the two previous years- 12.2 minutes average in 2021 and 10.6 in 2020.
In addition to low staffing, PPB has also seen a reduction in their ability to target gun violence through proactive policing since the disbanding of their Gang Enforcement and Gun Violence Reduction team. Further, the department acquiesced to the public’s demands to rid the schools of School Resource Officers (SROs) in June of 2020, which obviously took away armed officers staffed at the schools during regular school hours.
Rick Puente, Vice President of the Oregon School Resource Officers Association, said that the slow response time to gun violence in schools is hardly a surprise when all these factors are combined. “When you look at the responses that you are getting, we have a gap there,” he said. “I mean — it is pretty evident. When you remove a school resource officer or program, you leave that gap. I always look at it like — you get a flat tire — instead of repairing it, you remove it and keep going down the street on three wheels. It is going to be a bumpy ride.”
Puente also said seconds matter when it comes to police response to calls on or near schools, which is why it was so detrimental to student and staff safety to rid the schools of SROs.
The public outcry for better and faster police response has been received by authorities. However, it’s difficult for police to be able to reduce response times and increase the actions they’re able to take when their staffing has been depleted- due to the anti-police narrative which far-left politicians in the city helped spread- as well as the lessening of programs and resources meant to help close that gap, such as SROs and gun violence targeting teams.
Portland’s Police Chief Chuck Lovell is confident that increasing staffing levels will help with the slow response times. “We’re going to try to get to every call we can,” he said. “We do our best to answer them. And we understand that even if it is not a homicide or a shooting, having your stuff stolen, having your home violated by an intruder is traumatic and we want to do our best to address those with the resources we have.”
A PPB spokesperson told KGW that they’re “looking into” why the response times for these three gun incidents at Franklin High School were so long, but there has been no follow up on that at the time of this writing.
Chief Lovell has said that he is in favor of reinstating a gun violence unit to fight the growing crime, as well as increasing staffing and bringing in the use of Shotspotters- which report possible gunshots in real time to dispatchers.
This piece was written by Leah Anaya on October 11, 2022. It originally appeared on RedVoiceMedia.com and is used with permission.
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When you defund the police and refuse to prosecute criminals the natural result of these policies is higher crime and reduced police response times. The citizens of Portland voted for this, they need to reconcile themselves to these consequences or make a different choice of who represents them.
If anyone is surprised they are fools. Everyone was warned that this would be the result of the anti police narrative that many politicians were a part of. If the government representatives would have stood by law enforcement, we never would see situations like this. Many people in Portland hate the police………. until they need them. Why would any community remove police officers that are stationed at high schools? What good could come from that? This is a prime example of the inmates running the asylum BUT now the inmates are realizing that they screwed up. Any politician that took part in the anti police rhetoric is responsible for the current issues and they should all be voted out of office.