For creative cop, chat’s just a start

In Old Town, officer’s talks can lead to housing, treatment or jail

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Oct 9, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (23 Reader comments)

JIM CLARK / P0RTLAND TRIBUNE

For officer Jeff Myers, any opening will do to check someone out in Old Town/Chinatown. Here he gives a little lecture on jaywalking.

Officer Jeff Myers is long-striding down the street, stiff-legged and fast at 6-foot-8, and he’s looking for a creative solution. There’s a knot of people huddled outside nonprofit social service agency Transition Projects Inc., in Old Town. They’re shying away from the rain, and Myers is coming fast.

While on the move down Northwest Fifth Avenue, Myers is looking for a way to get at least some of the men and women he’s approaching outside Transition Projects off the street – into addiction programs, into housing, maybe into jail.

And he’s got to be a little more creative than he was last week, he says, because he no longer has the drug-free zone rules as leverage.

But Myers, working the pilot Neighborhood Livability Crime Enforcement program, is all about creative solutions, according to Myers’ fans in the police bureau and at City Hall.

“Give me five Jeff Myers, and we will turn crime around in Portland and send a message to criminals that this is not the place to be,” says city Commissioner Randy Leonard.

The mission of the crime enforcement program, which at this point has only Myers on the street, is to focus on zero tolerance for chronic public nuisance criminals. The choice for offenders is housing, treatment or jail.

Officer finds an opening

As Myers approaches the group, he smiles and delivers the same greeting he gives to nearly everybody he passes on the street, a personable “How ya doing?” The greeting isn’t so much a question as an introduction.

Myers needs a reason to talk to people, and any excuse will do. Riding a bike on one of Old Town’s sidewalks? Count on a lecture. Jaywalking? Expect to give up a few minutes of your time, and your name.

What Myers is doing is finding creative ways to engage people long enough to do one of two things – find them help or take them to jail. Either way, Myers says, he’s getting drug addicts off the street, and with them the nuisance crimes they commit.

“This is old school,” he says. “You walk along, you know everybody, you try to get them into a resolution of their problems.”

Myers has established personal relationships with workers at most of the Old Town social service agencies. With a call he can get someone on a waiting list for a subsidized room to stay in overnight or into a medical clinic.

Within minutes, Myers has singled out a middle-age black man he’s dealt with before from among the group outside Transition Projects. The man has the look of someone who has spent too many days feeding an addiction and more than a few nights on the street.

The man asks Myers to get him a room. Myers gets on his phone and tells the man that he’ll have a place, but it might take a few weeks. The man walks away.

One call leads to another

Fifteen minutes later, Myers is walking south on Northwest Fifth Avenue when he spots two men huddled in the alcove of an abandoned building. One is white, the other black, both familiar. In fact, the black man is the same fellow he talked to back at Transition Projects.

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