With Dennis Rosenbaum set to retire at the end of June as Portland’s adviser on federally required police reforms, the city is choosing between two groups to take his place.
Rosenbaum’s partner Tom Christoff, who has set up his own 18-member team, and a four-member group led by Richard Rosenthal, who served as the first director of Portland’s Independent Police Review division, are in the running.
Rosenthal left the city in 2005 after nearly four years in the job and went on to become a monitor for police reforms in Denver and Cleveland. He’s now the first civilian director overseeing criminal investigations of police use of deadly force in British Columbia.
He said his goal will be to get Portland to meet the provisions of its settlement with the U.S. Justice Department to avoid having a court-ordered monitor appointed.
“The costs of hiring an independent monitor are extraordinary,” Rosenthal said, and the money can be better spent on having three or four full-time employees working within the city on getting police to meet the required changes.
In contrast, Christoff said he would work with a court monitor if U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon appoints one and didn’t expect the work to change much from what he has already done working with Rosenbaum.
“We already have the experience of, in essence, acting in the same capacity,” he said.
Both men and their teams answered questions during a virtual community forum Wednesday night.
The settlement, approved by Simon in 2014, followed a federal investigation that found Portland officers used excessive force against people with mental illness. It called for widespread changes to use-of-force and Taser policies and training, a restructuring of police crisis intervention services and quicker investigations into alleged police misconduct.
The city hasn’t met the requirements since early 2021 because of inappropriate police use and management of force during the 2020 social justice protests.
City and police leaders are working on returning to compliance by taking some required steps, including equipping officers with body cameras and hiring a civilian dean of training. An outside assessment of police crowd control training is still ongoing.
Last November, Simon urged lawyers from the Justice Department and city to select an independent monitor to oversee the reforms, concerned by the lack of progress. All parties to the case remain in mediation on the subject.
Christoff has worked side-by-side with Rosenbaum, a Chicago-based academic, since Rosenbaum was selected the city’s compliance officer in 2015 for the settlement. He said he’s already established relationships with lawyers for the city, police and Justice Department and community representatives and is familiar with all aspects of the agreement and the bureau’s history of meeting them or not.
“I was really drawn into stepping into this role, given my knowledge of the history and evolution as well as the current state of the settlement agreement with the Department of Justice,” he said.
Christoff has proposed an annual cost of about $797,000. Rosenthal’s estimated annual cost for his smaller team would be about $440,000, not including travel expenses.
Unlike Rosenbaum, Christoff said he has added a community engagement aspect to his team “to make sure that everybody who is impacted by the settlement agreement will be able to have that voice.”
Leading that effort would be Steven Holt who owns a Portland consulting company called “Try Excellence” and has trained city officers on equity.
Among others who would be involved in community engagement are Janie Gullickson, a peer support and recovery mentor who is director of the Mental Health and Addiction Association in Oregon; and Kevin Fits, executive director of the Oregon Mental Health Consumers Association, according to Christoff
Rosenthal said he offers a smaller team that would bring a “fresh-eyes approach” by experts in the field and save money for the city so it can spend more on returning to compliance versus a court-appointed monitor.
His goal is to make sure police follow all the settlement’s requirements to ensure effective, constitutional policing in Portland.
“To see how far the bureau fell out of compliance was actually quite disappointing,” Rosenthal said.
One of the members of Rosenthal’s team is Randolph Dupont, who created the Memphis police Crisis Intervention Team model, which relies on a team of officers trained to respond to crisis calls and who volunteer for the job. Rosenthal said he also would add a Portland resident to his team of outside experts and work closely with Portland’s existing community advisory groups.
Rosenthal said he’s driven to make the unique settlement that Portland reached with the Justice Department — absent a traditional federal consent decree or a court monitor – succeed.
Rosenthal said he brought in outside consultants, the Police Assessment Resource Center, to do regular independent reviews of police shootings when he worked for the city. Another firm, California-based OIR group, took over that work.
But the Police Bureau has yet to adopt, track or train officers on many of the repeated recommendations from those consultants, he said.
Jason Renaud, a member of the Mental Health Alliance, said the city didn’t do enough to draw candidates from across the country to replace Rosenbaum. The city received three proposals and narrowed the field to two teams, according to Stephanie Howard, the mayor’s community safety manager.
“There’s probably better candidates out there,” Renaud said.
Sarah Ames, a deputy city attorney, said the city asked the Indiana-based National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement to advertise the opening. The city also asked Portland State University and Tarleton University in Texas, which started hosting an annual conference on federal consent decrees for police reform in 2016, to share the job opening with their contacts.
A city selection team working with Justice Department lawyers, along with input from the Albina Ministerial Alliance’s Coalition for Police and Justice Reform and the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing, is expected to select one of the teams by the end of next week and recommend approval to City Council.
— Maxine Bernstein
Email mbernstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-8212
Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian
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