Seventeen years ago James Chasse was beaten to death on 13th and NW Glisan, in Portland. He was my friend.
Three cops beat him, then hogtied him, waived off an ambulance, threw him in the back of their cruiser and took him to jail.
Jail nurses, seeing Chasse was mortally injured instructed the cops to take him to an ER.
After talking with a supervisor for 20 minutes they started driving Chasse - still hogtied - to Mt Hood Hospital - 17 miles away. OHSU is 1 mile, Good Sam is 2 miles. He died enroute.
Jim had schizophrenia. He was a peaceful person walking home when three cops jumped him, and brutally beat him in front of a dozen witnesses.
He had friends. He had family. He loved Lou Reed and the Green Lantern.
District Attorney Mike Schrunk found no reason to indict the three officers. His office had not prosecuted an officer for use of force since 1961.
Ted Wheeler, then Multnomah County Chair, settled with the Chasse family in 2010.
Sam Adams, then Mayor of Portland, settled with the Chasse family - as did AMR Ambulance and TriMet.
The cops received no penalty - no discipline from the city for killing Jim. No law or mechanism was in place to hold them accountable. No officer had ever been held accountable by the city for use of force before. All three continued in their law enforcement careers.
Sgt. Kyle Nice retired from PPB and works as a firearms trainer for the Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Training.
Bret Burton was hired away from the county sheriff's department to the Portland Police Bureau and was later promoted to sergeant - where he continues to serve.
Chris Humphrey told the city he was disabled from a stress disorder - essentially that by killing Chasse he'd become mentally ill. He later resigned and served as Sheriff of Wheeler County. Today he calls himself a trauma counselor practicing in Heppner (pop. 1100).
No substantive policy change was made by the county or the city in response to Jim's death; nothing was changed that would have saved his life.
In 2012 the US DOJ found the PPB has a pattern and practice of harming people with mental illness. Lawyers have spent the last decade litigating changes in the PPB, but few if any changes can be shown to have reduced use of force against people with mental illness.
Monday at 7 PM - Clinton Street Theater of course - we'll show our film about the life and death of James Chasse, who he was, how he was killed, and a city which wasn't safe to be weird. Filmmaker Brian Lindstrom & I will be there to give an after-talk
cstpdx.com
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