As Portland Loses DFZ's, Gresham Barely Uses Them.

Recently, I lamented Portland's recent decision to get rid of Drug Free Zones, which appears to have been done for dubious reasons and which is, in my opinion, a bad idea. It's a topic which, quite frankly, hasn't been discussed enough since the announcement. I really don't understand why. But I guess that's neither here nor there.

Now we learn that the City of Gresham, which adopted Portland-like Drug Free Zones in August of 2006, may lose their's for lack of use.

According to the Oregonian, in the past year that Gresham has had a Drug Free Zone which is primarily in its Rockwood area, drug citations in the area have dropped an overall 24 percent, and the exclusion authority given to officers has only been used about 10 percent of the time.

"That's unacceptable, " noted Gresham Mayor Shane Bemis. And he's right.

Having been intimately acquainted with the creation of the Gresham Drug Free Zone, I was able to watch closely as a now-departed Gresham Police sergeant and other members of the GPD staff did a ton of leg work, working with experienced folks associated with the Portland DFZ program (including the City Attorney's office, the DA's office, and PPB officers) to gather insight into the process for putting a zone in place, for details of how they were working in Portland, and for an idea of why they'd be a good thing for Gresham.

Once the idea of what to do took form, the next step was to figure out where it should be done. Numbers were crunched and diagrams of Gresham drug crime were created. Although I no longer have the info available in an on-line format, the visual diagram was described at the time by myself and others thusly:

If you imagine each drug crime in Gresham as a red dot, most of Gresham looks like a kid with a case of acne. The Central City area looks like a bad rash. And Rockwood looks like someone spilled a can of paint.

The Gresham Outlook offers the numbers behind the visual.

Rockwood had 116 drug possession arrests compared to 38, the highest number of arrests of the other four areas. Also, arrests for delivering drugs in the zone were 30 percent higher than the highest number of such arrests in the other four areas.

In fact, the total number of drug arrests in the zone was only slightly less than all drug arrests in the four other areas combined – 140 compared to 142.

The numbers supported a DFZ in Rockwood, and so organizers next had to hammer an actual proposal. While it was very clear that the Rockwood area in general, and the area surrounding Burnside from about 172nd to abot 192nd, was the area most in need of help, an initial DFZ was set up in a somewhat smaller area, where the core of the drug activity appeared to be.

The Gresham DFZ thus took on this shape:



Implementing the DFZ was about more than just getting the idea to create one, and then actually doing it, though. A great deal of time was spent on the part of various leaders in Gresham in getting members of the community to buy into the idea. They were presented at various neighborhood association meetings and other events with much of the information I shared with you in my Portland DFZ post, along with anecdotal information about how the zones would work in Gresham and why the whole city would benefit. What was shared with them is the same thing I think now.

Gresham is at a crossroads. It is at a point where it'll become the next great thing, or else it will simply recess into a long funk as Portland's poor neighbor to the east. So much of Gresham's future depends on the health of Rockwood. Rockwood is the gateway to Gresham. When people travel to Gresham, they (for the most part) pass through Rockwood. Their perceptions of Gresham are largely shaped by the image in their mind from the trek through that portal into town.

When I worked in Gresham, I often travelled through Rockwood, and my image of Gresham was negatively impacted. While I was there, I met a variety of great people in a lot of great areas who were doing a lot of great things working towards a great future. And, yet, Rockwood was what was in the back of my mind.

For Gresham to grow and to prosper, they need to be attractive to investors. Home-buyers and business owners and employers. And as long as they're contending with a Rockwood that resembles urban blight, they're facing an uphill battle.

Gresham's citizens in general appreciated this. Rockwood's residents, the people who stood to be most affected by the ordinance, also understood that cleaning up Rockwood would mean making their streets safer to live on. The vast majority of people I talked to had nothing but support for the idea of the DFZ.

And the police were asked to buy-in as well. I know for a fact that several presentations were made to officers to discuss the Drug Free Zone, what it was about, why it was a good thing, and how (roughly) it would work. Although I wasn't around much after it was implemented, I know there was planned training to teach the officers how to use it, how to issue exclusions, and how to use the new tool of the DFZ to make the area safer. And I knew a number of officers who professed excitement.

The DFZ was presented to the Gresham City Council in July of 2006. A month later, it was enacted. When presented with the idea, I recall Councillor Craddick responding with a "hallelujah."

In the aftermath of the passage of the ordinance, the local fishwrap shared optimism. The only pessimism voiced in the public paper was from a gentleman who didn't feel that Drug Free Zones were the answer, but instead zones "free of illegal aliens." As if methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, and other drugs aren't blind to skin color.

Against this whole backdrop, then, I am saddened by how little has been done. According to the Gresham Outlook, only 7 people have been excluded from the zone since it's inception, despite 70 being arrested for qualifying offenses. And I'm more saddened to see such an apparent disregard for the tool. As I may have explained in the Portland PFZ post, and as is mentioned in the Outlook article, the initial statistical result in the Portland zones (which was expected in Rockwood) was a spike in drug arrests. This isn't because more drug crime is happening, but because police put an emphasis on the area in order to start excluding people. The fact that the arrest rate has not increased, but dropped by 50 percent, is very disheartening indeed.

Gresham Police Chief Carla Piluso writes the drop off as due to the police being "so doggone busy." Because Gresham Police are so under-staffed, she argues, they aren't able to take part in pro-active contacts which generate drug arrests, instead dealing reactively with calls for service from citizens in need.

I don't entirely buy that, given that most initial drug arrests stem from stops for other things, like thefts, burglaries, vandalism, disorderly conduct, drunk driving, and other such crimes. I'm willing to bet that those arrests haven't trailed off.

Further, enforcement is highest in the Drug Free Zone. More crimes are committed there, many of them on public property. People are arrested constantly for criminal trespass in parking lots at apartments, for disorderly conduct while drunk on the streets, for violation of Tri-Met exclusions at the MAX stop, and for all sorts of other crimes. For a majority of people, the first drug arrest is a result of a stop for some other behavior, as police either end up searching you as you're getting hand-cuffed, or else search people after gaining consent during the encounter. When more police are in the area (because it's the highest-crime area of the city) having more contacts with more people, the drug arrest rate should be going up. So something else must be going on.

Gresham Police is offering assurances of stronger action on the DFZ in the next few months, both to justify its continuation and to legitimize its prior inception. I have no doubt that the area needs a DFZ. I'm surprised to learn that the people aren't benefitting from the strong, decisive action of the City's leaders in providing it. And I hope that GPD officers can step up, so that unlike Portland, the citizens of Rockwood can benefit from the right tool for the right job in the right place.