all right good afternoon i'm sergeant kevin allen and i'm hosting today's media availability with chief chuck lavelle thank you for being here uh like i said we'll start with some comments from the chief and he'll take your questions today we'll be using the raise hand feature of zoom if you have not used that before here's how you do it if you're working on a computer right now you can find it by clicking on the participants button on the bottom of your zoom screen you'll see a list of all of us on the call appearing on the right side and the raise hand button is at the bottom of that column i'll call on those who have raised their hand in order our call manager will invite you to unmute and you'll be able to open your microphone and ask your question of the chief we do want to address as many questions as possible today and also be fair to everyone on the call so we ask that each one of you ask one question at a time our call manager will again unmute you during or i'm sorry our call manager will be muting you during the chief's answer and that's only so that we can get a clean sound for everyone there's no background noise that's interrupting that sound but we do invite you to ask as many follow-ups as you like in the time that we have just raise your hand again and we'll circle back to you in order so with that i'll step aside and switch the camera here and introduce chief chuck level go ahead thanks kevin uh thanks everybody for being here i think i'd probably make sense to just start out talking a little bit about violent crime especially given the news today in the council's uh resolution gun violence prevention some of the most important work we do we really do it with a focus on the victims these are real people in the community who've suffered from gun violence families who are hurting because of gun violence and we want to do our part to play our role as the police in that solution it's a complex issue and there's room for a lot of different resources and ideas on how to tackle it and we welcome any resources that are going to help long and short term to address this in our community we continue to field our enhanced community safety team and our homicide detectives and investigative resources are working hard to to bend the curve on gun violence in the city we want to be good partners with the resources that city council and our community-based organizations are bringing to bear to help out in gun violence so i testified today before city council with that message in particular and there's a lot of really great officers out there every day who are working hard to keep the city safe so i always want to acknowledge them and thank them for their hard work and then also staffing staffing's gotten a lot of attention lately i get a lot of questions about that we're down to 818 sworn members at present we have 563 officers and we have 98 vacancies currently i'm told six more people are going to resign this month we have several people who are in background investigations with other agencies who could potentially leave in the short term as well next year we have 88 88 sworn members will be eligible by the middle of next year many of them will probably retire and that'll put further pressure on our staffing as well uh the tough thing for for me is we lose a lot of great people a lot of institutional knowledge a lot of city knowledge and relationships uh walk out the door when those people leave and that's tough we want to be a sought-after employer we want to be able to attract and retain the best people and that's our goal and that's a current uh frequent conversation here and across the street and how we could do that um that's uh very important to us so uh without further ado i know there's probably a lot of questions so we'll get right to them okay so like i said if you have a question go ahead and raise your hand and we'll just call on you guys in order maxine bernstein has the first question go ahead and unmute maxine and go ahead hi chief thanks for your time my question is about this new uh focused intervention team or i guess it's called fit uh where are those officers gonna come from there's been uh in some of the council proposal it said it um the officers were gonna come from domestic violence or sex trafficking and i wondered how many officers and how is the bureau going to pay for that for this team yeah that's a good question thanks max uh we're hoping to get some money um to pay for that but that doesn't look like it's gonna happen looks like we'll have to take that out of existing resources um i'm not a hundred percent sure yet where those uh officers will come from um i think we'll probably look to field a team around the size in a previous proposal of around a dozen officers and now we're so lean right now it's really hard to find a place where there's a dozen officers uh to pull from as many people know we we moved our traffic division our narcotics and canine divisions back into patrol to sure up our overtime budget and also uh to increase our call response times um we don't have a youth services division any longer and we don't have a transit division any longer either so there's not many other places to pull from to create stuff internally so we'll have to look and see where there are some officers that we can pull back to patrol or repurpose to try to fill out this new gun violence effort but um we're we're to the point now staffing wise where you know being able to do this means uh greatly impacting our ability to do something else okay uh next question is from jonathan levinson jonathan go ahead and unmute and ask your question when you're ready i max just uh just scooped me on my question which is fitting and just to follow up to max's previous