PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – In what the Portland police union president calls a landmark moment, the Portland Police Bureau and the City of Portland have agreed on a body camera policy, making Portland the last major city to move forward with the technology.

The agreement, which was approved by Portland City Council on April 26, 2023, was nearly a decade in the making.

One major issue during negotiations was whether officers have the right to review body camera footage before filing a report.

“It took 10 years for us to get here, but the big thing was trying to identify the science around what we wanted and how we wanted to navigate how officers would use evidence they collect,” said Portland Police Association President Aaron Schmautz.

“Officers engage in a lot of very traumatic incidents. We went to a lot of different trainings to kind of look at just human cognition and how the brain navigates those critical incidents. And so, when we heard from the city and the DOJ that they wanted to kind of encapsulate that specific perception when you have a critical incident, that was something we can get behind because it’s scientifically sound,” Schmautz added.

The policy states that in situations involving a deadly shooting or in-custody death, officers must first provide a recorded statement to internal affairs (including details from de-escalation to use of force) before reviewing the video.

After the initial statement, the investigator and the officer involved may watch the footage separately, providing the officer a chance to explain any discrepancies in a final statement.

Explaining the value behind officers reviewing footage, Schmautz explained, “if you got into a car accident, you may have a lot of different memories about this thing. You may tell a lot of different people about that. But when you actually go to talk to your insurance company or whatever else, you can just add information as you go and it’s fine.”

He added, “the challenge with law enforcement is everything we do is heavily scrutinized. Every time you write a report, any kind of misgiving or kind of difference of perspective can actually lead to allegations of truthfulness.”

“What’s really important behind the legitimacy standpoint, is provide officers the opportunity to evaluate all available evidence and just give a comprehensive statement about what occurred, answering all questions that you now know what the questions may be by looking at that video, just to ensure the report is complete,” Schmautz said.

Under the agreement, officers can review the footage under circumstances such as incidents that do not involve force.

“In Portland, we consider things to be force that most places don’t, very low-level. One example, if you go to handcuff somebody and they kind of pull away, that is force in Portland. If you hold on to somebody’s arm and they pull away, that is force in Portland,” Schmautz said.

There are two ways to navigate the cases in which force is used, such as using a stun gun on someone who is mentally ill, cases when someone is admitted to the hospital, significantly hurt or killed, Schmautz said.

“The first being, the lower level, you give a statement at the scene to your sergeant and then you go and complete your report. And that statement is recorded,” Schmautz said. “The second, if it’s deadly force, you’ll give an interview – and that interview is kind of a cognitive, perceptual statement about what occurred. Just the basic, who what when, where, why and how – and then you’ll go and you’ll watch your video, both parties will, and you go back and complete your interview navigating difference that might exist or also answering any further questions the investigator may have.”

Schmautz added, “there is a significant line of delineation in the country at deadly force and there’s significant public interest in cases where officers either significantly injure or kill somebody. And so, that kind of greater scrutiny aligned with the science makes sense and so I think that’s where the good kind of compromise lies.”

Amid concerns that officers may change their story after reviewing the video, Schmautz says “if there was any evidence that that was a problem in our country, the somewhere in the range of 50 to 60% of agencies that have full pre-review, I think we would see that by now.”

In response to PPB’s body camera program, Mayor Wheeler said, “This is a really important program because it provides accountability. It will allow the public to see what happens in significant policing incidents, but it also protects the men and women in the Portland Police Bureau.”

Schmautz says he agrees with the mayor “that this is a landmark moment in our city and it’s time to move forward.”

He added, “The thing that is really great about this, is at the end of the compromise, you saw all five city commissioners who come into elected office from five different kind of platforms, and you see the police union sitting together and saying, ‘Look, this is something our community needs. Accountable policing matters, accountability in our community matters.’”

The first two divisions that will get training and cameras are Central Precinct, with more than 100 officers, and the Focused Intervention Team, which are officers working to stop gun violence.

Police tell KOIN 6 News they expect all officers will likely have body cameras by the end of 2023 if the city and the police union decide the two-month pilot project went well.

In addition to PPB’s new body camera agreement, there have been concerns in recent weeks about feedback from PPB employees on the agency’s LGBTQ training.

In 2022, PPB took part in training to better interact with the LGBTQ community. Most of the response from officers after the training was positive, while other responses were alarming to some Portlanders.

A quarterly compliance report from the PPB on the LGBTQ training said, “the language used in some of the feedback was indicative of racial bias, ableism and white supremacist ideology.”

One anonymous feedback from a PPB employee read, “I will never ask anyone for their preferred pronouns. This woke agenda is insane. I guess it’s time to resign like everyone else.”

Another anonymous response said, “I find the use of the house with a ‘Black Lives Matter’ poster in the window highly inappropriate and offensive. No officer or member should be forced to accept a violent political organization’s agenda or its representation to prove that they care about all people.”

“The thing that’s difficult with anonymous comments, is I don’t even know who these people are or if they’re within my membership,” Schmautz said. “The other thing that’s difficult is, 2020 was a very difficult time for everybody and we navigated a lot of things and police officers in Portland were uniquely impacted by a significant violence.”

“You have the Black Lives Matter movement, which has a lot of really important things that we need to discuss, but you also had people who were trying to and were assaulting police officers while declaring affiliation with that kind of ideology and so it became very difficult for police officers to navigate,” Schmautz said.

“At the end of the day, the focus of the Portland Police Bureau and the Portland Police Association is constitutional policing. We want to make sure that our officers, when they’re engaging with the public, that they’re treating them appropriately, they’re not engaging in bias and that their conduct is consistent with the policies and values of the city. That’s what we have control over.”