Dear City of Portland CC: City Council for the City of Portland, and US Department of Justice. I am taking this, my one and only chance, to sit down and write down for you my experience as a volunteer for the Police Accountability Commission (PAC) , which served the City of Portland for almost 2 years, from 2021 to September of 2023. T he City Code we presented to City Council on September 15, 2023 was the culmination of 20 months of arduous work done by a committee of 20 volunteers, who dedicated c ountless hours of work, research, and participated in a series of community engagement events. I was one of the commissioners involved in this work. The city code as it was presented reflected all of this work and represented what the voters in Portland passed 3 years ago in Measure 26 - 217, 82% of you voted for it , and much of what this Police Accountability Commission heard from Portlanders throughout those community engagement events. We presented our code package to the City Council in September 15 , 2023, only to have City Council revise this work down from 96 pages to 27 when they presented th eir version of the same code package to the public , effectively derailing your voice and resisting much needed change. I am hoping that sharing my life expe rience and describing the process we as your PAC went through will help to move you to support your PAC and contact City Council and the Department of Justice to act in our behalf. As a Latinx immigrant and nurse - midwife, I have always wanted to serve. I chose midwifery in 1999, while pregnant with my first daughter when I saw the gap of culturally appropriate care for Latinas while working as a medical Spanish Interpreter and a musician in the 1990’s. I first moved to Portland after my first degree in co llege, only 4 years after immigrating to the US from Peru I had moved to the US as a passport holding immigrant, only because my parents happened to be here in the US when I was born. I was lucky enough to have been born into a family of means, that prov ided me a bilingual education since my birth, and all I had to do was get on a plane and pursue my American dream. The people I was interpreting for had gone through hell and back to be here, only to be faced with a hard reality of discrimination, more po verty, housing instability, food deserts, and police brutality while trying to find jobs under the table to provide food for their families and far away from all of their support systems, in a foreign land. My immigration story was a privileged one, and I felt a strong pull to make my community feel like someone out there cared for them. I found the perfect job at Virginia Garcia after I was done with training. I have been present for the birth of 1200 babies in Washington and Multnomah County in the la st 15 years, 90% of them into Latinx families because of VG. And I am grateful for the experience. But in 2021, life sent me a curve ball, and my husband’s father died, leaving my mother - in - law with Alzheimer’s in England, and having to move her here to live with us. I had to cut my hours to be present at home , and as we moved her into Assisted Living, I was able to return to work, at a limited capacity 6 months later. My decreased FTE gave me space to serve in another way. And the perfect opportunity came when Portland voted for Measure 26 - 217 and JoAnn Hardesty and city council staff sent a plea to anyone that had commitment and wanted to serve in the new Police Accountability Commission. They were looking for Portlanders who had lived experience, wh o worked with overpoliced communities and who identified as members of overpoliced communities. I felt I qualified, and quickly filled out my application. I served proudly with 20 other volunteers, co - chaired the subcommittee on community engagement, res earched police accountability systems in Philadelphia. Twice weekly, this commission met for over 2 h ou rs at a time, and we were given homework and independent research assignments to educate ourselves and bring to the group what we had found in our work. I served with commissioners that have dedicated their entire life to the work of police accountability in Portland, and others who like me, had never really delved into this topic and were driven by social justice and love for the city and its residents. In our meetings we heard from the entire current system of Police Accountability already in place to learn of what was working and what was not . We heard from all city council members, we heard from the police unions, and from the Citizen Review Commi t tee , Independent Police Review, from Internal Affairs in the Police Department, and the Department of Justice who has City of Portland under a Settlement Agreement because our system has harmed people with mental health issues, substance use issues and rac ial minorities. We started having community engagement events in the second half of our work and heard from residents in all overpoliced communities throughout the city including organizations working with families that have had to go through the current systems to bring complaints about our system to the city. Our job was to take Measure 26 - 217, and look at our city charter (which is like our city constitution and can only be changed by city vote) and the Settlement Agreement between Portland and the De partment of Justice, and propose the city code that would guide and design a new police accountability system in Portland. My goal in all of this was to make a system that would bring back honor for the job of a police officer, and bring back confidence t o our city residents. If we could create a system that would make it comfortable to bring complaints of harm to the city, and in which police officers felt they would be treated fairly when being reviewed in their work, then trust would return to the syst em. Then the job of a police officer could be seen as an honorable job, and the city would feel like our system was working for them, serving them and making our lives better. Then we would not have so much difficulty recruiting new officers into the for ce and our citizens would feel comfortable calling police in times of need, without the fear of being harmed, or shot at when their children were in crisis. I feel confident that we did an excellent job at representing the needs and desires o f the commun ity and the police department and those responsible for accountability currently. Our work culminated on September 15, 2023, when we presented our code package to City Council after many hours or working with independent legal counc e l to ensure that what we were proposing was legally sound and something that could be implemented. Our Code package was approved by the Police Accountability Commission unanimously, with every single commissioner voting “AY” as we had worked through it word for word and com e to consensus on all of its points with the help of independent lawyers. Just a month after we presented our 96 - page code package to the City of Portland, City Council responded with a “revised” code package that had 2/3 of our proposals taken out. Fea r of change and politics are getting in the way of your voice from being heard. You voted for this so overwhelmingly. We heard from you and we listened. Now the systems in place are resisting your call to change, as they always do, and we are too busy t o be able to put in the time and commitment to fight these systems of oppression that make it so hard to improve our lives. I could go into all the details that have been changed in our proposal but that would mean this letter would be another six pages long. Our Police Accountability Commission has had many of its members delineate these points and go through each change. We continue to advocate to the City Council and the City Attorney for our package to be given a chance to do its intention, but we a re not getting through and we a tired and we have given all we had to push this through for you and for our communities. Please, don’t let this be what happens. Our code package if left intact will provide a process that is less confusing, that listens to you, that informs you of where your complaint is in the process and that makes sure the police force is following all the rules and regulations they should be following in doing their job to respond in your times of need. Our code package will provide you a complaint navigator trained in trauma - informed, culturally responsive assistance throughout the entire process of accountability. If left as is, our police force can feel confident that their actions are being looked at fairly. The system will rep ort to the city their findings, and be able to not only address actions that are out of policy when police respond to the scene, but will also have the ability to look at the systems, and regulations that contribute to unwanted outcomes, and change those s o that our system can improve. These things can be scary for City Council, because it means REAL CHANGE to the usual paradigm, but we all know how poorly this usual paradigm has worked for us in the past. Please, take a moment to tell your City Council that you support the proposals of your Police Accountability Commission and don’t let them derail all the work your commission did for you and the City of Portland that we all love. Here are the places and links to do that. If there is one important thi ng to do for change and for bettering our systems right now it is this. Police Accountability Commission | Portland.gov Email the Department of Justice: doj - comments@portlandoregon.gov Thank you. Monica M. Arce Ex - commissioner for the Police Accountability Commission, City of Portland Midwife and Site Medical Director at Virginia Garcia Reproductive Health Clinic in Hillsboro