“As the male officer’s hands went across my body, all I could wonder was ‘Why me?’” I asked him—begged and pleaded in fact for both to tell me—but my cries for answers fell on deaf ears. I felt violated, humiliated, and threatened for my life.” – Lisa Haynes, a 4’10” African American woman in Portland mistaken for a 5’6” male, Latino suspect by Portland Police.
Oregon House Bill 2002 on police profiling passed in the recently ended 2015 legislative session. The House passed it 55-4 on June 26th and the Senate passed it 28-1 on July 1st. This Friday, July 10th, Pamela Santos will be talking with Salome Chimuku, Public Policy Director for the Center for Intercultural Organizing (CIO) which took a major role in introducing and lobbying for this measure about what HB 20002 means for Oregonians now that the bill is on its way to Governor Kate Brown’s desk and becoming law in 2016. In the words of Sam Cooke, a change is gonna come to Oregon – what is that going to look like?
Oregon until now has never had a statewide policy banning or even defining profiling by police and was one of eight states that do not ban profiling. Victims of police misconduct in Portland and the state have been speaking up about police accountability and their skepticism of the complaint process for years upon years. The Portland Independent Police Review Division in their 2012 annual report found that 77 percent of complaints made were dismissed and without ever receiving an internal affairs review. According to Copwatch, Oregon has never fired a law enforcement agent for killing an unarmed person of color. There is no statewide system for Oregonians to report cases of profiling when people are stopped, questioned, searched on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, language, housing status, sexual orientation, or gender identity. That translates to not documenting incidents, no data in one unified place to show there is a problem and most of all no accountability for local and state law enforcement agencies.
Bread and Roses airs 6pm every Friday and is a collective of women identified radio activists bringing you feminist news and public affairs programing every Friday at 6PM, here on your community radio station KBOO 90.7 FM. Women have had this forum on KBOO since 1978. You can download archived shows at kboo.fm/breadandroses.
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