Community Safety for all
Our community’s safety is my #1 priority. Every day, I work towards a Portland that is safe, and feels safe, for all of us, and I will continue doing so on the City Council.
Portlanders want an approach to public safety that is three-dimensional. It needs to be more than just reacting after something goes wrong. This community wants more preventative efforts to reduce crime, more harm reduction programs, and more communication and collaboration. They have repeatedly called for shorter response times and higher clearance rates after crimes are committed.
We share the same goals:
Reducing and preventing crime
Having the right selection of first responders available, and sending the right one to each incident
A 911 system that can answer calls and dispatch those responders quickly
Accountability when something goes wrong, focused on ensuring that problem doesn’t happen again
A system of review and continual improvement that includes the voices of those who are affected by crime, the voices of those affected by historic and present gaps or failures in our safety systems, and experts on those systems
I support data-driven, holistic solutions grounded in prevention, harm reduction, and cost-effective, accountable responses to safety concerns. These include:
Safe Routes to School
Portland has over 60 miles of unpaved roads, many of which are in District 2 neighborhoods like Cully. Portland also has many streets which have no sidewalks, with District 2 neighborhoods like Rose City Park heavily represented here too. These pose safety risks for pedestrians, and potholes compound those risks because cars often swerve to avoid the pothole.
Portland needs to pave its public roads, build sidewalks and crosswalks, and ensure pedestrian safety, especially for students. Children walk along these routes to school - they need infrastructure that protects them. You don’t have to be a parent to care about safer streets and sidewalks for kids, or to benefit from the infrastructure improvements that keep them safe.
Expanding and strengthening Portland Street Response
Portland Street Response is a vital part of our first responder network. I signed the Save Portland Street Response pledge on my first day as a candidate, because I support those requests, and because I want you to know it and hold me to that pledge once I’m in office.
Specifically, I support - at a minimum - 24/7, Citywide operations for Portland Street Response, with full staffing, and with continued dispatch from 911 calls. Like all government programs, PSR should be subject to rigorous evaluation and improvement, which means continuing independent evaluation like the one Portland State University already provided.
Organizationally, I support PSR moving from Fire into the Public Safety Service Area, which will ensure more support for Portland Street Response in administration, finance, and project management, and allow Portland Fire and Rescue to focus on what they do best as well. Its independence from traditional first responders will help build trust with the community it serves and avoid inefficient overlaps in responsibilities, while still allowing for transferring specific situations to other responders where appropriate.
Also:
Work to ensure the City can hire its own ambulance services or augment county contracts to allow for 1 EMT / 1 paramedic ambulances, reducing response times for ambulances
Hire more 911 dispatchers to bring our 911 call times in line with national standards
Continue existing work at the Community Safety Division to categorize and dispatch 911 calls to ensure the right responder goes to the right call.
Maintain and fund fire stations so they all remain open, and ensure stations are a support for other city safety services like emergency teams and street responders as well.
Active Spaces are Safe Spaces
Ensuring community activity and economic activity are inhabiting our spaces will ensure there aren’t vacuums for crime to grow into. Visiting and surveying areas with high crime often shows a correlation with the design and environment of a place and the likelihood of violence; vibrant neighborhoods have less crime.
We need more community activities activating our spaces. Public areas like parks and plazas need to be more accessible to existing community activities, so that the City isn’t putting up barriers to our community life. Having community events populate our public spaces will leave less room for activities we want to reduce, like drug dealing, exploitation and abuse, and gun violence. We need to scale up our City’s programming around violence prevention and crime prevention through environmental design, and reduce barriers (like fees and permits) which keep our communities’ activities from happening in public spaces.
We also need to promote economic development, including public-facing businesses being open later so there is positive activity on our streets. I will work with property owners and businesses that rent space, particularly restaurants and bars, to keep businesses open later. Customers will have more options in walkable areas, businesses will have more opportunities to make money in the evenings and weekends, workers will have more hours available to them, and neighbors will see less crime because there are fewer vacuums for anti-social activity.