What has Lane County changed a year after protests for racial justice? – The Register-Guard

Jordyn Brown and Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick, Eugene Register-Guard, and Elizabeth Gabriel, KLCC| Eugene Register-Guard and KLCC

Protests against police violence and racism occurred on a near-daily basis last summeracross Lane County, prompted by the murder of George Floyd.

Companies,school districtsand local governments publicly expressed support for racial justice as the crowds of voices calling for change grew. Some Lane County police departments announced they would make immediate changes, public health agencies began to tackle the pandemic through a lens of racial justice and Gov. Kate Brown called for a special session to pass police accountability legislation.

But a year later, some activists are left wondering if any substantial changes have been made.

While some remain optimistic about where last summers wave of energy will take communities, for some that have witnessed moments like this before, theres a feeling of deja vu.

The only difference is I see is more young white people and even some older white people involved, said Eugene resident Henry Luvert. Back in the day, it was Black folks, so they would shoot you (for protesting), whereas now sometimes they'll come out with rubber bullets.

Luvertwas a president of the local NAACP for about 20 years and was involved with civil rights movements in the area since the 1980s; he's pulled back his involvementin recent years for his health. He had a computer store,a construction company and served as a firefighter in the '80s where he says he faced racism from his peers as one of the first and only Black firefighters.

It's more of the same, Luvert said. What happens is you take one or two steps forward, you get pushback.

The core issue driving protests last summer was police use of force, fueling calls for defunding and abolishing police departments across the U.S.

Around Lane County, therewas animmediate response of possible solutions and suggestions.

Schools reevaluated having armed, uniformed police on campus. The Eugene School Board voted 6-1to remove police from schools, being the only one of the three major metro school districts in Lane County to do so.

And some policy changes were made at the Eugene and Springfield police departments after several use-of-force incidents in the past few year.

Eugene Police Department responded to the first week of protests and the initial May 29 riot with pepper balls, tear gas, arrests and curfews, which prompted two lawsuits.

Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner took some immediate steps, scaling back police involvement at protests, banning the use of chokeholds a few weeks ahead of state reforms. EPD also has a section of its website devoted to "8 Cant Wait," a police reform campaign thatprovidesalist of policy changes that can be quickly enacted,with the department committing to six of the eight reforms.

Skinner announced that as ofJune 14, EPD will report to the public displays of force such as pointing a taser, firearm and using K9s to gain compliance in incidents as well as uses of force.

Across the river in Springfield, however, changes in policing this year were not prompted by department initiative, but various use-of-force lawsuits and whistleblower complaints.

One wrongful death lawsuit was settled in 2020 on behalf of Stacy Kenny, who was killed by police during a traffic stop in 2019. The lawsuit, which noted a toxic warrior culture within the department, was settled by the city of Springfield for a record $4.55 million. An independent review released this year also found police "immediately resorted to force." As part of the settlement, the city agreed to a plan laid out by the Kenny family to correct this culture, which includedthe independent review and requiring SPD to annually report its use-of-force incidents and make several changes to policies, such as prioritizing de-escalation.

In response to the "8 Cant Wait" campaign, then-Springfield Police Chief Richard Lewis told city councilors in November he views the eight changes as unreasonable because they don'tmake an exception for officers arriving at immediately threatening scenes.He said SPD officers would still be allowed to use otherwise prohibited use-of-force tactics if their lives or others were in danger.

Lewis was placed on paid administrative leave at the end of March,during a still-ongoinginvestigationinto a complaint from a former recruit that he falsified information about her. He announced his retirement on May 19.

Springfield hired a new interim police chief, Andrew Shearer, who had 28 years with the Portland Police Bureau, which has had its own lawsuits and federal orders related to repeated incidents of use-of-force against protesters this last year.

Shearer said when taking the job he saw the various headlines about SPDs issues and wasnt deterred, seeing it as a chance for change and improvement.

I'm always up for a challenge, he told The Register-Guard.

Activismmoved from the Eugene and Springfield streetsto its board rooms last year. Protesters and activists gave public comment at city council and county board meetingsand protested atcity leaders homes at night. They were met with resolutions and words pledging change.

Unlike its neighboring communities, Springfields city council has notissuedany formal resolution. Springfield Mayor Sean VanGordon, who was appointed to the position in January and has been on the council since 2011, did denounce white supremacy in his State of the City address.

