By Rebecca Ellis
With two months left (click here) until he faces voters, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has pledged to take a different tack to leading his city.
Speaking behind a podium in an empty City Hall chamber Wednesday, the mayor issued a mea culpa of sorts, promising to lead both better and more visibly. Wheeler said he felt he hadn’t been focused enough on the crises facing the city and had failed to engage with Portlanders “enough or in the right way.”
“Frankly, I have not been focused enough on the two issues that are the most important to the city of Portland,” he said. “And right now, that is ending the nightly violence and getting our community back on its feet. And number two, it’s about economic recovery, both for our households and our small businesses. I need to focus like a laser beam on those two issues.”
The mayor said he planned to start this new direction with two meetings.
The first would take place Wednesday evening with the police bureau, when he planned to ask if they needed more resources to bring protests to “a peaceful conclusion.” Wheeler said he also wanted to see what ideas the bureau has to hold officers accountable “in real time” rather than through the city’s Independent Police Review, where a complaint against an officer can take months to work its way through the system. The mayor did not specify with whom he was meeting inside the bureau.
Having grievances answered in real-time will provide the protesters with less reason to protest. The protests are happening for real reasons. The resolve by police and citizen leadership has to be just as real as the grievances. Democracy is about people, not the ultimate control of them. Every one of those protests wants peaceful lives, but, it is interrupted by real reasons to protest.
The police violence toward protesters is not helpful when it is simply violence due to power and not governance.
The second meeting will be Thursday with “key stakeholders” from the business community to ask what the city can do to help downtown. The announcement comes on the heels of Williamette Week reporting that a prominent downtown property owner had delivered a heated letter to the City Council saying they were abdicating their duties and endorsing lawlessness in the area....
