Chief Walks the Walk, Talks the Talk on Portland Streets

New to the neighborhood, Police Chief Charles Moose had just parked his car outside his house when a prostitute approached. “I simply told her I wanted to go home,” the chief said. He was tired. He did not bust her for soliciting.

About a month after that, Moose returned late from work and ran into the flashing red lights of five squad cars that lined his block. They had been in pursuit of a stolen car. The driver had ditched the vehicle and fled on foot.

“It’s not a usual event,” Moose said recently, leaning back in his living room chair. “But it’s not that unusual, either.”

The city’s soft-spoken chief--a strong community policing advocate and 19-year veteran of the force--was appointed to his post last year.

When it came time to buy a house in November, Moose and his wife, Sandy, picked the troubled King neighborhood on the northeast side of town.

In the chief’s own words, it’s an area of “vacant lots and abandoned buildings.”

As captain of the precinct, Moose had gotten to know that neighborhood well. He walked the streets and he organized community policing meetings. He recognized faces. Faces recognized him.

“Soon after becoming chief,” Moose recalled, “I found myself talking to civic groups and telling them about building up society from the ground up, moving into the community where you work. When it came to buying a house, my wife and I decided to look into a community that was struggling to stabilize itself.”

When he worked in the neighborhood, Moose challenged residents to “turn on their lights” and “pull back their curtains.” The neighborhood successfully closed down a crack house two years ago.

Moose, who just earned his doctorate in urban studies at the age of 40, sees his move as part of “walking the walk and talking the talk.”

Locally, Moose is in the public’s eye via local cable access programs. In one recent production, he was interviewed by a former Vietnamese gang member. When the young host questioned the chief, who is black, about the possibilities of success for minorities in America, Moose responded:

“America says if you do all this (stay in school and work hard), you get an opportunity to succeed. I feel like that piece of what America stands for has come true for me.”

Moose would have had none of it if he had been unwilling to travel 3,000 miles for his job. He was recruited from North Carolina to join the Portland Police Department.

“I figured I was 21 years old and if I didn’t like it, I could go back. Yet I know people who wouldn’t go 300 miles for a job,” the chief said with a smile.

Moose’s actions have led to a call for a community-sponsored program that would offer low-interest loans to attract police officers into buying homes in similar neighborhoods.

At a Rotary Club meeting, Neil Kelly, a professional home remodeler, protested that the community can’t wait. He decided to offer three rental homes he owns in the Albina district at below market value to any police officer willing to move in.

“We’re getting a response,” Kelly said recently.

“Six officers have added their names to the list. Two large banks in the neighborhood . . . have expressed interest in offering the best terms possible, and craftsmen working to ready the houses for sale have offered their labor at reduced costs.

Kelly said that work on the first house was recently completed.