Portland Police Chief Bob Day on police response times and budget numbers

A new report found that Portland Police Bureau response times for high-priority calls are, on average, more than 20 minutes. And as reported in Willamette Week, some neighborhoods in Portland can wait as much as 40 minutes. The reports of these delays come as a new city budget is adopted that will lead to cuts to public safety. A PPA-backed proposed measure aims to direct Portland Clean Energy Fund dollars to the bureau. Portland Police Chief Bob Day joins us to share more on response times and the new budget.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI 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. Portland Police Chief Bob Day joins us now. As always, there’s a lot to talk about. The city recently released a report showing that response times for high priority calls are up, even as call volume has gone down. A separate data analysis found that response rates vary greatly by neighborhood. In some parts of East Portland, for example, residents have to wait 40 minutes for police to show up. Chief Day, welcome back to Think Out Loud.

Chief Bob Day: Thank you.

Miller: I want to start with the basics here. The city report that I mentioned found that, even though response times have doubled, overall calls for service have actually decreased in recent years. So how do you explain that?

Day: Yeah, I wanna thank Councilor Smith for bringing this resolution forward, and for the city initiating this report. It’s important to recognize this was not a PPB-driven report, so the data and the information found to be really helpful. A couple of things that need to be taken into consideration. One is call types have changed. For example, in 2019 we had a little over 400 shootings. Last year we had about 575. That’s a decrease from over 1,000 in 2021, 2022, 2023, around 1,000 1,300. A shooting call is very labor intensive, requires many more officers. So, because we’ve had consistent years, sometimes triple the amount of shootings we had before, we are using more officers.

Another example would be just the complexity around mental health and addiction. Those calls take much more time. Our emphasis on de-escalation, a good example, down in Old Town this weekend, we had a family disturbance call that involved a gun. We tried to negotiate for a period of time. We activated our tactical team, ultimately had to force entry, but brought that to a safe resolution with an arrest for domestic violence and the recovery of a firearm.

Years ago we might have just taken a few officers and knocked on the door and forced our way in. We would have been done sooner, but we could have had a more tragic outcome. So I really think the complexity and the types of calls we’re going to today combined with the reduced staffing has led to these higher call times.

Miller: Could we see a graph, for example, of the number of officers who are sent out on average for calls overall? Has that gone up, say, since 2019?

Day: No, it’s actually continued to struggle to meet just the basic number. For example, Saturday night this week, which we know was a busy evening, we had street takeovers. We had, unfortunately, a fatal accident. We had, as I mentioned earlier, the tactical team call out. A variety of things. We were running about 24% below what we would consider to be our minimum staffing, so we had 41 officers on our afternoon shift. We should have about 54, and this is due to a variety of things. Some of it has to do with just vacation and people needing to be away and wellness. There’s officers that are on leave for injuries or things like that.

But just as a recognition by the city, and this report bears it out, that there aren’t enough officers to meet the expectations of Portlanders and the demands, so we are running below what we believe is a minimum standard.

Miller: But I’m trying to understand that the first part you’re talking about, which seems like you were saying that the acuity of calls has gotten higher, so for homicide, or that tactical situation. My understanding of that was that you were saying that more officers are being called out to individual calls than they would in the past, meaning that those officers are now not available for other calls. Or did I misunderstand that?

Day: No, correct, that would be correct.

Miller: OK. This data, a lot of it is focused on what are known as “priority calls.” What fits into that category and what are the other categories?

Day: The 911 center prioritizes calls as they come in, and the categories range one through nine. Ones, twos and threes are what would be considered priority calls, and those, generally speaking, have a life safety or a crime in progress nexus. I’m being very general here.

You know, a priority one would be somebody’s been shot, and priority two could be somebody has a firearm, and that’s just… I don’t know if that’s exactly right, but that’s an example.

So there’s a distinction between one, two and three, but we tend to put one, two and three all in the same bucket, because all of them have a very significant nexus.