question too you know all the work that's getting done is important work um if they if officers come from detectives there's important working detectives that you know will get impacted as we shifted our resources from the traffic division you know we're a city that's had a lot of traffic facilities in the last year too so um we really need to figure out you know the best ways to manage this resource but eventually too there's going to be a real a real need to have some of this important work done so that's just part of an ongoing conversation okay thanks chief uh liz burch has the next question liz go ahead and unmute when you're ready hi chief thank you so much for your time today i hope you can hear me okay i'm in a live truck so i'm to kind of yell um you said that you want to work in a partnership with these community groups but with none of this 6 million that was just approved by city commissioners going towards ppb and them asking you to do more work do you feel like you have the support you need from portland city council to properly curb this increasing gun violence you know it'll remain to be seen um i think we will have to um to figure out how to repurpose these positions to do this work i i know the council i've had conversations with all the council members i know this is important work to them um they've made their decisions as far as funding and allocation of money on their end and i think for us it's just really uh coming to this work we know this work is important it's probably some of the most important work we do because it really affects people's lives and safety every day so we have to uh we have to figure out a way where we can be effective and playing our part and be a good partner but um yeah it is i will say it's very difficult to do um with limited personnel and limited budget okay next up lincoln graves lincoln whenever you're ready go ahead uh thank you chief for taking my question i wanted to ask you about the role that the city council has laid aside for park rangers in this problem of reducing gun violence do you believe that's a an appropriate thing to do and have you heard from park rangers themselves about the kind of work that they may be tasked with i didn't catch the whole question like can you kind of dropped out there could you restate your question please yeah i wanted to ask you about the role of park rangers in this plan to reduce violence do you support that uh plan and have you heard from park rangers with the role that they may be tasked with you know i i support resources for gun violence um i think park rangers can be be a resource maybe it's probably more of a long-term resource um than anything else and i think you know for us we'll assist them and provide support as far as we can i know i've heard from a few of them and their stance is that they are not police they're not there essentially to play the role of police in the parks they're there to serve more as ambassadors but i think they could serve as a deterrent and i think there's you know there's room for their participation so i think for me i just want to make sure that we as pbb are playing the best the best partnership role to assist them as possible and i think time will tell how how effective of a resource they are at curbing gun violence into the future okay uh next up sarah hurwitz sarah go ahead hey can you hear me we sure can go ahead sorry it's kind of loud um so my question had to do with the realigning of some of those resources in this new plan so does that is this is this going to add to the enhanced community safety team will it be different will that enhance community safety team go away i'm just trying to understand how it all kind of works together no that's a great question there's a lot of moving parts to this um we've put other investigative resources under the detective division to investigate shootings and homicide so it it kind of can look or seem like a big jumble of resources but i think the community the enhanced community safety team is probably really more investigatively focused i think this new group will probably be really tied into some community oversight and some community interaction um so they'll be separate but i think it's possible that some of their work could overlap and maybe there's a need to shift some resources from one to the other like i said this is really new so it hasn't really been determined exactly what pieces are going to fit where but i think it's important for us as the police bureau to make sure we pick the right people to do this work and we give them the right preparation to do this work make sure they uh you know they have all their equity training make sure they have some time to work together before we put them out on the street uh to do this work get familiar with working as a team and then uh you know have some real conversations about what the uh the community impacts are and you know talk with community about expectations and how we can best do this work together okay uh alex zielinski he's next in line go ahead alex hi yeah thank you for your time um you know some conversations i've had with mayor's office suggest that some officers may be hesitant to be part of the new gun violence patrol team that the focused intervention team because of kind of the criticism and heightened you know awareness of this uh program and it passed is that accurate at all is there um some hesitancy around joining that team you know that probably for the individual officers who would be on the team but i would say this in in the general sense this is highly scrutinized dangerous work i mean there is there is probably some good reason to be a little maybe thoughtful about how this work is done how it's viewed by the community we've