Sorry, We Don't Do That Here
Oregon's Department of Justice runs a biennial budget comparable to reckless endangerment — and when you do it to 4.27 million people, that's a felony.
Oregon funds the machinery that breaks people. It budgets almost nothing to repair them.
Oregon's justice system is a massively funded operation. Between the Judicial Department and the Department of Justice, large budgets flow every biennium toward law enforcement, prosecution, and keeping the courts running. When the system wants money to expand public safety, the legislature approves it.
One question never gets a line item. Where is the budget for the aftermath?
When the state causes harm, through police misconduct, court negligence, or retaliation, the resources dry up. Rachel Harmon's work on the costs of policing shows that public safety programs are designed, funded, and evaluated without accounting for the nonbudgetary harms of policing, what she calls the coercion costs borne by individuals and communities. The system is built to extend its own reach. It sets aside almost nothing to repair the people it breaks along the way.
The maze of "not our department"
For a citizen wronged by the system, justice is less a legal process than a war of attrition. There is no central, accessible place to bring a claim of state or police retaliation and get an unbiased hearing. There is a loop of deflection instead.
You report police misconduct to internal affairs, and the agency investigates itself and clears itself. You escalate, and you are told you have reached the wrong department. The runaround is not a malfunction. It is how the structure works. Decades of scholarship have pressed a simple idea, that police agencies should be governed like every other arm of government, through transparent and accountable policymaking. As Maria Ponomarenko has detailed, that kind of governance has been remarkably hard to establish over policing, which is why so much of what departments do stays internal and beyond outside reach.
The state shield, and the burden on the wronged
Because the state offers no funded path to restitution, the burden falls entirely on the person harmed. Retaliated against by law enforcement, your real option is to hire a private attorney and file a civil rights suit.
The ground is not level. Rebecca Wexler's work on the law enforcement privilege describes how police and prosecutors can rely on the results of secret investigative methods while withholding from the other side any account of how those methods work. The doctrine lets the state conceal the very evidence a person would need to prove unconstitutional conduct, and it can render constitutional and discovery protections close to meaningless in practice.
This takes money and stamina, the exact things the state has often already stripped from the person bringing the claim. The state forces citizens to bankrupt themselves to prove the state did something wrong, and it pays for its own defense with public money.
A budget is a moral document
Right now Oregon's justice budgets say plainly that prosecuting citizens is a priority and compensating citizens for state harm is not. Any system with the power to arrest, detain, and punish will cause harm. A system that knows this and budgets nothing for the repair has made a choice.
The budget has to change in three concrete ways.
It must fund civil rights enforcement against state actors, independent of police unions and district attorneys, so that the body investigating misconduct is never the body accused of it.
It must carry dedicated restitution funds, real line items, so that victims of systemic retaliation get timely support instead of a decade in private litigation.
And it must stand up an independent clearinghouse with the authority to override the "wrong department" answer, a single point of contact for people reporting systemic abuse.
We cannot keep maxing out the front end of the justice system while abandoning the people left broken behind it. If the state can afford to cause the harm, it can be made to afford the cure.
References
- Rachel Harmon, Federal Programs and the Real Costs of Policing, 90 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 870 (2015). SSRN
- Maria Ponomarenko, Rethinking Police Rulemaking, 114 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1 (2019). Repository
- Rebecca Wexler, Law Enforcement Privilege, 123 Mich. L. Rev. (2025). Repository
