Police Officer Talks to Reporter About How Useless Their Job Is, Still Demands Applause
On a Cop
(HI! Welcome to Caterpillar Steps, a newsletter by the writer and photographer Corbin Smith. Delay in dispatches, yes, probably because I’ve just felt SO GOOD lately, so happy and not at all walking around worried that my soul is going to devour my body at any second. I doubt I will employ subscriptions here, but if you like the newsletter and want to buy me a treat, you can feel free to deposit some cheddar in my Venmo account, @BigCorbs. Also please share with anyone you think might enjoy it.)
A Portland cop is dissatisfied with their job performance, and the Northwest Labor Press is ON IT. Another version of this blog post would fixate on NWLP including cops, a cadre who hassles labor actions as a matter of course, in “Labor.” But I am not a labor writer, so I will have to let that sit for now. Instead, let me guide you through this Journey into the mind of “The Good Cop,” the honest broker who is out here performing god’s work… which is important shit. Or at least they would be, if they were just allowed to arrest everyone!
Jordan Zaitz strives to police like she parents her kids, 9 and 13: fair, but firm.
Overseeing a camp cleanup, Zaitz gives a camp resident named Dora a couple of hours to pack up if it’s sunny, a couple more if it’s rainy. But Dora has to be done by the time the cleanup crew is done or the crew will pack up whatever’s left and hand it over to the City, which will hold it for Dora for up to 30 days. Also, Dora can only take what she can fit in as many shopping carts as she can push— three or four, not 12 or 20. At first, Dora cried and pleaded with Zaitz that she needed everything. But Zaitz didn’t give in, and the next time Dora saw Zaitz at a camp clean up, she didn’t argue. She figured out a way to fit most of her fossil collection in her carts, but didn’t have room for the sled. “Tough love,” Zaitz says.
When my kids who I love, 9 and 13, are unhoused, I like to give them the following ultimatum: I will take most of your shit and put it in hock for thirty days. Hopefully they will manage to acquire stable housing before that time expires, so they can come back to the county in the car they now own with a trailer they are renting, and bring all their shit back to their new housing unit, even though they have no money, no address, no prospects for employment, emotional problems, a strained relationship with their family, a drug problem, and they live in a city with out of control rents. I don’t do this because I like it: I do this because I love them. I tough love them.
It works! They get housing every time.
“Tough love” as a policy hasn’t had a lot of political currency in Portland in recent years, and thus, Zaitz has often felt in tension with the city she works for as a Portland Police officer assigned to the East Precinct neighborhood response team. “There have to be consequences,” she says. “And right now, there are no consequences.” Or at least not enough of them, Zaitz says.
Zaitz says the guy who goes to Home Depot at Mall 205 every day and steals tools gets only citations and court dates, for which he doesn’t show up.
A guy Zaitz sees in front of the Oregon Clinic every week smoking blues (counterfeit oxycodone pills containing fentanyl) gets citations and a phone number to a state hotline that, as far as she knows, he has never called.
What should the consequences be? Should they go to jail? Should they be convicted of a crime and get thrown in prison? Should the state pay for their incarceration in a violence plagued overcrowded hellhole that will not help them with their drug problem, their housing problems, their employment problems, or any of their problems?
If Zaitz does arrest someone, it’s not uncommon for them to be released within a couple hours, sometimes before a prosecutor at the district attorney’s office even sees the case. Other times, a prosecutor will decline one of Zaitz’s cases for reasons that seem, to her, unconvincing (the “low level nature of the offense” or the “significant backlog of cases caused by the pandemic”). There often aren’t judges or space in the docket for low level offenses like theft of less than $1,000.
The DA’s office has selected the less inhumane of two insanely inhumane options they can pursue in the short term. They cut people loose for bullshit, because the alternative would be stocking everyone who commits a petty drug or theft offense in a prison because there are no other robust governmental avenues for helping human beings in extreme economic distress in Portland or anywhere else in America.
