City Cites Alien Boy In Prolonging Gag Order

Lawyers for the City of Portland have cited the production of Alien Boy in arguing why the media and public should not be able to see certain documents about the officers involved in James Chasse’s death, which are currently covered by a gag order, in the case filed by Chasse’s family against the city.

The original gag order, signed on October 23, 2007 by Judge Denis Hubel, prohibits the release of broad categories of documents associated with the case to the public. Now, attorneys for the Chasse family are asking that the gag orders be reviewed so that the following documents can be made public: Internal affairs documents; documents from Officer Humphreys and Nice’s personnel files; PPB training documents; PPB after action reports; and City of Portland records involving in-custody deaths.

On page seven of its response, the city says Alien Boy’s production presents a safety risk to the officers involved:

Releasing the requested evidence, says the city, could result in hostility towards the defendants that is prejudicial to the trial. This begs the question: What’s in those documents, exactly? In addition, the city has attached two pages of posts from this blog as exhibits, intending to suggest the supposed dangerousness of Alien Boy.

It’s hard to know whether to be flattered or surprised by the city’s lawyers, although mainly, I think, we’re surprised.

Alien Boy is Front Page News

Homeless newspaper Street Roots gave Alien Boy a 1500 word write-up today. Buy a copy for a dollar and support the homeless, or go to the paper’s website tomorrow to download the article..

Candlelight Vigil for Jordan Case

Thanks to Joe Anybody for collecting this video and making it available.

For more information about what happened to Jordan Case, see Family Files Wrongful Death Lawsuit, Mourns Loss of Jordan Case, Willamette Week, April 2008

Meet the Filmmakers: Matt Davis

When a colleague suggested I talk with Matt Davis of the Portland Mercury, I was dismissive. It’s a post-college shopper; pretentious and provincial; someone’s plaything. But Matt had found Jamie Marquez, who had made a set of exceptional photographs with his cell phone camera, and more – Jamie was pissed off and wanted everyone to see the pics.

The fuzzy pictures showed a circle of uniformed police officers, fire personnel and emergency medical technicians standing over the limp body of James Chasse, who would die 90 minutes later without medical attention in the back of a police car.

Matt Davis had put Jamie’s pictures on the internet, and within a couple of days everyone had seen the impassive authorities, blandly gabbing with their partners. Matt had made a bold move. “Portland media has historically been frightened of candor when it comes to the police,” Matt told me recently, “Criticism of one officer is easily positioned by their advocates to be a blanket condemnation of all officers – most medias can’t risk having the door closed, and make compromises.”

The details: he’s 28 and from London. He’s been all over the world, and fell in love with a Portland girl who enticed him home. He has a quick smile, some bravado, easy wit and poor taste in clothes. Davis is working angles in Portland media no one has touched since Mark Christianson left for LA in the 1980s. And he’s working without standard resources. He doesn’t own a cell phone or a car. He uses an antique laptop, his own camera and has created his own beat – Portland’s underclass. And he takes a certain glee in pissing people off.

Not only in the print edition of the Mercury does he play, which is fairly innocuous, but the romper room of the paper’s active blog is where the duels have flourished – often Matt parrying several dozen hostile readers and an occasional editor at once.

Why Chasse?  Why a documentary film? “We can show the rest of the country that Portland isn’t as great as the New York Times would led us to believe. There need to be changes with the police, with the mental health system, with the state budget. I want this film to cry shame on Portland. Sure, we’ve learned things, we’ve made changes – but Jim Chasse’s death should have been prevented. It’s Portland’s small town mentality which caused this tragedy.”

Meet the Filmmakers: Benjamin Haile

“I think Chasse’s death is a great example of the lethal nature of commonly-used police tactics,” says Benjamin Haile, who has signed on to be our attorney. “Maybe the police were being extra-aggressive because of the demographic changes in the Pearl District at the time, and the decreased tolerance for people who seemed out of place there.”