We didn't pass a resolution against racism, but we did talk about the fact that political violence isn't welcome here, VanGordonsaid. Maybe it's a different venue than taking a formal action, but as mayor, thats actually the biggest megaphone I have.

The only tangible change that came from council action wasintroducing body-worn cameras for allSpringfield officers.

A year ago, facing budget concerns because of COVID-19, the council and budget committee planned to eliminate the funding set aside for police body cameras. When people gathered outside city hall to protest the decision, cameras were put back into the budget.

... To drive transparency, (we decided) that as a city this size, we've got to have body cameras, and we have got to figure out how to make it work, VanGordon said.

VanGordon said the best way he found to gather information about how people are feeling over the last year was to have one-on-one talks.

Over that summer, I had a lot of coffee, he said, adding he talked with about six people, not necessarily people of color. Those one-on-one moments and phone calls are really how you gather the feeling about where the community is.

We're a community of 60,000 people that goes all the way from the farthest point on the leftto the farthest point on the right, he said, about his takeaways from those conversations. Overall, it's always meaningful to have those types of conversations.

VanGordon announced last week that he will be holding quarterly conversations with community members via Zoom, calledVisit With Mayor VanGordon, with the first one happening Tuesday, June 22.

Meanwhile,Eugenecity leaders continued to face the question of what "public safety really is.

The City Council unanimously passed resolutions in 2019 and again in 2021that denounce white nationalism, alt-right and extremist groups. Eugene has had a police auditors office and body cameras for officers for years, but the protests called for more accountability.

Nationally, advocates made clear the call wasnt reform police,but defund police.

In Eugene, community members called on city officials toconsider changing the way revenues from the community safetypayroll tax, passed by voters inJune 2019, are spent. The taxis intended to generate $23.6 million annually to provide long-term funding for community safety services.

As originally proposed, more than half of those Community Safety Initiative funds would go to the citys police departmentincluding more than 50 new officers and other police staff, a street crimes unit and 10 additional jail beds, while a combined 10% would go to crime prevention and services to address homelessness.

Locally, the calls for "defund police" areeven more specific: reallocate and fund CAHOOTS,a 32-year-old emergency response program that continues to receive nationwide attention as a potential alternative to policing. In 12-hour shifts, teams made up of unarmed medics and crisis workers respond to medical or psychological emergencies in Eugene and Springfield. In 2019, CAHOOTShandled about 24,000 calls for service.

CAHOOTS wasn't included in theCommunity Safety Initiative fundingdespite the city touting CAHOOTS as a community service on thewebsite advertising the initiative.

InJuly 2020 the council voted to create an Ad Hoc Committee on policing and reevaluate the Community Safety Initiative by gathering more public input on the funding uses, especially from BIPOC residents.

After 46 hours of focus groups, listening sessions andonline surveys, the Ad Hoc Committee on May 17 offered the council 50 recommendations for changes.

Part of the feedback given tocity officials supportsthe use of alternatives to law enforcement, such as CAHOOTS.

According to the committee's report, CAHOOTS was a dominant example and one that was highly praised. Italso notes that CAHOOTS funding is "absent in the (Community Safety Initiative)" and says many focus group participants asked for the city to make funding explicit while others suggested separating CAHOOTS funding from EPD funding.

Some survey respondents and participants in the listening sessions directly asked for an increase in CAHOOTS services.

Following the report's findings, CAHOOTS requested $1.8 million from the cityso it could offer competitive wagesand wrote a letter to the City Council asking for direct funding from the Community Safety Initiative.

For now, the budget committee recommended the City Council add $125,000 of one-time funding for CAHOOTS in the next fiscal years budget from reserve funds to maintain an additional five hours per day of service, according to city spokesperson Laura Hammond.The committeeis also consideringincludingCAHOOTS in Community Safety Initiative allocations inthe fall.

One of the things that we learned from the Community Safety Initiative engagement, was a different framing… people were saying, We don't want you to talk about community safety, we want you to talk about community well-being, Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis said. That's a profound shift.

When asked whether these steps taken this year were enough, Vinis said she believes the council has done excellent work.

I think these two initiatives the ad hoc committee and the going back with another round of engagement on the Community Safety Initiative were excellent ideas. And from those reports, I would say we have learned a lot, she said.

