In recent weeks, multiple news organizations in Portland have reported on the surprisingly tenuous future of Portland Street Response, a 3-year-old program described by Oregon Public Broadcasting as providing “an unarmed response to mental health crises or 911 calls related to people experiencing homelessness.” Rather than send police officers to address issues involving unhoused Portlanders, “the idea was to reduce over-policing of homeless Portlanders by dispatching mental health experts, social workers, or physicians to certain 911 calls.”
PSR was expanded several-fold last year, so that multiple teams of employees went out on more than 7,000 calls in a one-year period ending in April (a more than 500% increase compared to the previous year). OPB notes that an astonishing 98% of these incidents would have previously been within the purview of the Portland Police Department.
Given such impressive statistics — to which should be added the cost savings from sending an unarmed response, not to mention the concomitant reduction in the possibility of a police response escalating into a violent or deadly confrontation — why on earth are city officials and others questioning the program’s viability and future? After all, a recent report by Portland State University indicates that the program is largely meeting its goals (though it also identified problems in need of redress). And though it’s still new, the program has already fueled a wave of interest from other cities looking for alternative approaches to the vexing issue of homelessness (though to give credit where credit is due, PSR was modeled on an established program in Eugene, OR). It’s even received a national push thanks to some of Oregon elected federal officials, who helped make $1 billion available for like programs across the country.
The official city motto for Portland is “the city that works.” This is a program that’s working.
Yet those most directly involved with overseeing the program, particularly Interim Fire Chief Ryan Gillespie and city council member Rene Gonzalez (who oversees the Fire Bureau), have recently cast doubts on the program’s long-term future. Most decisively, Gonzalez, who ran for office on get-tough policies towards the city’s homeless population, has indicated ambivalence about the PSR’s core mission and concern that it’s siphoning money better spent on other public safety priorities, such as improving the city’s 911 response system. Crucially, Gonzalez defeated the city council member who pushed PSR into existence, so that there is now no strong advocate for its existence left among Portland’s elected officials.
As startling as it may be, recent reporting suggests that it is the program’s very success that has left it bereft of allies and beset by doubters and outright opponents. You will look in vain for any substantive criticisms of the program, such as its failure to help the population it’s intended to help.
Rather, its critics rest their case in part on the notion that the program has grown too fast and lacks proper structure and procedures, so that it is time to hit pause and figure out what steps to take next. Such is the position of Gillespie.
More decisively, though, firefighters and Commissioner Gonzalez have indicated that PSR’s approach to the homeless is “enabling” those without housing. Simultaneously, acting chief Gillespie has restricted PSR from buying new supplies to hand out to the unhoused, pointing to PSR staff’s lack of proper requisitioning procedures and Fire Bureau budget limitations. But the critiques of humanitarian assistance that builds trust and immediately helps the homeless seem closer to the heart of the PSR skeptics’ issues with the program. Last winter, Commissioner Gonzalez actually ordered PSR to stop distributing tents in the wake of a spate of tent fires, stating that “Firefighters’ job is to protect people. The concept of handing out tents to a population that has high rates of mental illness and very high rates of heavy drug use, is mind-boggling.” This, in a city that lacks sufficient shelter for its homeless population on any given night.
More recently, PSR's practice of handing out clothing to the unhoused was also criticized as “enabling” by some firefighters interviewed for the recent Portland State University report — a criticism that helps us better see the more fundamental philosophical conflict driving the moves to undercut and even sabotage the functioning of PSR. You can’t help but wonder what exactly is “enabled” by giving clothes to a person in rags or even naked in the midst of a mental health crisis - a sense of dignity? Becoming the object of the most rudimentary compassion and humanity? The mind boggles at anyone who would callously refer to this a “enabling” activity; it’s a turn of phrase that lays bare the cruelty behind the criminalization of homelessness.
It is not too much of a stretch to speculate that Gonzalez, who successfully ran for office on a punitive approach to the unhoused, simply sees PSR as both a waste of money and an unsettling challenge to his preferred approach to dealing with the homeless. His more old-school approach intersects neatly with his desire to maintain the support of the firefighters union that helped fund his run, and so he kills two birds with one stone by portraying the homeless as enemies of firefighter safety, vilifying the former while valorizing the latter. With the PSR unfortunately embedded within the Fire Bureau, he is also able to signal his loyalty to firefighters by suggesting its funds would be better spent on other Fire Bureau matters, while working to undercut a program whose very existence suggests a more humanitarian and long-term alternative approach to the unhoused.
Gonzalez has said that PSR has a place in the city’s homeless response, yet has already declined once to try moving the group into another department that might spare it unhelpful competition with funds for other Fire Bureau needs. But even as we see Gonzalez using PSR as a punching bag to build up his own tough-on-crime and homelessness bona fides, the lack of any vigorous defense from the other four city council members or Mayor Ted Wheeler speaks to a “tough love” turn in the whole elected city government’s approach to the unhoused. This attitude is most strikingly shown in the city’s ban of daytime camping, which went into effect this past week — despite apparently running afoul of a court ruling prohibiting such bans when there’s insufficient accommodations for the unhoused population. After years of an escalating crisis of the unhoused on Portland streets, city leaders appear to be embracing the failed policies of criminalization that arguably helped get the city to this crisis state in the first place. This is a dark turn for a city that not long ago had seemed to collectively understand the importance of housing-first, compassionate policies to resolve the agonizing issue of the unhoused.