Today, in THE BIG IDEA—a series of short videos featuring just one candidate at a time, talking about just one idea—is Terrence Hayes, who’s running for city council in District 1.
I talked with Terrence about the various narratives to emerge from the George Floyd protests in 2020 around policing—that the black community does not like police, does not want police officers in their neighborhoods, and sees entities like Portland Street Response, the city’s non-police first responder program that assists people experiencing mental and behavioral health crises, as the answer to police bias in use of force, police shootings of unarmed black men, and systemic racism in the criminal justice system. I asked him, what’s true about this? And he said, well, nothing. (Watch the video for the rest—it’s only two and a half minutes long!)
I also want to acknowledge the utter insanity of asking one black man to speak for the entire black community, which of course no one can do. But for what it’s worth, Terrence’s perspective on policing echoes the findings from several national polls and surveys on the same topic, even as it clashes with the statements of local elected officials. Here’s a nice summary of these from Vox:
In polling, black people often express disgust at police racism yet support more funding for police. A 2015 Gallup poll found that black adults who believed police treated black people unfairly were also more likely to desire a larger police presence in their local area than those who thought police treated black people fairly. A 2019 Vox poll found that despite being the racial group with the most unfavorable view of the police, most black people still supported hiring more police officers. And more recently, a June 2020 Yahoo News/YouGov survey taken after the killing of George Floyd found that 50 percent of black respondents still said that “we need more cops on the street,” even as 49 percent of black respondents said when they personally see a police officer it makes them feel “less secure.”
Yet the story around race and policing in Portland rarely includes this kind of nuance. That, I think, is part of what makes Terrence such an interesting person and candidate. He’s had lots of lived experience (this is such a popular term in progressive circles, there have even been panels and forums this election cycle where only people with certain kinds of lived experience can speak) that make him the kind of person most progressive city council candidates claim to represent—he was born poor to parents who were addicted to drugs, got involved with guns and gangs, spent 13 years in prison, and, in 2017, tragically lost his cousin, Quanice Hayes, to a police shooting. Yet Terrence has reached fairly opposite policy conclusions from these candidates in many substantive ways.
I also want to say I feel a little guilty about this interview, because at some point during our talk, Terrence said it was getting old, always having to talk about black people in the context of public safety—how much more they are and can do—and I agree! (I remember hearing similar criticism when I was a reporter in Arizona from Mexican Americans who wanted to be asked about more than just immigration.) But that is for another, longer piece. The narrative around public safety in Portland is so skewed, I don’t want to move on from talking about it until it’s a little more reflective of how most people feel.
On that point, I need to point out that, unfortunately, the last thing Terrence says in the video is true—we did lose a lot of people, mostly black, to gun violence between 2020 and 2023. This isn’t solely because the city eliminated the Gun Violence Reduction Team (homicides went up across the country in 2021), but the national homicide rate fell by 6.1% between 2021 and 2022, while in Portland, it went up—101 people were killed in 2022 compared to 92 in 2021. Fortunately, it dropped in 2023, due to a mix of interventions, one of which was the reinstatement of task force focused on gun violence, like the FIT team Terrence mentions. (I’ll cover other interventions from the Community Safety Division with Lisa Freeman in the next video.)
p.s. A reminder that my husband and I own a production company, and we’ve worked with several candidates running for office, including Terrence. (I designed his billboards and digital ads.) If that makes it difficult to read this post and you’d rather gather information about him in a more impartial way, I recommend you read his responses to the candidate questionnaire in the Oregonian, watch this interview on KOIN or listen to this interview on Rational in Portland, which the host, Kristin Olson, said was the most downloaded episode in the podcast’s history.
Thank you for reading! Up next in THE BIG IDEA: Lisa Freeman in District 4.
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