The City of Portland – never to be trusted

That horrifying police training slideshow that the dirty rotten scoundrels of Portland City Hall dumped to the public on the Friday before MLK weekend is still making headlines the following week. As well it should. Turns out, the lawyers in the U.S. Justice Department, who for years have been suing to clean up obvious civil rights violations by the city's worthless police force, are pretty ticked off that the city didn't show them the appalling materials sooner. As told by the Weed –

They added that the city should have reported the RRT training materials to the DOJ “when they were developed,” as is required by the parties’ 2014 settlement agreement.

“The existence of these RRT training materials might have materially impacted our assessments of the city’s compliance with the agreement,” Geissler and Hager wrote, adding that the materials in the presentation were “central” to their 2021 annual compliance report.

“Some PPB and city employees knew or should have known about these materials for years,” they wrote. “The City Attorney’s Office has reportedly known about them since at least September 2021. Had we known about this RRT training, we might have proposed additional remedies. The United States reserves its rights under the agreement related to this matter.”

Up until now, I've been giving the city attorney's office the benefit of the doubt – that they're good lawyers representing bad people. But maybe I was wrong about that. Their professional ethics are not exactly shining lately. They ought to be ashamed, but I'm no longer sure they are capable of shame.

City Attorney Robert Taylor provided the following comment to WW on Tuesday afternoon: “We received the letter, and we plan to fully respond to the DOJ’s three requests to address their concerns.”

And you know what the response will be, of course. Two words, basically, and they won't be "You're right."

I wish I were the judge in that federal civil rights case. The game-playing by the wiseacres in City Hall would have been over a long time ago.

Only a complete jerk would find this funny, clever, or profound. 

But some Portland cops in high places obviously loved it.