The Portland Police Chief regrets Mayor Ted Wheeler’s decision to shut down a gun violence reduction team, just as the city has seen a dramatic increase in shooting that the senior police officer described as “very, very alarming.”
“The loss of the gun violence reduction team, in particular, has a diminishing effect on how we can investigate the shooting, which is some of the most important crimes we investigated,” said Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell in a podcast. “So we still have to do that work and figure out how we will do it without the experience that that team has been challenging.”
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Lovell was responding to police numbers that showed a dramatic increase in shootings in the city. As of July 12, there were 42 shootings in the city this month. (That compares to just 11 in that time period in 2019, according to KPTV.)
Julio also seems to be dwarf in the previous months. According to the media, there were 59 shootings throughout June and 46 throughout May.
Mayor Wheeler had abolished the unit as part of an “action plan to increase police accountability and reinvest in black and brown communities.” The plan, announced last month, promised to dissolve the team and “fundamentally reform our approach to reducing gun violence in collaboration with the Office for the Prevention of Youth Violence, the District Attorney-elect and other partners.”
Police Chief Lovell went on to say that the shooting is still being investigated, first by patrols before investigations move to the detective division, “but not having that recourse is troubling.”
“It remains to be seen where those numbers will tend, but I’m afraid that will have a negative impact on communities of color, especially,” he said, before calling the increased shooting “very, very alarming.” “
“We have detectives. We have officers who will go out and do the initial investigation and scrutiny at the scene. But we lost a very valuable resource in the armed violence reduction team, ”he said.
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The shootings come as Portland has been hit by a wave of protests and violence in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody in May. However, the shooting does not appear to be directly associated with those protests.
Those protests have dragged on for six weeks in a row, and local businesses have reported losses of $ 23 million due to looting and riots that have gripped their center since late May.
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Wheeler said acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf called him Tuesday to speak to him about the ongoing violence and how the government could help. Wheeler tweeted that he told Wolf “that my biggest immediate concern is the violence federal agents have brought to our streets in recent days, and the potentially deadly tactics their agents use.”
“We do not need or want your help,” he said.
Danielle Wallace and Michael Ruiz of Fox News contributed to this report.