Newsweek

Portland Police End Gang List

Some law enforcement experts say their gang member databases help fight gang crime and improve public safety, while critics say they are overly broad and include people who never were or are no longer in gangs.
Last week the Portland Police Bureau announced that it would end its policy of documenting people as gang members, in what experts say appears to be the first such move by a police department in recent years.
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He was busted for his flannel coat—and not by the fashion police. The authorities stopped him on his way home from work and thought he was in a gang. Or so the man realized after police in Portland, Oregon, sent him a letter saying they’d added him to a list of known gang members.

“I did tell the cops that I use[d] to bang,” the man wrote in a 2015 appeal letter obtained by Newsweek (his name was

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