Jim Gaither: I'm Jim Gaither. I am a PS3 public safety support specialist. I'm a retired Portland Police Officer, did 28 years. Gerbis Soler-Gonzalez: My name's Gerbis Soler. And my role is a public safety support specialist for Portland Police. My overall goal is to become a Portland Police Officer. Lt. Greg Stewart: So for those who live, work, or play in Portland, you may start to see new public safety support specialists on the street. You may call the police and have somebody respond who doesn't look like a traditional police officer. Gerbis Soler-Gonzalez: Hey, how you doing? Lt. Greg Stewart: We'd like to introduce you to our new public safety support specialist program. Gerbis Soler-Gonzalez: Right here? Speaker 4: So, we're parked down the street out here. Gerbis Soler-Gonzalez: We're here to help. So in any way that we can, if they need a transport somewhere because they just got their vehicle stolen, we're there. Jim Gaither: So we're going to head over here and pick up the owner of the stolen truck. Lt. Greg Stewart: Public safety support specialists are professional staff brought on by the Portland Police Bureau to assist sworn officers, but that do not have full police authority. This means that they can't issue citations, make arrests, or otherwise engage in police actions, and that the state of Oregon doesn't recognize them as police officers. However, what they can do is things like respond to lower level calls for service, assist community members with livability complaints, and assist our officers, freeing the officer's time up to engage in other activities Jim Gaither: This way it frees them up to stay on the priority calls and then the people still get to have that contact with the police department, the police bureau, with having a human come talk to them. Gerbis Soler-Gonzalez: So far, the citizens are pretty happy to see us. It's a new thing. So they don't really expect it. But once I introduce myself and I tell them what I do, they're pretty happy. Lt. Greg Stewart: Our public safety support specialists are unarmed. They're dressed in a green polo. They drive Transit vans. Jim Gaither: How long ago was your truck stolen? Speaker 5: Last Wednesday. Lt. Greg Stewart: My hope with this program is that the new PS3 position will be both more efficient and a better use of the resources of the City of Portland, but also that will allow officers to get back to some of the more community engagement type activities that we used to engage in. Currently, officers frequently spend the majority of their shift responding to calls repeatedly. Our hope is that by shifting some of these lower level calls to another resource, officers will have more time to do things like foot patrols, to get out in the neighborhoods more, to interact with people more, and that when emergencies do a call, we'll be able to respond to them more quickly. Jim Gaither: Go ahead and see if to start up for you. Okay. Thank you.