The City of Portland has concluded an audit of Portland Police intelligence gathering both generally and during the 2020 protests. Chief Chuck Lovell leads the bureau.

According to the report, "A wave of Black Lives Matter protests swept through Portland in the summer and fall of 2020. Police encountered protesters exercising their right to free speech and others vandalizing property and committing arson. The dynamic conditions of the protests presented a challenge for police to enforce laws while safeguarding people’s civil rights.

The audit has two parts. The first reviewed whether police working the protests and criminal intelligence officers gathered and maintained information about protesters in a way that protected their civil rights. The second part focused on how the police used surveillance technology, both during protests and more generally. Among other things, the audit found that the Portland Police Bureau provided no guidance for officers at protests about what information they could collect and that the Criminal Intelligence Unit did not limit access to its reports and kept them past their retention schedule.

The 23 page report recounts that

"The [Portland Police] Bureau had 37 different surveillance technologies but few policies and procedures to guide their use. We found that officers used social media extensively without direction for appropriate use. Our review of video taken from the Bureau’s airplane did not record images that could be used to identify people or vehicles, a finding that may help alleviate protesters’ fears of the Air Support Unit.

Intelligence gathering and surveillance is by its nature secretive, but the Bureau should adopt policies to guide officers tasked with collecting it. The policies should set boundaries for acceptable activity and help ease the public’s fear of the Bureau’s use of intelligence-gathering and surveillance, the collection of which is to make Portland a safer and more secure place to live.

The Oregon Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union panned the Portland Police in a statement in which they described the report as "damning." "Such indiscriminate, warrantless surveillance chills free speech, erodes trust between community and government, and creates alarming opportunities for abuse. That is why, under Oregon law, the police are prohibited from collecting and maintaining information on anyone’s political views or activities outside of a criminal investigation. PPB’s broad and highly intrusive surveillance of protesters in 2020 is a blatant violation of this law."


--Staff Reports

Post Date: 2022-04-07 17:33:23

Last Update: 2022-04-07 20:02:55