Poverty Makes You Mad...The Mayor Makes You Madder...The Cops Make You Maddest

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Produced by: 
KBOO
Program:: 
Air date: 
Thu, 11/13/2014 - 10:00am to 10:15am
Interview with Dan Handelman, Portland CopWatch & Albina Ministerial Alliance

 
Poverty Makes A Person Mad…
 
Think:  The two groups of people most likely to spend their days and nights together in a state of mutual fear and mistrust?
The police and the homeless.  And the homeless very often have come off the rails.  Poverty does make a person crazy, both mentally and physically ill and more or less permanently teetering on the cusp of committing a crime.  Enter  DENNIS ROSENBAUM.  He’s  going to be visiting from time to time to the tune of $240 thousand dollars.
Let’s see, that comes to 240 apartments at $1000 a month.  If people double up that remove nearly five hundred people from the streets. The numbers could easily be doubled with matching grants from the Portland Business Alliance, City Club and other entities such as Nike. We could house about one thousand people and connect them to services that lead to employment.  Now you have tax-paying people, mended lives and hopeful futures.
Denver and a few other cities have discovered the completely obvious and not at all surprising fact that when you give people a safe place to call home, they no longer display the symptoms that characterize ‘mental illness’
Problem solved! oversee Portland's federally mandated police reforms over the next several years, offered city leaders something no other applicant could match.
 
Ah, but instead we have Dennis Rosenbaum who “Befitting his post as director of the Center for Research in Law and Justice, the Chicago-based professor mustered a nationally recognized team steeped not only in the drudgery of data analysis, but also in the ups and downs of policing and mental health issues.” (The Portland Mercury)
From Chicago.
Or not, actually.  No, Dennis will not be joining us here on the streets of Portland.  And Dennis will never know what it’s like to live hard out here in the west.
So retired judge Paul DeMuniz , whose qualifications start with the fact that he actually lives here will take up a lot of the slack that lies between Chicago and Portland.
Enter:
Retired Oregon Supreme Court Justice Paul De Muniz, who was glancingly mentioned in Rosenbaum's application materials.  The Oversight Guy gets an Overseer…
 
Mayor Hales and Commisioner  Amanda Fritz, in backing Rosenbaum and De Muniz, passed on two other finalists who fell short for various reasons. Local consultant John Campbell put together a sizable team of Portland-based experts, but wasn't seen as strong on mental health issues—important given that the US Department of Justice accused Portland police of engaging in a pattern or practice of using excessive force against people with mental illness.
 
Oregon Alcohol and Drug Policy Commission Executive Director Daniel Ward made perhaps the most compelling case on mental health of the three, having talked about his own history with depression. But he applied all on his own, without a team to help him do the work. He said he'd wait to find helpers until after he got the job.
 
Portland Copwatch, in a statement, said it spoke with activists in Chicago who questioned Rosenbaum’s role in that city’s police accountability movement. And both Copwatch and the AMA lamented Fritz and Hales’ willingness to defy the city’s selection panel.
 
"The city has already taken the stand that the community's input is not important," the AMA's co-chairs wrote.
 
—The Mercury's Dirk VanderHart contributed to this report.
 

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