Burglaries: ‘Out of control’

• East Precinct officers strive in vain to keep up with break-ins and those who commit them

By Jacob Quinn Sanders

The Portland Tribune, Jan 14, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Portland police arrested Christopher Gaetaniello in mid-December and twice more the first week of January. He spent a total of eight hours in jail, released all three times on his own recognizance Ñ a no-bail, get-out-of-jail-free card.

The primary charge: burglary. The cops: frustrated. The reason: There are so many like him.

Burglary shot up by almost a quarter in 2004, often fueled by the drug methamphetamine, and hit the Police Bureau’s East Precinct hard. Southeast Precinct has more burglaries but also has more detectives. At East, three detectives, soon to be four, work those cases full-time. They say they haven’t investigated an identity-theft case in two years, and fraud cases only very rarely.

Just burglaries.

And burglaries have become one of the hardest crimes on which to hold criminals in Multnomah County, with full jails and a “matrix” that keeps violent crooks in jail but often freely releases those accused of or sentenced in minor crimes.

East Precinct Cmdr. Greg Hendricks, calls it a “public-safety crisis,” the worst he’s seen in 29 years in law enforcement.

It has left his detectives at East working against the almost crushing weight of time, sweat, evidence and connections to build cases and keep those they arrest in jail.

“You call the jail and tell them if someone tries to release this guy, ‘Call me, here’s my cell phone, here’s my home phone,’ ” Detective Dave Anderson said. “I get that call, then I call my sergeant, who calls the commander, who calls and asks for a favor to keep the guy in jail. So it’s not just a matter of pulling strings once. You have to keep pulling the strings constantly.”

The detectives can’t act on most of the tips or evidence they receive. The crimes or criminals are too small-time or the detectives are too busy, and no one forgets that the jails are full.

It’s a simple calculation, Hendricks said: Meth created more burglars as more people needed things to sell for drug money. Burglaries spiked. The detectives don’t have the resources to investigate each one, a problem made almost moot by the lack of jail space in Multnomah County Ñ of 2,555 jail beds, officials can afford to use 1,579.

Bottomless well

What car thefts are to North Precinct and transients are to Central Precinct, burglary is to East, which begins roughly at Southeast 102nd Avenue and continues east to the city line.

The detectives and crime analysts at East get 30 to 40 residential burglary reports a week, perhaps two of which contain information that they say by itself could trigger an arrest. DNA matches from burglaries Ñ like gold, they say Ñ collect unread on their desks.

“We could arrest someone every two days,” Anderson said. “That would be like being on fire. But we can’t. Every piece of paper takes time.”

The Records Division no longer logs any items without a serial number into its database. To find something such as antique jewelry, detectives must hope it’s among the 350,000 items contained annually in pawn shop reports to the Police Bureau. Two officers are assigned to reading and entering those reports.

Burglaries declined in East Precinct Ñ the largest in the Police Bureau at nearly 33 square miles Ñ from 1998 to 2002, but 2002 showed the beginning of an increase. Final numbers from 2004 are expected to be released any day, but figures released in September showed 23 percent more burglaries in Portland over 2003, even as crime overall dipped 6 percent.

Arrests the detectives do make Ñ even the big ones Ñ have little impact on an epidemic of residential burglaries.

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