Portland’s new government needs a more practical approach to police supervision

With the upcoming change in Portland’s form of government in 2025, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler recently took command of all city bureaus and handed over day-to-day operations to an interim city administrator to “test and refine” a consolidated approach to governing.

Their testing and refining should also include taking a close look at the organizational structure for the new government, specifically for oversight of police. The plan calls for dividing supervision of the police chief from supervision of the police bureau – a problematic governance model that will make it difficult to achieve the long-term reforms Portlanders want. Wheeler should make clear in this time of transition that the next mayor should delegate supervision of the police chief to the city administrator.

According to the organizational chart for the new government, the mayor will continue to oversee the police chief, as is currently the case, for budget and business operations. However, the new city administrator, with the support of a deputy, will oversee the roughly 800 police officers and 300 staff members who comprise the Portland Police Bureau.

In other large U.S. cities, day-to-day management of the police is either within the mayor’s responsibilities or delegated to a city manager or administrator, not split between the two of them. Vesting responsibility with a professional administrator does not absolve elected officials - like our next mayor – from ultimate accountability and oversight of the chief. It simply acknowledges the reality that most elected officials do not have expertise in city management or public safety and are not qualified to direct a police chief or fully evaluate their performance.

Portland needs a practical approach that ensures a qualified professional, not subject to the election cycle, will work with the police chief and Portland Police Association on long-term policy issues like modernizing training and accountability procedures, hiring and retaining police officers, upgrading dilapidated facilities, obtaining appropriate technology, and ensuring police are transparent with the public. A clear line of supervision and oversight will also mitigate the risk of confusion during emergencies.

The hard truth is that to make significant progress on the most difficult public safety issues takes multiple cycles of police union contract negotiations over many years. If a mayor has direct day-to-day management of the police chief while at the same time our first city administrator manages the rest of police and related employees, we will have a confused mix of political and managerial priorities. The most likely result, looking at history, is that a mayor’s short-term budget and policy pressures will take priority over reforms that realistically take longer due to negotiations that by collective bargaining law must be done with the police union.

The 10-year effort to start Portland’s body camera program is a good example of the dysfunction that occurs when policy decisions are separated from operations and budget allocations. The Department of Justice ordered Portland to start a body camera program and yet it took a decade to come to agreement with the union and launch a pilot of the effort. Two successive mayors prioritized policies other than body cameras in police union negotiations and the budget and technology teams on the operational side of city government raised different issues and recurring financial constraints when mayors did prioritize the effort. The result was years of inaction. We will likely get more examples like this delay if the chief reports to the mayor and the rest of the police staff report to the city administrator.

Critics of this approach may say that Portlanders lose direct oversight over police if their elected representative, the mayor, assigns day-to-day management of the chief to the city administrator. The Charter Commission debated this and decided that the mayor, as our elected representative, should be the direct supervisor. This is a misunderstanding of how supervision really works each day in the complex systems of public safety and emergency management. The appropriate role of the mayor is to set policy, in alignment with the City Council, while a professional manager leads the implementation. This works in cities across the country.

Separated oversight of the chief and the bureau between the mayor and administrator sets Portlanders up for continued disillusionment with our public safety system. The next mayor should commit to letting the city administrator take day-to-day responsibility for oversight of both the police chief and police bureau. In 2025, Portlanders should know who is in charge.