And then fours on down are maybe information, or your house was burglarized, you were on vacation, you came home. It’s not something that’s current.

Miller: A few months ago, a public safety working group put forward a recommendation that welfare check calls – meaning calls where there’s not evidence to suggest public safety concerns or a crime, so in my mind the higher numbers of what you’re just saying, as opposed to one, two, and three – that those calls should be handled by alternative responders.

They noted that there are 14,000 welfare check dispatches every year.

What would it take to transfer those from PPB to say, Portland Street Response, in the context of the current budget where the cuts to public safety came largely to unarmed response?

Day: The conversation around alternative response, I’m very welcoming for. I think we need to always be looking at alternatives. Police officers are expensive and there’s a lot of risk associated, and there are a lot of calls for service that don’t require an armed response.

At the same time, we have to recognize the risks associated with predicting what might be the outcome. For example, up in the Stadium District, a security guard contacted a person who was just simply laying on the ground, to check their welfare, and that person violently assaulted the security guard and they were seriously injured. So it’s difficult to make a determination. If we were to move those calls or other calls, we would want to be very intentional and very thoughtful. We want to think of scope of work, police officers’ roles, as well as unarmed response roles.

And then the final piece is to remember that if we do move those 14,000 calls, it’s not as if there aren’t 14,000 calls waiting behind this. I mean, we are falling woefully short in our response to calls for service, so there will be something that will take its place, but I am open to the conversation.

Miller: How do you think that those decisions should be made in terms of whether or not to send an unarmed response? You’re saying it’s tricky, and in some situations you might not realize all of a sudden things that seemed relatively calm can turn deadly in an instant. You’re also saying that you’re open to some version of more non-police response. So how would you, if you were the decision maker in terms of the overall allocation of these different response types, how would you do it?

Day: Well, I think we’re actually in the process of trying to do that. Working with the public safety service area, working with the leadership of Portland Street Response, also with 911 so that we have as much information as possible to make that right choice.

And it is a work in progress and it is a difficult transition because of the complexity of it, but I think it really starts with a thoughtful conversation and a recognition that, yes, there’s an alternative response, but there’s also a need for the police, and I think that’s where we have missed over the years is a failure to recognize the police do have a role in this. My comment is often, “The police are not the answer, but we’re part of the equation.” We need to be in the conversation, and that is starting to happen more regularly, thankfully.

Miller: For years, we’ve heard about Portland’s low number of sworn officers per capita compared to most other cities, but the report talked about a different way to look at this, to look at workload issues. It said that “per capita calculations are less helpful than a workload-based approach,” meaning look at the number of officers based on the actual demand for public services.

But then I scanned through the report and I didn’t see a section that directly compared Portland’s officers’ workload ratios to those in other cities. So if you think about Portland’s overall sworn officers right now and the work they have to do, can you do an apples-to-apples comparison and say this is what’s happening in Denver or Seattle or San Francisco, you know, other cities?’

Day: I’m not sure that that’s completely available. No, the short answer is no. I’m not 100% sure. And part of the reason is because we are so woefully behind in those numbers and comparisons. I mean, Milwaukee, Wisconsin has 1,700 police officers. We have 809. I was in Boston recently, half the geographic size of Portland, maybe 20,000-30,000 more people. They have 2,800 police officers. We have 809, so we’re sort of an apples-and-oranges comparison.

In terms of the work we’re doing, we talk about workload. I think the conversation for me is not about per capita, it’s really about our values as a city. What’s important? Are 19 minutes to get to priority calls acceptable? Is having your business burglarized multiple times with little to no investigation or follow up acceptable? Is the inability to fulfill our responsibility to some of our most vulnerable populations acceptable? I don’t believe they are.

And so we have to begin to have that conversation about trying to achieve those values and what that looks like, and I believe it is, of course, through the increased amount of police officers we need because of the individual significant responsibility they have.

Miller: So let’s turn to those specific ways that current police staff, or a beefed-up personnel list, the jobs they actually could do or would be doing.

