At their meeting on January 7th, leaders of the Citizen Review Committeer (CRC) raised concerns about delays to the new system and a lack of a clear transition plan from the city.
Under the current system, the CRC has three main functions. They hear appeals of police misconduct findings, they educate the community on the process of filing complaints against Portland police officers, and they fill the voting seat designated for a community member on the police review board.
Their work will eventually be replaced by the Community Board for Police Accountability (CBPA), in a process mandated by voters in 2020. But at the pace things are going, that could still be 2 years away.
The work of the CRC is critical to keep Portland in compliance with a 2012 settlement agreement with the Department of Justice. The CRC must meet every quarter under the settlement agreement, and they failed to do so in the last quarter of 2025. That settlement agreement was put in place because the DOJ found that Portland Police had a pattern of using excessive force against civilians who were in mental health crisis. Without citizen oversight of police, Portland violates the settlement agreement, opening the city up to action from the Trump administration.
It would also leave the public without a process to have complaints against police investigated by an independent agency.
Yume Delegato is the chair of the CRC, a volunteer position. At the January meeting of the CRC, he expressed worry about how the existing system could continue to function and serve the public until the new system takes over.
“What is the city's plan, right? And maybe separately from that,what would you have me tell our members in terms of why we should keep doing this work? Like it feels like we have no money. We're increasingly losing staff. And a lot of us have been doing this job for now half a decade," Delegato said. "Frankly, I start to wonder if I'm actually living up to the oath I swore to uphold the city charter, because we're not delivering on what we gave to the what we promised the voters we would do."
CRC members are leaving the committee, opening up the possibility that there won’t be enough members to meet a quorum. New members must be approved by the City Council, but Delegato says it's been difficult to get those approvals on the agenda.
When pressed by Delegato at the January meeting, Deputy City Attorney Heidi Brown suggested going to the City Council to pass a change to city code, to allow members to stay on longer.
This also comes as the CRC’s parent body, the Independent Police Review (IPR) which investigates complaints against police, is actively dissolving. Their director, Ross Caldwell, exited January 16th, with no replacement on the horizon. IPR’s staff finds itself in the position of knowing that their jobs will be ending within a few years but not exactly when, which has led to some recent labor strife.
That timeline is partly dependent on the new board getting background checks, being trained, and hiring a director. But it also depends on police misconduct cases. Any officer involved shooting in this interim time between the boards likely increases the timeline of IPR’s work by at least 18 months, Delegato says.
Before his election to city council for district 2, Councilor Sameer Kanal was the project manager for the Police Accountability Commission which spent two years crafting the basic form and functions of the new police oversight system. Kanal told KBOO some councilors are aware of the problems Portland’s police oversight system is facing, but solutions haven’t come before council yet.
"The challenges are even bigger than just waiting until the new board is ready to go. There has to be an overlap while the new system ramps up and the old system finishes its cases in progress. The blockers can be things like policy around how long a person can serve, term limits, the need for council action to extend people even within the existing terms," Kanal said. "I think that these are things that are solvable. It just takes a certain level of commitment. I'm very happy to be the sponsor of something like that in council if there needs to be a code change."
The uncertainty of IPR and CRC’s ability to effectively meet the need for a police accountability process comes at a time when increased protests are bringing Portlanders into direct confrontation with police regularly. Issues of excessive force haven’t dried up. As just one example, video surfaced in mid January of a Portland police officer repeatedly punching someone in the head while pinning them on the ground, at a protest at the South Waterfront ICE facility.
But despite the uncertainty of how Portland police will be held accountable in this interim time, Kanal says it is still worth going through the existing system.
"There's civil lawsuits. There's criminal charges. And there's administrative accountability, which is really the employment-related response. That's really what we're talking about here. And for that, I would suggest that people go to Independent Police Review," Kanal said.
"I think that it's an imperfect system, and so is the new one. Nothing is perfect. The new one will be better, but that doesn't mean that the old one is not worth attempting and going through to try and seek remedy for what you think is and have experienced. "
The new Community Board for Police Accountability says it will hold its inaugural meeting in early February, though the date and details have not yet been announced. Their first order of business? Hiring a director.
Althea Billings contributed to this reporting.