“But the basic theme of Tasing someone then having the enormous weight of a police officer on top of them while they are in shock is something that I see very often,” Haile continues. “I frequently have clients say they thought they were going to die during such encounters.”

Haile qualified from Lewis & Clark law school in 2004, and initially focused on criminal defense work. In September 2005 he started a small practice focusing on civil rights, primarily police misconduct cases.

“That’s always been something that concerns me,” he says. “The need to police the police. Somebody needs to be doing it from outside of government. I think internal affairs investigations can be effective when they have effective civilian oversight, but in Portland at least, I don’t think the Independent Police Review really has enough investigatory power to be effective, and I haven’t seen very good results from the Citizen’s Review Committee, either.”

Frequently, Haile’s clients come to him having exhausted Portland’s police review process. If a client comes to him without having made a complaint to the city’s oversight system, Haile frequently files such complaints alongside civil lawsuits, because he wants to empower the review process as much as possible.

One of Haile’s first clients even alleged excessive force against officer Christopher Humphreys, in an incident in 2003. In that case, the violence escalated quickly. The police were looking for Haile’s client’s friend, and assumed that the client was the person they were looking for, even though he was sleeping in a car outside the person’s house.

“They broke the car windows and pepper-sprayed him,” says Haile. “So my client drove around the corner to another friend’s house, where he stopped. The officers dragged him out of the car, Tazed him and beat him.”

Haile secured an $85,000 settlement for his client in that case, although there was no discipline for Officer Humphreys. Haile says he wasn’t altogether surprised by this, but that he did feel the city’s having to pay a significant settlement might draw some attention. Another of Haile’s clients, Richard Prentice, alleges he was confronted by Humphreys in a cell in 2007, after putting up posters of him downtown.

Haile is excited about our project, especially that we are making Alien Boy while the lawsuit is being pursued by the Chasse family.

“When a lawsuit is filed, often an issue drops out of public view,” he says. “So I think it’s very important that others who are concerned about the issue keep it in the public view. It’s tragic when lawyers get involved and cause everyone to clam up.”

Thanks for giving us your help and advice, Ben!

Meet The Filmmakers: Jason Renaud

“We were looking for a case we could follow for a long time through all its permutations,” says Jason Renaud, when asked why his organization decided to follow the story of James Chasse’s death. “These events happen frequently but the public moves from one story to the next, because the media moves from one story to the next. By focusing on one story, we’re hoping to get to a deeper, more sophisticated understanding.”

Renaud has been doing advocacy around alcohol and drug issues for almost 30 years. In 2003 he formed the Mental Health Association of Portland (MHAP), with the purpose of selecting a single project each year to put the group’s utmost effort into, rather than getting buffeted about by the latest news.

There’s a saying in the disability advocacy movement, nothing about us without us, that Renaud took to heart when he formed MHAP. Its board is made up of people suffering with mental illness, addiction, or those who care for such people. MHAP is particularly interested in how people with mental illness are affected within the confluence of large institutions like prisons, hospitals, churches and schools. Renaud also happened to know Chasse personally, as a fellow student at the Metropolitan Learning Center when they were in their teens.

“I’ve been trying to get more memories of Jim but they haven’t come,” he admits. “We spent time mostly after school going to clubs, record stores, and hanging out at coffee shops. He was a bit of a poet, and he had this newsletter he published and handed out. Often we were too young to get into the clubs so we’d stand outside.”

What happened when Renaud heard about his friend’s death?

“I was disappointed,” he says. “I guess I don’t really get angry, but I can be fairly determined, and Jim didn’t have to die that way. It was a miserable, brutal death, and completely pointless. In general I’m tired of people with a mental illness being abused, and at some point, you have to pick your fight.”

Renaud, whose quiet determination is largely responsible for getting the film to where it is now, says he’s optimistic about getting Alien Boy into theaters. “We’ve got a good plan, a good crew, a good story,” he says. “And the opportunity to do it is right now.”

Black Flag - Police Story

These kids have swiped a tape from Joe Rees’ Target Video archive. This one is pure energy - Police Story by an early incarnation of Black Flag with Dez Cadena on mike.