The report says that police staffing is a policy question as much as a technical one, and they say that the number of officers that Portland needs depends on what the city council and the community expect PPB to achieve, and it gave a long list of potential priorities that included these: Faster response times, a greater range of reports being assigned to investigation, higher investigative clearance rates, more proactive patrol, expanded traffic engagement, stronger community engagement, reduced overtime reliance. So a lot of different things. How do you think about that list? What would you prioritize?

Day: Well, in our current budget crisis, we’ve had to do some hard thinking about that, after the reduction in the police bureau budget this year. So we are continuing to focus on hiring and recruitment, training, and retention. We have to continue to get people in the door, and I’m proud of the work we’re doing there. We are seeing that. We started this year with about 20 more cops than we had last year, which is the first time in a long time to be on the plus side.

We’re also attempting to prioritize the high priority calls for service we already talked about. Also really focusing on violence in marginalized groups and those that are most vulnerable. For example, continuing to focus on shooting investigations. They primarily impact Black and Brown families as well as our houseless population. Trying to look at ways to beef up our support for domestic violence and some of these other programs, really starting with those, and then working down to some of those other areas.

Our traffic division’s been decimated over the years. We did recently reestablish an afternoon traffic division, but we know that to achieve Vision Zero numbers, the primary driver for traffic fatalities is distracted driving, reckless behavior and impaired driving. So, being able to boost our traffic division to be able to support that mission and save lives, whereas this year we’re on track to see a high number of fatalities.

So it’s a constant trade-off. I would love to have more traffic officers. I’d love to have more violence intervention, but we are prioritizing right now the most extreme behavior, and I think that was demonstrated just this weekend as well as the Fourth of July weekend and so forth, where we’re maximizing those efforts.

Miller: Maybe you’re giving us a sense for what has to be sacrificed based on the resources you currently have now, and it seems like traffic is one of them, but what do you see as the biggest losers in this? I mean, if the winners, in terms of allocation of resources is gun violence prevention, what are the losers?

Day: That’s such a hard question for me to answer as a career public servant, really.

Miller: You mean because it’s painful.

Day: Yeah…

Miller: You have the data but you don’t like saying it.

Day: No, it’s painful. You know, it’s a good question, but it’s a hard question, because it really pains me as a servant for the community. But certainly property crimes are what fall behind in that regard, and oftentimes these are the most overall quality of life impact to a city. Property crimes sometimes don’t get the attention they deserve, yet their impact can be very significant.

If your home is burglarized while you’re on vacation, you come back, that’s a huge intrusion of privacy, very unsettling, very disturbing. And yet it might be something that we’re not able to get to within a reasonable amount of time. When you call, you may have to wait several hours for us to take that burglary report. Now you’re sitting in your home that’s been vandalized, and there’s trauma there.

And yet, if we’re going to a shooting call or we’re going to a crime in progress, that’s going to get priority. And what I would envision is, as we continue to grow the organization, to be able to invest more heavily in those types of crimes, as well.

Miller: I mentioned, so there’s the city report that Commissioner Smith and others said we want the city to do, which was really about staffing overall, but then there was a data analysis that Willamette Week reported on by a student at the University of Portland. She found big disparities in response times for these priority calls across different neighborhoods.

It is worth noting, and this actually seems relatively rare in the conversations I’ve had on the show for almost 20 years, that she didn’t find a correlation in this case between response times and census tract level, race or income. It seemed more random, and maybe more just about geography or distance as opposed to race and income, but I’m curious if you learned anything from this analysis?

