The Portland City Council approved a $5.6 billion annual city budget Wednesday morning, including a 3 percent decrease to the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) budget from last year's total. It's the first time the police budget has been decreased—not inflated—in years. The decision comes in the midst of a local and national uprising against police brutality, one that encouraged City Council to tack on $15 million in last-minute cuts to the initially proposed PPB budget..
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[What follows is part two of a five-part series on the progress Portland has made on police reform over the past year. Read the rest here.—eds] The beginning of last year’s protests coincided with City Council’s deliberations on the city budget, a vote that determines Portland Police Bureau's (PPB) funding for the year. Of the nearly 800 people who signed up to testify on the city budget in June 2020, the majority of them echoed.
When Margaret Carter reflects on police, she remembers the 1970s, when officers in North Portland planted marijuana in people’s cars and arrested them. Since then, said Carter the first Black woman elected to the Oregon Legislature little has changed to restore trust between Black Portlanders and police officers. And continued police killings of Black Americans have only exacerbated these .