Commissioner Hardesty Office Memo on Gun Violence in Portland

Memo Review by Ashley Hong, MPP

Memo: Commissioner Hardesty Office Memo on Gun Violence in PortlandLinks to an external site.

This is a public memo from the Policy Director of Portland's Commissioner to the Mayor's Office of Portland. In advance of an upcoming City Council Work Session, the author argues that public interest in reinstituting the city's Gun Violence Reduction Team is not based on data and that, historically, the initiative disproportionately overpoliced Black Portlanders. The purpose of this memo was not to offer a discrete policy solution, but request Councilmembers seriously consider implications related to reinstating the Team.

• Clear: Yes. The first 2 sentences of the second paragraph state the issue and the author continues to stay on topic. The memo was clear and easy to understand throughout.
• Cohesive: Yes. There's a clear and cohesive story flow. Author starts with an empathy frame, presents their issue, walks through a timeline of events, discusses implications, and closes with a call to action. All parts flowed from one to another and made logical sense.
• Concise: No. This memo was not concise. For example, the author uses this exact sentence twice: "Portland’s GVRT has had a disproportionate impact on Black Portlanders." There were many sentences and ideas that were redundant. On the sentence structure level, the author had many parenthetical/transition phrases that made sentences unnecessarily wordy.
• Credible: Yes. The author used data in a compelling way and used language to make their data shine -- for example, the author used synthesizing words like "doubling" and "half" that made ideas easier to understand. They also cited all their sources in case readers wanted exact numbers.
• Compelling/Concrete: Yes. The memo was compelling and the author's use of data helped make the case. I appreciated how the author compared Portland's stats to those of other jurisdictions and the national average to gain a better sense of the relative inequality in Portland's situation. Overall, the memo would have been more compelling if the author were more concise.