Day: Yeah, we take a look at all that information that comes in, and there’s a couple of things. I mean, one you already touched on, geography is significant. Portland is 145 square miles, roughly, and we’re divided by a river, so we’re dependent upon bridges. Then, the reduction in the size of the police bureau has caused us to shrink our footprint around our precincts. For example, the North Precinct is stationed out of MLK and Killingsworth, but goes from St. John’s way out to 160-something and Sandy. It’s several miles long and wide. So response times and being able to get to some of these more remote areas of the city…

East Portland in particular, has a high number of calls for service, but also once again, geographically is really spread out and really diverse. When you think about going from Foster all the way to I-84, and 82nd all the way out to 162nd, that’s a lot of ground to cover, and that’s ground we used to cover when we had five precincts. We could be more intentional. We could divide it up so when calls are coming out, shift change, for example, we’re pretty limited if each precinct’s coming from 107th and Stark and they’ve got to go to 162nd and Powell. People think, well, we have lights and sirens, but even in that case, we want to drive responsibly.

And when you think of downtown, for example, Southwest is very isolated, very limited ways to be able to get to respond to Southwest. So that, combined with once again that prioritization model, where are we going to focus our energy, where we’re going to be able to focus our limited amount of resources, is impacting those. But we’re looking at that data. Anything that I see, even if it’s just a one-off, we gather that, and I’m constantly reviewing that to see if there’s something to learn.

Miller: I want to turn back to getting more police officers, because right now, am I right that there’s still more positions available than actually sworn officers?

Day: Right. We have about 70 vacancies currently.

Miller: The report noted that about a quarter of trainees leave PPB within some point in the course of the two-year training and probation process – either voluntarily, meaning they decide, “Oh, you know, actually policing is not right for me,” or the other way around. PPB says, “You are not right for us,” – but that’s after a lot of time and money and resources that Portland Police Bureau has put into these future police officers. What do you think you could do as a bureau to reduce that?

I mean, it’s never going to be zero. There’s always gonna be some people who decide it’s not right for them, or that you decide that they’re not right, but how can you get a little bit better at those precious resources for future police officers?

Day: I appreciate you highlighting that, and I’m encouraged to say we have been just recently, within the last year, began to bring that number down. In fact, in recent months we’ve seen it down to almost 10%.

Miller: So this reports on older data, and you’re saying that recently it’s only 10%.

Day: Yeah, right. Within the last year we’ve been able to get that down to about 10% and the reason is manyfold, but really focusing on retention, really focusing on value in our members. We understand a lot of people coming into the profession today, they’re not motivated by how much they make, they’re really motivated by knowing that they have a purpose and they have support and they have advocacy. So we’re seeing progress there through real intentional efforts of valuing our employees and letting them know that we support them, and then identifying problems early to try and mitigate losing them. Retention is huge. It’s as equally important to me as hiring is being able to retain.

Miller: You have been a police officer for more than three decades, but the last six years have been particularly challenging ones for the relationship between police officers in Portland, all across the country and their communities. But I’m curious what kind of evolution you’ve seen in terms of community response since 2020?

I ask this, and I know that as police chief, you can’t really comment on the likely ballot measure to divert PCEF climate change money to police staffing. But likely it’s going to be on the ballot, and I’m just curious how you read the relationship between Portlanders and police right now.

Day: Well, I couldn’t be more grateful. I’m out in the community a ton, and since I came on board almost three years ago, I’ve emphasized, it’s not the police in the community, it’s the community. The police are part of the community. And I believe we’re seeing that borne out in the relationships and the conversations that I’m having. The amount of community engagement we’re seeing our members participate in is double what it was when I started.

And the feedback we’re getting is Portlanders want a relationship with their police department, and that’s what’s really encouraging about this report, and really about the direction we’re going, is I’m hearing Portlanders say, “We want a relationship with our police department.”

I believe the events of 2020, 2021 and 2022, as difficult and even traumatic as they were for our city, unlocked some things that needed to be evaluated, needed to be looked at, and we’ve been doing that aggressively in the last three years since I’ve been on board, and I have a lot of confidence in Portlanders and their desire for a well-funded, well-resourced police department.

Miller: Bob Day, thanks very much.

Day: Thank you.

Miller: Bob Day is the chief of the Portland Police Bureau.

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