This fucking city / Is run by pigs / They take the rights away / From all the kids
Understand, We’re fighting a war we can’t win / They hate us-we hate them / We can’t win-no way

Our First Shooting List!

Our first shooting list is complete, whittled down from this sprawling “storyboard” of names and possible locations drawn from our pre-production conversations and research over recent months:

Given all the time in the world and an unlimited budget, we’d interview all of these people at length, and include them in the movie. Speaking of which, have you donated to the project yet? The more money we have, the more comprehensive the movie! It’s that simple…

Last night, we managed to come up with our first list of 16 people who we simply have to include in the movie. They include eyewitnesses from the incident, police union boss Robert King, Police Chief Rosie Sizer, mayor Tom Potter, and some others you’ll be able to identify if you can decipher Jason’s writing:

We’ll be contacting our first prospective interviewees over the next week, and scheduling shooting. It’s somewhat surreal to see the fruit of months’ worth of work coming to a head with a list of names on a sheet of paper, and I wonder what Jim Chasse would think of all this. My sense is that he might find the legwork a little dull, but that he’d be excited by the prospect of doing the first interviews. Me too.

Trailer - Northwest Passage

Northwest Passage is a documentary made by Mike Lastra of Smegma and Smegma Studios from Portland punk concert footage he shot in the late 1970s and early 1980s, along with recent interviews. The main focus of the film is a show from October 1979 which was recorded for a compilation later released as 10-29-79, with The Wipers, Neo-Boys, Smegma, Lo-Tek, Bop Zombies, The Cleavers, Sado-Nation and others.

It’s available at the Multnomah County library.

It’s part of James Chasse’s story, part of his curiosity and adventuresome spirit that he was often one of the youngest persons at these “adult” and “punk rock” concerts.

Meet The Filmmakers: Carol Wells

“It seems to be an evenly-distributed tragedy in that this innocent man died, and these other men have to live with what certainly seems to be a loss of control in a difficult situation,” says Carol Wells, the newest member of the Alien Boy team, discussing James Chasse’s death.

Wells, who will be our grant writer, gained a masters in English from PSU in 1988, and went on to teach writing and drama at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, on the edge of Amish country. Having decided not to pursue her PHD, Wells then went on to work as a copywriter at an advertising agency in Allentown, PA—her first job there was writing the copy for the in-house magazine of Mack Trucks, which was called “The Growler.”

“It was great fun to be at that time a 30-something former English teacher writing to truck salesmen, you know, ‘when the pedal hits the metal and the rubber hits the road,’ I’d giggle and think ‘if only they knew’,” she laughs.

Wells returned to Portland in 1995 and among other jobs, she has since worked as a researcher at the Veterans Association, as a copywriter for Norm Thompson Outfitters, and has been freelancing for the NW Examiner for the past six years.

Wells also started a non-profit trying to do peer-support for mental health patients in 2004, called Torri: Gateway to Community. The non-profit closed in 2006, but having watched our director, Brian Lindstrom’s film about Central City Concern’s recovery mentor program, Finding Normal, Wells says she is all the more convinced that peer support is the way forward for the mental health community.

“We were very obviously trying to fill a gap,” she says, referring to Torri. “When people come out of mental health treatment, they’re alone. They need someone to take them shopping, help them get on the bus, tell them it’s alright. It’s still not happening and it would be nice if it were.”

Wells has just written her first grant proposal for Alien Boy, to Portland’s Anne A. Berni Foundation, and is about to formally submit a proposal to the Spirit Mountain Community Fund. She is also excited about applying to the Paul Robeson Foundation, which specifically funds pre-production for films with a social justice focus.

“Clarity is absolutely crucial when I’m writing grant proposals,” says Wells. “I don’t try to manipulate, because these people have read and heard it all. I just try to make it as clear and concise as possible.”

She adds that she plans to keep applying for grants until we have the money we need to complete Alien Boy. Welcome aboard, Carol! We’re glad you’re with us!