“We do have a couple of teams in the day time going out and doing some of the citations to see if we get any response on people calling the number,” said Pettey. In April, police cleared out the interior of an infamous abandoned building downtown after a series of overdoses and rampant crime in the area. As we are working on that death another death comes out two blocks away right around here.” We literally roll her over and start working on her and they all wondered off once they realized what was going on. Literally had people yelling at me ‘hey, we don’t need you, we can take care of ourselves’ and all this stuff. We just stopped the car in the middle of the street to go chat with her. “I saw a girl lying the middle of a crowd that was doing drugs, yelling at us. “That particular intersection, I think we had about ten serious OD calls we went to.” Said Pettey. Pettey says officers have responded to numerous calls at the location. We also drove past SW 4th and Washington, where an alleged open air drug market used to be. Those are the first few areas we will look at then we will probably go to Old Town.” “We’ve had a few shootings, we had an assault with a baseball bat at SW 6th and Harvey Milk, couple of other issues there. “Recently we’ve had issues at SW 5th and Oak,” said Pettey. I really like the people I work with because once you work with them side by side for a long enough time, you get the idea of how they respond to things and what they need.” That kind of teamwork is critical and it does happen here. It really is a teamwork effort to get the call handled safely, efficiently, and sort of resolve it. If cars need to be towed, someone starts on that. If there is video that needs to be collected someone starts doing that. If there are witnesses that need to be talked to, you find someone to chat with them. So you go to a scene, you write the report, you’re doing that, but the other people who are supporting you on that scene typically find a problem or a role that’s not being filled and fill that role. “So a lot of the things we train on is when you get to a scene if you’re the person who is primary and you are going to write the report, you’re going to chat with the victim, you’re going to get video, you’re going to do different stuff like that, you’re going to get all the things you need to write the report. “A lot of the thing of being a police officer is you’re solving problems to help the community,” said Petty. Pettey remarked on the teamwork with his fellow officers. That becomes apparent when you see what we have to deal with.” I think the national average for police per capita is something like 1.8 and Portland has been ranked at 1.4 or 1.2 for quite a long time. “All those except for one are one person cars. “There’s roughly ten cars out right now,” said Pettey. As of June 15, PPB reports it has 286 patrol officers, 101 of which are at Central Precinct. We also discussed understaffing at the bureau.
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