This month's guilty verdict in the Kim Potter trial has brought renewed attention to police accountability, but a Minnesota group says fatal encounters with law enforcement still happen too often, and it wants to help departments with their response teams.

Potter, a former Brooklyn Center officer, was convicted in the shooting death of Daunte Wright. It followed this spring's conviction of former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin.

Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality, said those verdicts are important for the families, but the need for reform is far from over. Her group's current focus is to help departments embrace alternative responses to calls.

"What we need to do is narrow the bandwidth of policing to those things that police are supposed to be dealing with," she said, "which is, you know, crime."

She said it's been frustrating trying to get certain reform measures adopted by the Legislature, but her group cited a victory this year. A new law requires 911 dispatchers to route mental-health calls to crisis teams. Gross said it won't be easy for every jurisdiction to implement the changes, and advocacy groups have pledged to help them overcome logistical barriers.

Beyond the law change, Gross said, there are broader efforts to help some cities build a more robust response network of specialists. At the same time, she said, she feels it's important to not strip communities of law-enforcement capability.

"We do need police when a crime has occurred," she said, "and people have access to the court system by way of a police investigation."

As for the Potter verdict, Gross said it proves video footage adds another dimension in analyzing deadly encounters with police. She suggested that it allows juries and the public to better question police accounts of whether an individual posed a threat, especially in situations where racial profiling is a possibility.

A police oversight group has formally recommended Portland adopt a technology known as "ShotSpotter" to help tackle gun violence, but the technology has been met with some skepticism.

ShotSpotter uses artificial intelligence with data collected from hidden microphones to determine the location of gunshots and inform the police department.

Dan Hon, a Portland-based strategy consultant in government and civic technology, said the technology still has to make some leaps to determine if the sound it hears is a gunshot.

"The thing about technology that we really need to understand is that it's not magical, it's not necessarily more reliable," Hon asserted. "It's not necessarily going to 100%, always classify sound in exactly the right way."

A study last year from Chicago, where ShotSpotter has been implemented, found it led to more than 40,000 dead-end police deployments in less than two years.

A ShotSpotter spokesperson says the report draws erroneous conclusions from its interpretation of police reports.

The Focus Intervention Taskforce Community Oversight Group submitted its recommendation to Mayor Ted Wheeler and the city council on Monday. Hon argued if the technology is adopted, open data is key to ensure accountability.

Je Amaechi, digital organizer in Portland for Freedom to Thrive, pointed out the technology is still experimental, and has even faced a challenge to its constitutionality as sole evidence in an Ohio case.

One of the biggest criticisms is it could lead to more policing in communities of color. Amaechi thinks the resources to bring ShotSpotter to Portland should be used instead to improve lives in communities of color.

"They instead use it to manipulate people into manufacturing consent for this surveillance system that puts more police into their neighborhoods," Amaechi contended. "And we've seen already that more police in neighborhoods does not make us safer. It makes us, actually, more at risk of police violence."

A ShotSpotter spokesperson said communities affected by gun violence "deserve a rapid police response, which gunshot detection enables regardless of race or geographic location." At a community meeting last week, ShotSpotter stressed the technology would only be used to detect gunshots.

Chris Bushick, executive director of PDX Privacy, believes the microphones could be used for other purposes.

"I really want to believe them, but I've been disappointed many times by tech companies that have broken their promises," Bushick stressed. "And there have been at least two criminal trials where prosecutors have tried to introduce into evidence voice recordings that were obtained from gunshot detection systems."

ShotSpotter says sensors are only designed to record loud sounds and says the risk of recording voices is extremely limited.

More than 120 cities are contracted with ShotSpotter, according to the company's website.

This July 4th marks nearly 250 years since the United States declared its independence, setting the country on a path to establishing its democracy. But some feel the state of U.S. democracy needs close examination.

Lindsay Schubiner is with the Portland-based organization Western States Center. She is the director of its Momentum program, which is focused on countering white nationalism - and she said it's clear to many that the future of democracy is in peril.

"The country has watched as bigoted and anti-democracy movements have built political power and have been welcomed into mainstream politics, at least by many people," said Schubiner. "And that has had enormous and devastating repercussions."

As an example, she pointed to the white nationalist shooting of ten Black people in Buffalo, New York, in May - and the January 6 insurrection at the nation's Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Schubiner said the congressional hearings on January 6 are important because they're holding people accountable for what happened.

"It's critical to have elected officials and community leaders speak out clearly, and forcefully and repeatedly," said Schubiner, "both in support of inclusive democracy, but also to clearly reject the bigoted and anti-democracy movements."

Schubiner encouraged people to join and organize within local and neighborhood groups.

"We really do have the power to protect our democracy if we take action together," said Schubiner, "and a lot of that can start at the local level."




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The arrests of 31 white supremacists outside of a Pride festival in North Idaho shook the country over the weekend. It's only part of a larger uptick in far-right extremism.

The group involved is known as Patriot Front, which renamed itself after the 2017 rally in Charlottesville where one of its members ran over and killed Heather Heyer. However, Patriot Front was not the only extremist group at the Coeur d'Alene Pride festival. Leah Sotille, a freelance reporter who covers this issue in the Northwest, said a local biker group and Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott, R-Blanchard, made the event a flashpoint.

"The Pride festival was going on, and then around the park there was a guy holding an AR-15, there were people holding signs and trying to intimidate people at the festival," Sotille said. "So, people seemed to respond to the Panhandle Patriots' and Heather Scott's calls to get people there to protest."

It's not yet clear what the Patriot Front members planned to do at the festival. Local police arrested them for conspiracy to riot.

Sotille said other far-right figures at the event included Matt Shea, a former eastern Washington state representative. Shea is known for his extremist rhetoric and has been seen with Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader facing sedition charges for his role on Jan. 6, 2001, at the U.S. Capitol. Two people who attend Shea's church were among the men arrested.

Sotille said the latest attack on the LGBT community may feel new but it is not for folks like Shea.

"The whole debate around trans youth and trans people - this is something that has just revived old grievances within the far right," she said. "But I think it's just something that people like Matt Shea have pounced on to continue to push the views that they've always had."

Idaho has struggled with white supremacists in the past, although only one of the men arrested is from Idaho. Sotille said it's important to see this as one of many extremist incidents taking place within a short time span across the country.

"It was just a week ago or two weeks ago that we were all talking about the Buffalo shooting at the grocery store, and how the shooter was motivated by a white-supremacist ideology," she said. "This group, Patriot Front, is part and parcel, it's the same ideas about a white ethno-state."

Sotille has authored a book about religious extremism in Idaho, called "When the Moon Turns to Blood," which comes out next week.


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