had different um efforts to to combat this before that were met with scrutiny and um there were a lot of great people who did a lot of really good work got guns off the street had good relationships with people and uh the work was was criticized um and essentially when eventually went away so you know i think people remember that and they're mindful of that and they wonder like what would that mean for me and my career if this were to happen again so i mean i i think it's probably safe to say that some people would be really mindful of how this work uh could be done and could be perceived and if it's a good fit for them okay uh jonathan levinson is uh back go ahead with your follow-up jonathan uh thanks um chief this was this plan was put together and passed pretty fast there was no community feedback or input and it kind of back doored in these other 12 officers uh through the gun violence uh intervention plan i know ppb objected to disbanding gbrt and has been trying to bring it back since but is this an effective way to go about it or does it risk adding to the existing divide between the bureau of the community you know for me i think there's been a lot of conversation about this um there's been a proposal too from the interface peace action collaborative also a lot of different uh ideas and conversations going back and forth on how best the police can serve their role in curbing gun violence uh some people feel that's with more officers on the street doing more proactive work some people feel that's not with polices with other resources so this was really a lot of work in the making it probably seems today like it happened really quickly but there was a lot of conversation and thought that went into it and i see it as different from our gun violence reduction team efforts this is going to be really community-led it'll have a some type of community steering component to it uh that will meet and work uh very closely and figure out you know how how we're gonna go about this work together with community input and i think that was something that was missing uh maybe with our gvrt efforts i don't think it was um it's transparent to the community and i think people had a real sense of how the work was being done who was doing the work and i think having this community oversight will lend more community support more community knowledge about how the work's being done and who's doing the work great uh maxine bernstein uh you're up again go ahead max thank you um yeah there was uh part of the plan i understand is for this community oversight committee to um sort of set parameters do you know how that will be formed or who's in charge of forming that and is there any sort of timeline for this focused intervention team and the truth there was reference in city council to a truth and reconciliation effort that would start within the police bureau for six months can you talk about that as well yeah i don't have a timeline for the the community oversight piece um there's some urgency to it so my hope is it would happen in a you know in a fairly short amount of time but i'm sure there's going to be a process to pick the right people and figure out you know what their charge is going to be going forward and how they'll interact with with our folks and the truth and reconciliation is something that is in our community engagement plan i think it's an important piece of really charting the way forward for the police bureau a lot of what i talk about you'll hear me talk about a lot is trust and i think really coming back to to revisit you know some some things from the past some hurts and really try to figure out what is the best way to move forward together is important so i think this truth and reconciliation piece is important to do and i think internally there probably is uh some work for ppb to do before we come to the larger effort of truth and reconciliation i really think this has to be a city-wide effort i think there's a lot of people in the city and bureaus and entities that could participate and benefit from this effort but i think it makes sense for for ppb to have some some work up front before we move to the larger group all right next in line mike benner go ahead mike hey chief thanks for giving us a second um off topic just uh a bit here i think uh it was the oregonian that published a report about exit interviews um with officers leaving the bureau i'm talking about being overworked and um not a lot of support i just want to get your reaction to that when when you see that you know published but obviously you were probably aware of it before then um doesn't uh show ppb in a good light yeah no you're right i saw it and it's hard because you you know you have really good folks working here and to see them uh some of them unhappy and leaving it's hard and you know they take a lot of experience and knowledge and relationships with them people have their own reasons personal reasons for leaving so i understand those as well and um you know there there has been you know a lot asked of the men and women of the police bureau especially in the last nine ten months uh we've had to cancel days off we've had uh need to have people come in on overtime we've had need to staff a full-time crowd control element and then there's still the regular duties and calls for service that don't go away when those happen and it's a lot there's a lot ass to the the folks that work here and it's difficult so you know i talk to a lot of folks who um who are thinking about leaving or want to leave who i know personally and you know they cite a lot of different things it's not really always just the police bureau in a vacuum there's other you know city type things and environment things and family type things