I won't say that, in every respect, it was perfect, Vinis said. There was no model to follow and we responded in a climate of urgency that we needed to act … Sometimes when you move very quickly, you don't anticipate all of the ways in which there might be unintended consequences from your actions. But I think that both of those reports really set the groundwork for us.

County leaders were called on for larger change last summer, including taking action to rename the county.

The county is named after Joseph Lane, the first governor of Oregon Territory and a slaveowner. A petition circulated calling for a change to the countys name, which the Board of Commissioners discussed last August, but in the end the board kept the name, KLCC reported.

The board instead issued resolutions. The first was in June 2020 in support of Black Lives Matter. The second came in February 2021, when the county acknowledged its role in evicting and demolishing the citys first black neighborhood Ferry Street Village in 1949. The third was to acknowledge racism as a public health crisis this April.

Resolutions are interesting things in and of themselves, they don't do squat…unless they engender action and change they don't mean much you might as well put them on a shelf and forget them, said Board Chair Joe Berney. "But what that does is it gives staff a green light.

These declarations told county staff to prioritize equity in their work, Berney said, with actions such as opening up a sixth Community Health Center, prioritizing financial support for minority and women-owned small businesses, and bettering hiring practices.

We targeted recruitment for the jobs we were creating to populations that have been historically excluded from full workforce participation in those jobs, which in the building tradeswas women, people of color and veterans, Berney said. We were not attached toLane County government should look like Lane County. We were attached to, Lane County government should look far more diverse than Lane County what Lane Countys hopefully going to become.

Lane County Public Health set aside COVID-19 vaccine doses during distribution to ensure access for people who may have strained relationships with the medical system, including people who are experiencing homelessness as well as some people of color.

We're fighting racism as a public health crisis, and back in 2020 we weren't … we were fighting against police brutality, but police brutality is also a piece of racism it's also a piece of this public health environment that we have, said Martin Allums, protester-turned-BIPOC Community Liasion for LCPH.

Allums also pointed to the statewide passage of Measure 110, which decriminalizes small quantities drugs in Oregon and will potentially decrease yearly convictions for possession by 90%.

When the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission analyzed the racial and ethnic impacts of the measure, it found that Black Oregonians were overrepresented in the number of people convicted of drug possession, and that the passage of Measure 110 would eliminate the disparity.

With COVID, even though it's set us back so far in terms of the hustle and bustle of society, it gave us an opportunity to really stop and look around and really see how we treat each other and how we treat our communities, Allums said. You didn't have an option to turn away and ignore it, because you were forced to quarantine, you were forced to stop and see how you treated yourself and how you treated your community.

Even with these changes, theres still more to do to make a significant cultural shift to addressing racism, Berney said.

Its never enough, he said. Anyone that says its enough shouldn't be where they're at. It's never enough.

Seven police reform bills passed the Legislature during two special sessions called last summer, and at least eight more passed at the latest session, along with several other non-policing bills aimed at racial justice.The Oregon Legislature banned police use of chokeholds during the 2020 Special Legislative Session for pandemic and police accountability. The state alsoestablished the duty for other officers to intervene in a use-of-force situation.

Have we moved the needle? I think considerably. Is there more to do? There is much more to do because we're talking about years of systemic racism, Sen. James Manning Jr., D-Eugene said. We're talking about a system that was designed systemically to oppress and hold Black people people that look like me.

Manning, a former police officer and Army veteran, represents Oregon Senate District 7, which includes north Eugene, west Eugene, Santa Clara and Junction City. Hehas been involved with the creation and passage of many recent bills meant to reform policing in Oregon.

Manningsaid that even as protests have died down, the political will to make change has not.

All of my colleagues understand," he said, "that it's time for reform.

Editors' note: This project is a collaboration between The Eugene Register-Guard and KLCC public radio.

Editor's note: The original version of this story incorrectly stated how many calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019. It has been corrected to reflect the correct amount.

Contact reporter Jordyn Brown at jbrown@registerguard.comand on Twitter @thejordynbrown; reporter Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick atTatiana@registerguard.com and on Twitter@TatianaSophiaPT; andreporter Elizabeth Gabriel ategabriel@klcc.org andon Twitter@_elizabethgabs.

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What has Lane County changed a year after protests for racial justice? - The Register-Guard