But what about the hidden toll of all this neglect? Oh, sorry, not the immiseration it creates or the human lives at stake, or the losses Home Depot is getting hit with. What about… the feelings of cops?
It’s not exactly what Zaitz had in mind when she joined the force in 2004. She was 23 years old and had the idea that if she became a police officer, she’d get to chase bad guys and drive fast and know things before everyone else. At first, she did get to drive fast, fairly frequently, when in pursuit of a suspect, and there were a few so-called bad guys she felt satisfied to put away—a murderer, a bank robber, and one especially chilling man convicted of beating his girlfriend’s 18-month-old son to death.
But then the department greatly curtailed officers’ ability to pursue (only for felony person crimes or extraordinary circumstances).
It used to be I got to get in a fucking high speed chase whenever someone boosted a Plaid Pantry. But then “The Suits” were like “Oh high speed chases are insanely fucking dangerous and raise the stakes of common burglaries just to let cops hoot and holler while playing like they’re Jackie Chan,” so now, crime and poverty are running rampant on our streets. It’s a one to one connection.
A Minnesota cop killed George Floyd, sparking protests for more than 100 explosive and intensely acrimonious nights in Portland. Many officers resigned or retired. Few new ones were hired. Zaitz says “chasing bad guys” became something the department was less and less able to do.
“We just don’t have the resources,” she says. “We’re running shifts five, six officers below minimums. Never in my career has it been that low.”
“A Minnesota Cop Killed George Floyd.” We Portland Cops, on the other hand, never did anything bad. We are angels! Besides, that cop went to prison! Those protests weren’t about anything but George Floyd, and yet, here we are, people saying we’re bad! Us!? And now “Normal People” who “Want to do some shred of good in this wicked world,” are beginning to “Think that joining the police isn’t the avenue to accomplish anything but writing bullshit tickets and bullying homeless people,” while my honored and respected colleagues, gentlemen of the law each and every one of them, “Ragequit because Socialists were mean to them?” Absurd!
Far more often than chasing bad guys, Zaitz finds herself in conversation with people like Dora, with the sled, or with the guy who steals from Home Depot every day, or a man she recently watched leave Target with a bag of stolen merchandise in each hand … and go directly to his dealer’s apartment across the street, where he paid for his pills in Tide Pods and white t-shirts.
“Do you want blues or black?” Zaitz heard the dealer ask, but she didn’t have a search warrant for his apartment, so she scolded him and left.
“It’s my job to parent adults whose parents didn’t parent them,” Zaitz says.
You know what the problem with writing a maybe-too-snarky blog post about this particular article is? There are just… so many fucking pressure points that a sentiment like “It’s my job to parent adults whose parents didn’t parent them” touches on.
ONE: Extremely high probability this statement is loaded with a, let’s call it, “Racially tinged sentiment” regarding the engagement of black parents. Then again, I’ve never encountered or heard of a prejudiced cop in my life so that’s probably not the case.
TWO: If we accept her premise, assume she’s not huffing and puffing on a fucking dog whistle, why wouldn’t you take the second step there, and wonder hey, why is it someone’s parent might not be around? Could it be the extreme economic pressures imposed on parents, and the total lack of state help in assuaging those pressures? The fucking insane cost of daycare, the shitty wages any job with moderate flexability affords someone with no college education, the absolute nightmare of uncontrolled rents? Do you think being a poor parent is easy?
THREE: Furthermore, if that is your job, I think it’s pretty obvious that you are fucking terrible at it. And so, the question becomes: why is the city paying you to do something you’re terrible at? Why isn’t your job being performed by a social worker, someone who is trained and qualified to deal with people in crisis? Why aren’t their housing needs taken care of? Why is your department funded to the fucking gills while agencies that could actually deal with the effects of economic and emotional distress languish in a puddle of Clintonian no-policy gibberish?
Fewer officers and fewer consequences have likely contributed to higher crime rates. The pandemic—and the social and economic distress it caused—also surely contributed.