too we you know we forget a lot of folks have spouses partners and children and elder parents and other job opportunities that come up for their loved ones too so um it's definitely something that we're concerned about uh we're probably averaging four to five people a month leaving and that attrition over time if you can't hire becomes becomes a real worry definitely all right lincoln graves is next in line lincoln go ahead can you hear me okay yes we can hear you now go ahead chief we have a reporter working on a story about fentanyl drugs and i just wanted to ask you about sort of that general topic have you seen an increase in drugs coming into the portland area in recent years you know drugs laced with fentanyl and are any of the recent shootings recent gun violence can you tie those to this type of drug at all i don't think i can you know there's probably a question better asked to uh someone in our uh narcotics unit but i think you know there is a little bit of worry on my part about overdoses and fentanyl in particular i know you know with the passing of measure 110 and then on top of that we have our narcotics units which was folded back into patrol so we have less people available to quickly go do overdose investigations and that's you know that's troubling but then you introduce a drug like fentanyl uh with its deadly characteristics and you know those overdoses become really worrisome and problematic especially if your ability to investigate them quickly and prevent possible other ones is somehow diminished liz burch is up again go ahead liz with your uh yeah thank you so much uh in the counter proposal from city commissioners they made it sound like they only wanted the police department to hire new officers and not rehire retired officers obviously there's program that you guys can utilize that would allow you to rehire retired police officers you mentioned losing experience when you lose these 45 officers above that are leaving or staff what are your thoughts on that do you think that's the right direction to go to only hire completely new officers or do you think you should have the ability to rehire retired officers you know i personally like the idea of being able to hire retired officers currently the way it's set up i think we'd have to make a slight change to it but the idea early on was to maybe reach back to august and be able to hire i.e bring back officers who were already gone to to bolster our numbers um if we did reinstitute the retire rehire program kind of as it's drawn up it really doesn't really give you any more people it might let people who are here retire and then come back to work but it doesn't increase your numbers and the chief's office here does have um the discretion to to choose who gets hired back and who doesn't so i do like having that that control of it but i think it's really one a way to uh bring people back if we could go back to uh like last august and the 120 folks who have gone between uh july 1 of last year and now and maybe bring some of them back that would be helpful and then you know i think ahead to next year next july of 2022 when we could have 88 folks eligible uh if the bulk of those folks choose to go and you don't have a program like retiree hire that lets some of them come back that's a big loss to absorb to an already lean agency all right david ashton you're up next go ahead david it looks like i'm unmuted now great uh it seems like the shooting incidents are down by a bit in the last couple of weeks at least in outer east portland especially in the lens and paul hurst gilbert neighborhoods if true to what do you attribute this reduction chief you know it's hard to say to pinpoint something for a short period of time like that i'm happy they're down slightly but we're still trending for uh record numbers of shootings this year i think that number just kind of ebbs and flows the start of this year has been something that we haven't seen ever as far as shootings go so uh even if it does start to trend down a little bit that's you know that's a good thing for us but um i think in comparison to what we've experienced the first three months i hope they would trend down a little bit yeah all right um back to alex zielinski go ahead with your follow-up alex yeah thanks um one second sorry [Music] your audio fell off there alex um are you still there yeah can you hear me yes you sound fine now go ahead sorry about that yeah i just had a question around um budget i know that the new fit plan um there is no extra money being given through council to to support that right now during this fiscal year but i'm curious chief if you're planning on asking for any more funding for the upcoming fiscal budget for 21 22 um and if there's any space to add that on to your current asks yeah we have a at ask package in right now for the budget for 5.4 million uh in an ad back that would allow us to essentially hire about 39 uh sworn folks and fill those positions uh we're also seeking uh some funding to add some records uh records people and i think some analysts to that package uh there's there hasn't been an ad to add this uh fit piece yet and this is this resolution is very new so um there hasn't been time to really i think ferret that out but we're looking at a about a 10 million budget reduction for the fiscal year present so we're hoping our ad our ask for the ad back gets approved and we can we can hire i think for for us it's really important that people understand it's a it's a long it's a long haul to hire police officer there's about six months um background and processing to actually get hired and then there's an 18 18-month probation period on the back end of that so like in comparison to you know some other job where you