Multnomah County deputies recently stopped providing security at court hearings in the Unity Center, Portland's largest psychiatric hospital facility.
April Ehrlich / OPB
Long-simmering tensions over whether law enforcement officers should be allowed to carry guns while inside Portland’s largest mental health hospital came to a dramatic head last month.
In protest of being required to ditch their guns while entering the Unity Center for Behavioral Health, Multnomah County sheriff’s deputies announced they would no longer provide security for judicial hearings at the Northeast Portland facility.
“If they want [Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office] members to continue to assist, MCSO members will NOT remove their safety equipment,” Scott Shropshire, vice president of the union that represents Multnomah County deputies, wrote in an email to sheriff’s office leaders on Feb. 11. “If that’s objectionable to the Unity Center, they can rely on other parties.”
The announcement has forced a quick adjustment to hearings that are vital as the county struggles to deal with mental illness on Portland’s streets.
Opened in 2017, the 107-bed Unity Center is the city’s largest hospital facility for people in acute mental health crisis. When patients are ill enough to merit commitment – meaning the state places them under forced hospital care for up to 180 days at a time – they often end up at Unity.
Deputies have long provided security for civil commitment hearings that play out in a courtroom within the facility. With those deputies now declining to participate, those hearings have moved online – spurring concerns from the nonprofit advocacy group Disability Rights Oregon, which represents patients in civil commitment hearings.
Dave Boyer, an attorney with the group, said Thursday that remote hearings can be confusing and cheapen a proceeding that is hugely consequential for patients’ lives.
“This is one of the worst days of their lives,” Boyer said. “They’re facing six months of civil commitment, and they’re looking at a computer screen that has at least seven zoom screens with people they don’t know. That’s confusing even for people who aren’t in the hospital.”
Ending in-person hearings, Boyer said, “violates our clients’ constitutional rights to a fair trial, and we will resist any efforts to allow it to continue.”
Multnomah County prosecutors also have a role in the hearings: arguing for patients to be committed. Senior Deputy District Attorney Caroline Wong said in a statement that, while the office would prefer in-person hearings with proper security measures, “This is currently not possible.”
Both the sheriff’s office and Legacy Health, which operates the Unity Center, told OPB that remote hearings are a sensible solution as they work out the impasse. Hospitals other than the Unity Center routinely hold remote civil commitment hearings.
“We are working in collaboration with the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office to identify a model that will continue to implement trauma-informed care and best practices for our patients,” the Unity Center said in a statement. “As part of our commitment to trauma-informed care and safety, firearms have never been permitted inside Unity Center.”
That’s not quite right.
The Unity Center has long had rules directing police and others who visit the facility to put their guns in lock boxes before entering secure areas. Advocates and officials worry that having guns in psychiatric wards introduces the likelihood that a person in crisis will be shot.
But Portland Police made clear at the outset of the hospital’s opening that they wouldn’t abide by those rules when responding to calls at Unity. Sgt. Kevin Allen, a bureau spokesman, said Thursday that policy hasn’t changed. Allen noted that officers visiting the hospital rarely have to enter secured areas.
Disability Rights Oregon has lobbied since 2017 to ensure that MCSO deputies comply with the no-guns rule.
The sheriff’s office says it began hashing out changes to civil commitment hearings with Unity in late 2023, hoping to create a new process “based on several factors, including trauma-informed care and best practices, use of MCSO staffing, system efficiency, and fiscal responsibility.”
Those discussions weren’t enough to avoid the impasse that emerged in February.
In his memo to top brass, union Vice President Shropshire said being forced to stow guns and other protective equipment “creates officer safety issues and violates general MCSO policies regarding members to have all their equipment on them and to be duty ready when operating in uniform.”
He contended that the policy risks safe workplace laws for deputies, and threatened to alert state workplace regulators if Sheriff Nicole Morrissey O’Donnell attempted to order deputies to staff civil commitment hearings unarmed.
If the Unity Center objected, Shropshire wrote, it could hire private security.
The blow up in Multnomah County comes as lawmakers prepare to focus on the issue of civil commitment, potentially leading to more hearings at Unity and elsewhere.
For years, judges, prosecutors and family members of people with severe mental illness have asked the Legislature to lower the standard for committing a person into the state’s custody.
State law allows for such commitments when a person poses a risk to themselves or others, or faces immediate harm because they can’t provide for their own needs. But proponents of changing the law say court opinions over the years have created an unreasonably high hurdle to meeting those standards.
With a mental health crisis growing increasingly visible around the state, lawmakers are signaling they will take a serious look at changes this year. A House committee is expected to take up proposals to reform the mental health system later this month.