Originally Posted by kane

A handful of years back there were a lot of changes within the Portland police department. There were a couple of high profile cases where innocent people got killed by the police. One was when a pregnant black woman was shot by a white cop and killed and another was a mentally handicapped guy was shot and killed by the police. Both of these cases brought with them a ton negative publicity.

For several years after those two cases anything that police did wrong was highly scrutinized. They went through a few different police chiefs and then the city set up a citizen's review board that looked into cases where the police overreached or were supposedly out of line.

Part of the issue too is that Portland is one of the most liberal cities in the nation so anything involving the police in a negative way can start a firestorm. We have a lot of people in this city who think that the cops shouldn't be allowed to carry guns.

Eventually, they got a police chief in who decided to stop trying to appease the press and decided to just focusing on doing good work. She was also very open with the community and the activists groups and invited local leaders to meet with her and work with the police department. Her work seemed to change a lot of the negativity towards the police. One of the big changes she made was trying to keep officers in specific areas for extended periods of time. This way they got to know their neighborhoods and the people there got to know them and it gave it a more community type feel instead of having different police in there all the time.

There are still issues that come up form time to time, like with any big city, but it seems like much of the ongoing hate is gone.

That chief left a few years ago and the new guy seems to be doing a decent job.