Portland Police Dialogue Liaison Officers help deescalate ICE protests

Protests at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in South Portland have been largely peaceful, despite President Trump’s attempts to send National Guard troops to the site. Local law enforcement has successfully managed conflicts among protesters and counter-protesters and made arrests for those who commit property or other crimes.

In September, Portland Police Chief Bob Day said on “Think Out Loud” that the bureau’s approach to these protests is consciously different from the one it took in 2020. He cited the use of Dialogue Liaison Officers who are “embedded” early on. “These are officers that are clearly identifiable with white shirts,” he said. “They’ve had additional training, and they go early on and try to establish communication and understanding.”

We learn more about this approach from Sergeant Daniel DiMatteo and Officer Jessica Ruch. They are among the approximately 10 Dialogue Liaison Officers the bureau deploys to protests.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. About a month ago, we had Portland Police Chief Bob Day on the show. I asked him how the bureau’s approach to protests outside the ICE building right now is different from how the bureau handled racial justice protests in downtown Portland in 2020. Here is part of what he said:

Police Chief Bob Day: The use of our dialogue officers has been so significant where we embed officers early on. These are officers that are clearly identifiable with white shirts. They’ve had additional training, and they go early on and try and establish communication and understanding, maybe provide some off-ramps for some of the dissidents so that, you know, we can take the temperature down. If people are not responsive to that, they don’t engage, that’s fine. We don’t enforce ourselves on them, but we make ourselves available.

Miller: We want to know more about what Dialogue Liaison Officers actually do, so we’ve invited two of them onto the show. Sergeant Daniel DiMatteo and Officer Jessica Ruch are among the approximately 10 Dialogue Liaison Officers the bureau currently deploys. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Ofc. Jessica Ruch: Hi.

Sgt. Daniel DiMatteo: Thanks for having us.

Miller: Sergeant DiMatteo, first, is this a volunteer team to be on this team? Is it because you have affirmatively said, I want to do this?

DiMatteo: Oh yeah, nobody’s forced or co-opted into this. If you want to do this, you do it. Even all people who may want to do it, not everybody might be the right fit for it. It starts with people wanting to do it, and then we move on from there.

Miller: Officer Ruch, why did you want to do it?

Ruch: I like having those conversations with people. I typically work patrol downtown and there’s always gonna be another call, so we have to get through our work as quickly and efficiently as possible and having this opportunity to have longer conversations about what those contacts mean to them is pretty rewarding, and I like doing that with everyone.

Miller: So part of this was this gave you an opportunity to talk to people for longer.

Ruch: Yes.

Miller: The chief said that people can identify you because you’ve got a white shirt on. What are you wearing?

DiMatteo: It’s a set of gray pants, a white polo shirt or white long sleeve shirt, and then a regular vest. We’re still just regular police officers, but this is kind of an extra duty, so the only difference between the way we dress a normal police officer and us, they’re wearing all navy blue stuff. We have gray pants and a white shirt.

Miller: Does it say Dialogue Liaison Officer somewhere?

DiMatteo: Yeah, so we have a back patch and instead of it just where it says Portland Police, it’ll say Portland Police Liaison Officer. And then on the shirts, on the sleeves, a lot of times it says Liaison Officer, but in the external vest covers up, it also says Liaison Officer on the back of the shirt.

Miller: Where did the idea of this kind of job, Dialogue Liaison Officer, come from?

DiMatteo: A couple of different places it came from, we had officers who were doing this in the past. It wasn’t actually called Liaison Officer back then. It was just officers trying to kind of act as a go-between or a mediator between protesters and the thing they were protesting, to see if they could make it work better, where both sides come out feeling like they’ve won or feeling there was some accomplishment.

But also you have Doctor Clifford Stott who is a professor in England, and he teaches crowd-based management using evidence-based psychology. He was teaching out in Columbus, Ohio, and they sent myself and another sergeant out there just to learn from them and see, can we bring this program back to Portland and make it work?

Miller: What made you want to do that?

DiMatteo: Prior to this, I was riding the bikes downtown. I was part of the downtown bike officers, which is completely separate from the rapid response team officers who you see at protests. We were downtown and we’re doing livability stuff. I would go and talk to businesses, residents, anybody downtown who just wanted to talk or to see what I could do to help out. The chiefs and the bosses here at the Portland police noticed that and they were like, you seem like you have the ability to talk to anybody and try to work for solutions, would you like to do this? I’m like, yep, why not?

Miller: Officer Ruch, can you just describe how something might start? Let’s say this afternoon you’re gonna be going to the ICE building. We should say again for folks who haven’t been there recently, it’s very quiet there right now and it has been for weeks. But let’s say that things were a little bit more animated. You show up, how does it even start?

Ruch: Those conversations are a big part of it. A lot of people, their only contact with police is through an enforcement action, whether it be a traffic stop or something terrible has happened. This gives us the chance to have those larger communication conversations about what they expect or why they’re there. A lot of the conversations we have there are for creating safe spaces so that’s preventive, talking about what kind of expectations there are.

