Thank you, Mayor Potter for Ending Portland’s Deeply Flawed “Exclusion Zones”
Mayor Potter recently decided not to re-authorize the city’s three “Exclusion Zones” that allow police officers to prohibit a person from entering, or being present in, large parts of the City of Portland for up to 90 days if they are suspected of drug or prostitution offenses. The idea of the zones was to provide the Police with an efficient tool for confronting elusive criminal activity. To some extent the Exclusion Zones achieved that goal, but at a cost that is far too high for our community to tolerate.
Exclusion zones allowed a significant penalty to be meted out to people not only without requiring them to first be convicted of a crime - but without even requiring that they have been arrested at all. This turns the fundamental notion of “innocent until proven guilty” so far on its head that our founding fathers must be spinning in their graves.
Second, these zones impact different groups within our community quite differently and serve to inflame the tensions between the Police and members of Portland’s minority communities. African Americans, in particular, have been disproportionately impacted by the way Exclusion Zones have been applied. A Police Bureau report issued in 2006 showed that African Americans who were stopped by Police were almost twice as likely to get exclusions as whites.
Finally, even if the individual being excluded actually committed a crime that merits punishment, Exclusion Zones don’t take criminals off the street they just move them to different neighborhoods around town for a few months. This limited benefit pales in comparison to the negative consequences of Exclusion Zones
We live in an era when the most basic civil liberties upon which our country was founded have come under unprecedented assault from our Federal Government. In Portland we must not succumb to the temptation to sacrifice liberty in the name of efficient law enforcement. Exclusion Zones simply aren’t worth it and I commend Mayor Potter for ending it there.
Posted on September 27, 2007
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