The inaugural meeting for Eugene’s newest watchdog group, formed to focus on police behavior toward city residents, kicked off not with a bang, but more of a drumbeat.
The seven committee members and approximately 50 supporters of the Independent Police Review Project, which was organized in late May to shed light on issues of police accountability, met Friday evening at EWEB to recount tales of what organizers say is an increasing amount of police misconduct.
“The turnout wasn’t as great as I thought it would be, but I think we accomplished our goal
of giving people an opportunity to speak about abuses that they’ve suffered and need to talk about,” one of the project’s organizers, Trish Binder, said.
Several speakers at the gathering made references to the June 16-18 anarchist rally in Eugene that led to 67 arrests and generated complaints about police actions. But a few speakers seized the moment to highlight similar incidents in other cities, such as Portland or Philadelphia, where last Wednesday’s videotaped beating of an arrested man by 12 police officers gained national attention.
“We’re here to let you know that the excesses and abuses that you face here in Eugene are not isolated to your town,” Portland Copwatch volunteer Kristian Williams said.
Williams and Shira Zucker, also of Portland Copwatch agreed to speak at the meeting when asked by IPRP organizers.
Carol Berg, another project organizer, stressed that this organization was not founded by anarchists, but does consider itself to be all-inclusive when it comes to community members. IPRP will function as a resource and referral service for people who have complaints against police officers, she said.
The IPRP will gather citizen complaints and make those statements available to the public and report findings to City Council members. One aspect of the group’s make-up, however — the exclusion of police or city government representatives in organizing issues — is a strike against it, City Manager Jim Johnson said.
“My gut reaction [is] whenever a group wants to see a change in the way things are done, they need to conduct their business in a way that includes the city, [otherwise] their outcome is not going to happen,” he said.
One speaker at the meeting elicited laughter from the crowd when she began her comments, “I’m from the government, but I’m here to help.”
Betsy Brown has been a custodian at the Eugene Library for nine years and said, in her opinion, unelected officials such as Johnson and executive managers of other city departments run the city, not the City Council.
“If we as a community are getting screwed by the police we have to look at whose hand is on the screwdriver,” Brown said, emphasizing that she spoke as a private citizen and not as a city employee.
The claim that city management is in control of city policy is a common misperception, City Councilor Bobby Lee said. Although city management makes operational decisions, he said, the City Council decides policy and the public ultimately helps make the final decisions on those policy directions.
“I welcome [the IPRP], but they’re called an ‘independent review project’ so I’m not going to get involved directly,” Lee said. “But I do want to work in partnership with them.”
The next “speak out” meeting is scheduled for sometime in October, when the majority of University students will be back in town.
“I think students in particular are a group that I want to communicate with and I think we have students around who are interested in communicating with other students about this issue,” Binder said.