Oh yeah. Surely.
Portland set a new record in homicides last year, and is currently on pace to set another. Frustration with the garbage and tent encampments and stolen catalytic converters is so palpable that policing in Portland might be changing again.
Thank god. Because not only will the boot of the state come crashing down on the heads of the poor and addled: it will work, like it always has before and always will forever. Prison WILL fix these people's lives!
“While the defund movement is kind of over, people [in Portland] haven’t really vocally come back and said, ‘You’re right, we need you,’” Zaitz says. “They’re happy to have us here and they’re not complaining that we’re here, but they’re not actively saying, ‘We need you.’”
“And,” she goes on, “we need the community to say they want us to be like [we used to be] again.”
This lady’s entire life is a testament to the inadequacy of the police as a civic balm. She has spelled out the myriad ways that any action she can perform without resorting to violence is an inadequate gesture in the face of the devastation of American poverty, and yet, here she is, whining about how people aren’t nice enough to her as she does jack-all to help anyone or improve anything.
To her, this means more proactive police work, more consequences for crimes.
You know how billionaires are always dry humping the air, looking for market solutions to all of the world’s biggest problems? Climate change, inequality, whatever else? A lot of people accuse Davos-types of bad faith, using these ostensibly progressive causes to enrich themselves. Which is probably true. But also true, equally true, I believe, is that they really do believe that the solution to the world’s problems is necessarily routed through them, even when what they do usually just makes shit worse
So it is with cops. They cannot imagine a world where civic ills aren’t best addressed with the force of the police. Where every problem is just rats emerging from rotted wood, and the only solution is kicking the shit out of the rats until they say hey buddy we get it we’ll stop being drug addicts now. We’ve purchased a gigantic fucking hammer and it sees everyone as a nail, and also the hammer wants us to please give it hugs.
But for many in Portland, it’s a more complicated question. Portland police were found in federal court to have used excessive force on people with mental illness. They’ve also been accused of disproportionately targeting black motorists.
Zaitz says many reforms have been instituted since then: Portland police approach people with mental illness more slowly and carefully. They know not to engage until the less lethal unit is present with tasers and bean bag guns. They often explain to people they stop why they fit the description of a suspect. But the police department’s reputation still suffers, and its relationship with the public is strained.
Also because, as you have enumerated at length in this interview, you aren’t fucking doing anything useful.
This is one reason why the Portland Police Association is so important to Zaitz and other officers.
…and because it shields us from the consequences of our malfeasance. That’s another reason why it is important to us.
Union membership is strictly voluntary in the public sector, but only one officer in the entire department has elected not to join PPA. Officers see PPA as a constant source of support in a city that has been less constant in its support.
You could tell me anything about the one cop not in the PPA and I would believe it. Is he a weird radical who thinks he can change the system from the inside? A right wing anti union psycho? Does he just “hate clubs?” Learning the truth would ruin the mystery.
“It’s nice to know somebody has your back, and you’re not just going to get hung out to dry when you’re out there with good intentions, doing the best work that you can in the moment,” Zaitz says.
You know, like when you shoot an unarmed teenager because you got spooked. Best intentions!
The story ends with an anecdote about Zazitz helping a drug addicted teenager, the subject of a missing persons report out of North Dakota, get home to her mother and enroll in a drug treatment program. It’s nice that she did this, but it must have occurred to her, at some point, that she did not need a gun to do this. She did not need to be able to hustle someone down in a car, to search her house without a warrant. She did not need the authority to ransack all of her shit and blow up her life. As a matter of fact, if she COULDN’T do all those things, the system might have been able to help her sooner, because she would have been intrinsically seeking to help someone instead of maintaining order. What if there were more people, more resources, out there looking to HELP people instead of manage them? Alternative approaches to public safety are out there, and considering the vast nothingness Zazitz claims she is accomplishing in her day to day, maybe you could pay for them by shifting money away from that nothingness?