Jesse Cornett summed it up accurately: “It’s about time.” Mayor Sam Adams made himself Police Bureau Commissioner, at the same time providing himself with a better partner for the job of running the Bureau by firing Chief Rose Sizer and promoting East Precinct Captain Mike Reese. It will now be on Mayor Adams to push forward the long-delayed project of transforming the Bureau from a shoot-first-ask-questions-later paramilitary organization to a public safety force.

Horribly, and almost fittingly, just hours after taking over the Bureau from Dan Saltzman, police got into a gun fight that resulted in the (apparently armed) civilian being killed and a cop wounded. Of course.

Among the questions being asked are, “Why now?” This has been going on a long time, and while it’s understandable that he fired Sizer for her insubordinate actions in how she questioned his budget (she dared him to fire her, and he didn’t blink), to sack Saltzman as Police Commissioner a week before a primary election in which Saltzman face multiple challengers, including one, Jesse Cornett, who was already likely to push Saltzman to a general election run-off, is perplexing. My opinion is that he knew a settlement was coming with the Chasse family and was waiting for that to be completed. He didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that process, and, since it was finished yesterday, he was able to move forward and take the Bureau under his own control.

Why not wait until after the election? This is more likely to undercut Saltzman’s election chance than to help, but had the Mayor waited until after the election to make this move, he would have faced charges that he had waited in order to help Saltzman during the primary. Of course this would have been better to do well away from any election, but the Mayor did not have that option. He needed to act as soon as possible, and that was today. The chips, for Saltzman, will fall where they will.

And while many have sympathized that the Mayor put Saltzman in an impossible situation by “offering” him the Police Bureau in the first place, Saltzman has bragged during this election that he was the right guy for the job. I’m an engineer, he said, I know how to make things work. To his great credit, Saltzman has never complained about getting the gig, never said anything derogatory about the Mayor’s action in dumping a bureau that has historically been the Mayor’s. Saltzman has sucked it up in his unassuming way and done his best. That was not good enough, of course, and now he is paying the price for not being up to a job that never should have been his in the first place.

No, life is not fair.

But Dan’s been stoic about it — until today. Following his sacking, Saltzman let the Mayor have it.

“I’ve experienced vindictiveness by the mayor,” Saltzman said of his years on City Council. “I would characterize this as one of those circumstances.”

Because he and the Chief spoke out against the Mayor’s budget, the subsequent actions are “vindictive”. No, Commissioner Saltzman, it’s called discipline in her case — she had no business pulling her stunt unless her goal was to either get fired or humiliate the Mayor — and in your case, it’s called, as Cornett said, “about time”.

It gets worse:

“The mayor was not sufficiently committed to the safety of Portlanders by keeping the bureau at full strength,” said Saltzman. ”He didn’t expect us to speak up about it.”

“Not sufficiently committed to the safety of Portlanders”. That’s about as reprehensible a statement as anyone could make about a public official — that he doesn’t care enough (please, define “enough” for me) about their safety. Sam Adams is faced with his own impossible task: running a city with not nearly enough money to do so. Saltzman knows that. To accuse his colleague of placing the safety of citizens second to other concerns — and that’s what he’s doing —

Dan Saltzman is a man who refuses to take responsibility for his own mistakes. He continues to assert he did nothing wrong when he violated the City Code of Ethics by hiding his relationship with a woman who worked at an organization that received $600,000 from Saltzman’s Children Levy. And now he’s been fired because the Mayor is vindictive, not because he has been a failure as Police Commissioner. The Mayor gave him what credit he could when announcing the change, not that there was a lot of credit to give. Saltzman failed to get the job done as Police Commissioner, and the Mayor at long last did the right thing and took over the Bureau himself. With luck, next Tuesday voters will take the hint and complete the job fully, replacing Saltzman at City Hall with Jesse Cornett.