We’ve heard in the past, there have been concerns of livability issues, so letting people know what’s needed. Or following up if there is an enforcement action, we want to create that dialogue so they understand what we did and it’s not against this particular group or an idea, but addressing a specific behavior.

Miller: So if I understand correctly, like when you’re talking about an enforcement action, let’s say that you see an alleged assault, and you or some other officers arrest somebody, and then the question is how do you talk about that with the other protesters who are still there? What do you say?

Ruch: Again, addressing that specific behavior. When you see somebody get arrested, we have these very focused arrests that have happened where you see a number of people, usually on bikes, come in, take that person in custody after we’ve developed probable cause and removed, and that’s frightening because everyone has said, well, I saw that person five minutes ago and that wasn’t what was happening.

So giving us the opportunity to say, this is why we did this, we believe we’re creating a safer space, we did it during a time that we thought was safest for everyone, and we’re here to keep talking about it. Bringing it back down, we don’t want someone to get arrested and for everyone to get agitated and feel like something greater has happened and a greater concern for them to address by larger behaviors.

Miller: What’s the range of responses that you might get, Sergeant DiMatteo, from, you say, hey, we’re here to keep the peace, to keep things calm, to give you a chance to exercise your free speech. What’s the range of responses you get?

DiMatteo: It goes from what the best things and the worst things you can think of somebody saying to somebody, that’s what we get. We’ll walk over and we’ll have people tell us to swear at us, F off, they’ll tell us to go kill ourselves. You will have people who will come up and say thank you for being here. You will have people, say they are grateful that we’re here, that we’re helping, we’re actually helping the community.

Then you’ll have people who are in the middle who are like, I don’t know what you do, help me understand what you’re doing. It’s the gamut of both sides, and I like the people in the middle because those are the ones who truly don’t know, haven’t made up their minds. It seems like the ones on the other side made up their minds, either they like you or they hate you. The ones in the middle are the ones we can actually influence like, here’s why I’m here, here’s what I’m doing.

Miller: When someone says to you, kill yourself or F off, what’s your response?

DiMatteo: For me, it doesn’t bother me because these people don’t know me on a personal level. What’s happening is they’re mad at the government, at an institution. They’re mad at the uniform, they’re mad in general. They’re saying something just out of kind of rage or just, it’s a visceral, they’re also trying to get a response out of me. They want me to get mad at them so that they can kind of try to catch me, maybe in a gotcha, here’s the police overreacting. And again, I don’t do it because you don’t know me personally, so you saying that, I believe they’re just trying to get the response. They’re not actually… yeah.

Miller: The interesting thing about that is what came to mind is the phrase that we heard early on, after the Trump administration said they were going to send federalized National Guard, elected officials, folks in power, the police chief, the governor, a bunch of people said to protesters, “don’t take the bait,” meaning don’t take the bait from federal troops and give them what they want and become violent, give them an excuse to crack down on you. It almost seems like what you’re saying is that you also have to not take the bait, in this case, from protesters who want to get you to do the same thing.

Ruch: It’s for everyone, I would say. We need to be our solid selves and remember why we’re down there, to be the most help we can be. I know the initial “don’t take the bait” was for that initial big reaction to what people saw as a federal overreach. And there’s also “don’t take the bait” because not everyone down there agrees, so you’ll see these arguments and sometimes they become violent, sometimes they don’t. But people not understanding that when they take the bait, when somebody says something very offensive or something they really don’t agree with on a cellular level, don’t take the bait, don’t fall into it, don’t take it to a place that you can’t come back from.

Miller: How do you know that what you’re doing is working, in the moment?

Ruch: By conversations.

Miller: Just simply meaning if you’re talking, things are working?

Ruch: It’s slowing it down. We want to slow things down so people don’t react in a way that they’re not there to begin with, so if somebody becomes escalated, they might act out in a way that they can’t come back from. They hurt somebody, they damage something, and then it restricts their ability to use their voice in more helpful ways. If we can be there and keep talking to people, slow down the conversation, get those thoughtful responses, people understand their own thoughts better. They understand the thoughts of other people better, and they understand their actions better.

Miller: Sergeant DiMatteo, what about you? How do you know that this effort is worth it?

DiMatteo: Because a lot of times you can see the change. Some people, they came down to protest. They came down. Some people wanna protest, some people wanna see what’s happening. And when you explain to them, everybody has the right to protest. Everybody has the right to have their voice heard. They may not like what other people say, and a lot of times you’ll have them [say], I want that person arrested because I don’t like their speech, and we start to explain, that’s not the First Amendment.

It allows them to have that speech regardless if you like it or not. It’s their right to say these things, if you agree or not and getting some of the understanding you see like, OK, we are making a difference. Also letting people know here’s what we can do, here’s what will happen, here’s just different things that are going on because when you’re in it, you usually don’t see the big picture. You focus on what you’re doing. And as for being down there, for us being on the outside, we get to see kind of the entire picture.

