Cities must fund law enforcement to reduce crime, police association president says - WKRC TV Cincinnati

WASHINGTON (TND) — The Fraternal Order of Police says more than officers have been shot in the line of duty this year — a 43% increase from 2021.

Those shootings happened across 34 states and 17 officers were killed, including five who were murdered in ambush-style attacks.

The organization says at this rate, the country is on track to match last year's record number of shootings — 346 officers were shot in the line of duty in 2021 and 63 were killed.

A similar nationwide trend appears to be developing for shootings in general. The Gun Violence Archive reports that more than 5,600 people have been shot and killed so far this year.

Murder rates in major U.S. cities are up by about 1% and a dozen cities are coming off of a record-breaking year for homicides, many of them surpassing records set the previous year and people are noticing.

Portland, Oregon, is on that list with 92 homicides in 2021 — more than three-quarters of which were shootings — and the city is already on track to tie or surpass that record this year.

So what does the police force there attribute rising crime to?

Sgt. Aaron Schmautz, President of the Portland Police Association, joined the National Desk Wednesday, saying a loss of funding contributed to the danger.

“If you go back to 2020, there was a national debate and discussion on law enforcement and Portland what a lot of cities did which is remove resources for law enforcement. We definitely always need to be discussing how to best police our communities but the decisions that were made were specific. They took police resources away from areas where we were most interacting with communities — specifically communities that are vulnerable to violence — and those relationships combined with a loss of interdiction ability due to those relationships created significant chaos in Portland,” Schmautz said.

He added that the issue of homelessness in the city was a problem as well and pulling police resources only exacerbated the problem.

“30% of our homicides last year were people who were experiencing homelessness. I think just the general disorder in Portland is leading to a lot of these problems,” said Schmautz.

Last week, the Portland City Council approved spending $1.4 million on gun violence prevention efforts. Schmautz says the money needs to go toward properly funding and staffing law enforcement.

“Any effort to restore safety to Portland has to begin with properly funding and staffing law enforcement and we need to ensure that money that's being spent is being spent to enhance the efforts that police are making and also looking at addiction treatment, looking at resolving some of our homelessness issues and also looking at ways to ensure that when people engage in criminal conduct, they're held accountable and properly funding prosecution efforts to keep people in jail who need to be in jail,” he said.

As violent crime continues to plague major cities, there has been a big push from Democratic leaders to get guns off the streets as a way to fight crime, while some members of the GOP say stricter gun regulation would only make things worse.

“The reality is that people have an intent to engage in violence or are on the pathway of violence, we need to be able to interact with them. We need to be able to prevent that from happening. We also need to find ways to hold them accountable. So, you know, going and finding laws that just prohibit people who were already lawfully owning their guns isn't going to change the problem. A lot of the people who are out there engaging in gun violence, those guns they possess, they possess illegally anyway and so we need to make sure that we are enforcing the laws we have and we're putting our police officers in a position to be successful,” said Schmautz.

Over the weekend, a group of protesters marched in Portland, eventually lighting a dumpster on fire outside of a Portland police precinct and damaging dozens of businesses, offices, restaurants and cafes nearby.

“It is not legitimate protest to burn, damage and destroy buildings — to attack businesses. Many of these businesses are in Black communities and are Black-owned businesses. None of this is legitimate protest. There are legitimate grievances that people have the need to discuss and Portland has a strong history of supporting free speech events but when people state overtly and upfront, ‘we're going to go and we're going to do a direct action event. We're going to go we're going to try to burn down police stations where police officers are inside,’ people are tired of it,” Schmautz said.

More than 1,100 protest cases have been referred to the Portland District Attorney’s Office since May 2021 and of those 900 cases have been tossed out. Schmautz says this send a clear message.

“Well, we for sure saw in 2020 and 2021 that if you go and engage in violence you may not be held accountable. The accountability focus was mainly on ‘how do we hold police accountable?’ But there was not enough discussion about ‘how do we discourage criminal actors?’ I speak with a district attorney and I believe that his sentiment on these topics has changed or is changing. However, it is important that we see that play out,” he said.

Schmautz added that money from the city’s budget should also be invested in the city’s prosecutorial efforts in order to keep the system running smoothly and make sure criminals don’t slip through the cracks.

“The reality is too is that we're experiencing a crisis in public defenders in Portland. Some money needs to go to that to ensure that we don't have people not prosecuted simply because the justice system can't turn,” he said. “Police are just the first stage in that and we need to ensure that when people engage in criminal conduct, they're held accountable.”

source: https://local12.com/news/nation-world/portland-must-fund-law-enforcement-to-reduce-crime-police-association-president-says-gun-violence-debate-sgt-aaron-schmautz-major-cities-reform-bail-courts-protests

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