The Oregonian (Portland, OR) 
January 14, 2008 

REAWAKENING THE CITY'S CONSCIENCE
The Portland City Council should move this week to create a new Human Relations Commission

By S. Renee Mitchell

For all of the grief Portland Mayor Tom Potter took over his "visioning process" last year, it's worth pointing out that the effort was not entirely an exercise in navel gazing.

The mostly predictable, mostly self-evident report the vision committee produced last fall contained at least one important and useful recommendation: Our community needs to resurrect its human rights commission. Last week, the mayor's office outlined its proposal to do just that and presented a detailed report on why it's a good idea.

The Portland City Council will conduct its first hearing on the subject this week at Jefferson High School, where the mayor has temporarily relocated his office and will hold the regular Wednesday meeting of the City Council. Potter's Jefferson project, by the way, is an excellent idea and has educational and symbolic importance.

The proposal to create a city Human Relations Commission is far from being mere symbolism. It is the re-establishment of a key community function that has been allowed to slip away. As Potter pointed out last week during a discussion with The Oregonian's editorial board, the city has no agency, and thus no real ability, to review or investigate pressing human rights issues, incidents and trends in Portland.

The once-active Metropolitan Human Rights Commission died of bureaucratic strangulation in 2003 when its budget was cut from the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, where the commission had been sent off to die. Since then, the city's response to human rights issues has been episodic and reactive.

Portland and its surrounding communities are increasingly diverse, and the fault lines along race, ethnicity and sexual orientation are as apparent as ever. Neo-Nazis may not openly defile the community as they did in 1988, when skinheads provoked a racial incident that culminated in the murder of Ethiopian Mulugeta Seraw, but hate and fear, ignorance and mistrust must be confronted every day in Portland because they exist every day.

Last year, for example, the city reported 77 hate crimes, most of them aimed at gays and lesbians, through mid-December.

When the question of racial profiling by police came to a head following the police killing of an innocent black driver in 2004, there was no agency other than the Police Bureau to take up the question. To its credit, the bureau has been working to address its shortcomings. However, the city needs a permanent, independent agency to monitor human rights issues, report often to the community at large and to provide a forum to solve problems through education, discussion, moderation and mediation.

Human rights issues aren't the exclusive province of Portland, of course, and over time, Portland, Multnomah County, Washington County, Clackamas County and area cities ought to pool their efforts and form a regional human relations commission.

Potter has proposed the city spend $200,000 in this fiscal year and $500,000 in the next to launch the city-only initiative. The City Council ought to scrutinize those numbers closely, but it should put enough money and effort into the project to ensure its success and permanence. Budgetary issues sank the last human rights commission, and that should not be allowed to happen again.

A city can live without a lot of things, but it shouldn't do without a conscience.

Copyright 2008 - The Oregonian