Miller: That entire picture, a lot of it in recent weeks, the most dramatic parts haven’t necessarily been federal immigration enforcement or federal law enforcement officers versus protesters. It is different civilians who very much disagree with each other, whether they are streaming personalities or protesters who feel very differently about the question of federal deployment. What has it been like to be in the middle of that, to be kind of saying, hey everybody, calm down, at a time when the country is extremely divided. Officer Ruch, how do you think about that role?

Ruch: I really like that you pointed out, these are big questions. These aren’t small arguments that people are having a difference of opinion. These are life-changing questions, and that’s why people come in with those emotions and those feelings and that kind of time dedication. Be there for them. It’s the same thing you would do any day, is be there for them, be human with them, talk to them about it, and ask what they think the future should look like.

Miller: Is it ever hard? I’m curious, did either of you take part in policing of the racial justice protests in 2020 that the chief has said, and everybody knows, were very, very different. Different in scale, different in place, and different in actions on the part of Portland police and federal agents. Were you a part of that policing?

DiMatteo: Yes and no. I was working at the time. However, my role was limited to, we would just be the transport cars if people got arrested. I didn’t have a direct role in any of that.

Miller: I ask it because I’m wondering if some protesters in recent weeks or months have said, now you want to talk to us, but it was your fellow officers who were tear gassing us five years ago and now you want me to trust you. Have people said that to you?

DiMatteo: Yeah, so some of the ICE facility things that happen and some of the marches that happen. We’ve had people who’ve come up to it and said like, why are you now trying this? Why should I trust you? Where were you before? Why? And I explained, we’re learning. We tried something then and it didn’t work it looks like, so let’s try something different. Let’s go in a different path. Let’s find out what works. You’re never going to get it right the first time.

You work until you get it right, and we’re trying a different approach and a lot of them like this. They’re like, well, it’s a good approach, but they’re still a little wary of trust because they’re like, here’s what happened in the past, and I understand that lack of trust. A lot of it is I tell them we will take as much time as you need to build that trust back, but let’s see how this can work.

Miller: Have either of you been tear gassed in the last couple of months by federal agents?

Ruch: Yes.

Miller: You have. And what was happening at that moment when you were tear gassed?

Ruch: On most of those occasions I was not close enough to the gates to understand what might have instigated that, but we did have to evacuate each time.

Miller: In any of those instances, even though I take your point, you’re saying this very carefully. You weren’t close enough to know exactly what happened, but from what you could see, did it seem like there was justification for that use of force?

Ruch: I can’t actually speak to it because again, I didn’t see the exact moment. I would love if I knew.

Miller: I appreciate your care. I’d love to get a different answer.

Ruch: I know the outcome was that they wanted to clear space, but I can’t tell you what their reasoning for those actions were or what led to that decision making. It wouldn’t be fair. Much like if they saw anything I did, I wouldn’t want them to make assumptions about my choices.

Miller: Unless they could say definitively based on their proximity.

Ruch: Yes.

Miller: I want to end with where we started and Officer Ruch first, because it’s fascinating that as you said, part of the reason you want to do this is because this gives you a chance to have longer conversations. It does make me wonder if what we’re talking about here is connecting with Portlanders, connecting with communities, having honest, important, challenging conversations, how is that different from what we want beat cops, neighborhood police officers, to be doing every day? How is this different from just good old policing?

Ruch: I would love if we had the time to take all of the time on each call. It’s rare. I work downtown Portland during days. It’s very rare that I have the opportunity to just walk around and talk to people. I’m usually going call to call to call, and it’s frustrating, and there are times I have to leave a call when I feel there’s more to be said, there’s more understanding to be had, and it’s not going to happen on follow-up. I wish we did. I wish we had so many more officers so we would have more time. I do.

Miller: Sergeant DiMatteo, from your perspective, what we’ve just heard, and it’s not the first time we’ve heard this…

DiMatteo: Right.

Miller: …but this is a question about resources, but to you, is there a difference between the Dialogue Liaison Officer work and good policing broadly, or is it just a question for you, too, of resources?

DiMatteo: It’s a little bit of both. It’s different generations. I’m older, so everything when I started was you would talk to everybody. A lot of younger people now want to call or text everybody, so it’s getting back to being able to talk to people. For me it came naturally, other people it hasn’t. But I also believe in the resource part of it. It’s hard to find the time for everybody to go out and just go walk around sometimes, because you do have so many calls that officers are trying to get to it. I was afforded opportunities where I could ride the bike and could go do those interactions, so it helped me. I liked doing that.

Miller: Daniel DiMatteo and Jessica Ruch, thanks very much.

Ruch: Thank you.

DiMatteo: Thank you.

Miller: Sergeant Daniel DiMatteo and Officer Jessica Ruch are both among the Portland Police Bureau’s Dialogue Liaison Officers.

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