Joey Brunelle is an at-large candidate for Portland City Council.
I live near downtown Portland and walk down Congress Street every day. I am acutely aware of our city’s public safety issues and I have heard from so many people that police officers tell them that they can’t do anything about it.
Someone on Reddit wrote about an attempted break-in but police said there’s nothing they can do, so the victim has to collect his own evidence from neighbors.
A business told me they call the police “nearly every day” about drug dealing and assaults that happen on their doorstep. They share videos of incidents with the PD, but say nothing has been done about it.
Neighbors told me they’ve repeatedly called the police about drug dealing in an alley, night after night, and police say there’s nothing they can do.
I myself witnessed people selling drugs to high school kids on the sidewalk in broad daylight, right on Congress Street.
Some leaders dismiss these as systemic issues arising from poverty. Yes, of course that’s true, but that doesn’t help with the acute safety problem in front of our eyes right now. There are actual crimes being committed, seemingly without accountability.
On the other hand, Mayor Mark Dion has suggested that this is the result of being “too compassionate.” I strongly disagree with that. I don’t think anyone has much compassion for people who sell drugs to kids, or who assault innocent people, or who break into homes or cars.
The Portland Police Department’s budget is at a record high — over $23 million this year. Excluding the schools, no other city department contributes more to your tax bill than the Police Department. Not Social Services, not Public Health, not Health & Human Services.
So with record-high police funding, why does it seem like we are incapable of dealing with drugs and crime? We need new ideas. But we are not the first city to have this problem — how did other cities solve it?
Denver, Colorado, freed up police officer time by responding to low-level, nonviolent mental health and homelessness issues with paramedics and mental health clinicians instead of armed officers. Individuals are referred to treatment, and many are transported to shelters or medical facilities.
By replacing officers with clinicians, police were able to focus on more serious issues. It also saved money: responses by the clinicians cost an average of $151 versus $646 by police officers.
Dayton, Ohio, added more bike and foot patrols to their downtown. Studies have shown that there’s an optimal frequency and length for foot/bike patrols to prevent crime. (In dense downtowns, cruisers respond to crime, whereas foot/bike patrols prevent it.) In Dayton, they averaged nine hours per day of foot patrols in their downtown, and over five years crime fell 35%.
High Point, North Carolina, implemented a program called Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) in which low-level drug dealers are identified and cases built against them, then given an ultimatum: accept recovery, housing or support services or face immediate jail time. The result? Violent crime dropped 75% in 100 days, and reoffending was half of what it is elsewhere in the state.
LEAD is not some fringe program: almost 100 towns and cities use this model — including Scarborough since 2021. Maybe somebody should give them a call.
These are just three ideas, and I could go on.
Some politicians tell us that we either do nothing, or return to Republican-style mass incarceration. That’s a false choice. We have other options — great ones, in fact — if we look beyond Maine for what’s worked elsewhere, if we think beyond sound bites and politically motivated narratives and delve into the details of how we police our streets.
If elected to the Portland City Council in November, I won’t rest on “the way we’ve always done things” — left or right. That’s not good enough. Let’s solve our public safety problem with modern, effective models of policing and prosecution.