can hire someone and in a couple weeks they're there working uh you know for a police officer it's a long period of time before you are certified off probation and uh ready to work on your own all right uh we'll probably go about five more minutes so um if you have any last questions uh please get in line uh tess risky is up next go ahead tess hey thanks for having me um chief i'm wondering if you could please provide um an update on the investigation um involving officer hunziker and also um if it's uh still correct that he is working a patrol in the north precinct yeah he is still currently working patrol that investigation is ongoing i can't really give a status update to it right now but i will in due time once we get some information to actually share all right uh thinking lincoln graves was in line next uh lincoln did you still have a question or did you uh yes i did i had one more question if i could okay yeah sorry please go ahead uh certainly the bureau has a lot of big things to focus on we have heard from viewers though who they're at least perceiving that small petty crime like the different kinds of theft really aren't a priority anymore do you agree with that is that true and what would you say to those concerns now i'd say that those are important to us we've shifted a lot of our resources and investigations towards person crimes shootings and homicides in particular we really do realize it you know property crimes i don't even like the term like petty crimes or smaller because if if you're the victim it's a big deal to you so you know we've had to unfortunately shift a lot of our resources away from property crimes and investigations of that nature to person crimes uh shootings and homicides so uh those are important but right now we're really trying to manage our resource to a point where we can really um aggressively uh address those and and to some degree uh we have less resources to really focus on those property crimes thefts and things of that nature yeah and i'll put in a plug for a recent video we put a video out about the uh about the call response times and why some calls do take longer for an officer to respond so uh we hope people have a chance to view that uh all right a couple more questions david ashton you're up again go ahead david yes chief from the standpoint of law enforcement uh what do you consider the results of the portland street response pilot program you know i i've heard that they're expanding their area outside of uh outside of lentz a little bit i'm really hopeful for that program i i am a believer that there are some calls that police you know shouldn't go to if there were other resources that are better suited um that those resources should respond um i know we have a lot of interaction with them um just feedback back and forth and i think as they grow and as we see kind of a bigger sample size and figure out what what chunk of those calls they can handle going forward then i think we'll have a good collaboration i know the city just hired mike myers as the safe community safety transition director so he'll have kind of the overarching uh umbrella for public safety in the city and i think if you look at some of the pieces that the fire bureau has and portland street responses under the fire bureau and then the tools that the police bureau has and then the other public safety partners boeic and pbm and we'll see kind of where we can all fit in where their synergies and where we can kind of function as a holistic system uh towards public safety all right uh and then max bernstein your backup again go ahead max thank you i am there was a reference during the city uh council meeting about the significant increase in domestic violence can you talk about that and is there a chance that officers investigating domestic violence might be pulled to to this new focused intervention team yeah like i said earlier i haven't really figured out for sure where these officers are going to come from i think the the reason those two units were mentioned human trafficking and um family services division those are a few of the non-patrol based operations branch pieces that have detectives in them so in order or have officers in them so in order to provide people at the rank of officer who are not answering calls for service there are very few places uh you can go and find them and those two units happen to have officers who do investigations um domestic violence it's hard to say but i think you know people are one not out at work or you know off doing a lot of things they would normally be doing outside the pandemic so maybe people are around each other more there's more opportunity for that interactions to go bad but um you know i think for us that's important work it's hard to say you know we're we're not going to you know investigate domestic violence we have to investigate domestic violence so it's you know it's for us it's really figuring out how we get the resources to do all the things that we need to do because when you look at the scope of work none of it is unimportant and there's not people who are you know without important work to do or not doing uh important job somewhere so figuring out where we can move things without you know totally uh decimating some other piece of work is tricky we know when we do move people around it's going to impact work but we want to try to mitigate that as much as possible all right with that i think we will wrap it up i just want to thank everybody for joining today and just remind you that if you do have any further questions that come up as you're uh covering your stories just send us an email to ppbio at portlandoregon.gov and we'll seek out those answers for you thanks again everybody thanks everybody you