Portland mayor fires police officer who leaked false allegations against Commissioner Jo Ann...

On March 3, 2021, a 46-year-old white woman called 911 to report a car crash. She told the dispatcher she was confident that Hardesty had rear-ended her vehicle at an intersection in Southeast Portland and then fled the scene. The woman was wrong about the identity of the other driver. Police quickly identified the suspect as a woman from Vancouver, Washington.

But, by that point, the false allegation against Hardesty had already been leaked to the media and published by news outlets, including The Oregonian/OregonLive.

The Feb. 28 letter, signed by Wheeler and Lovell, spelled out the results of the internal affairs investigation, including that Hunzeker sent a text message to Oregonian reporter Maxine Bernstein soon after being made aware of the rumored hit-and-run.

“A few minutes later she calls me back...and I explain to her that I wanted to talk to her off the record,” Hunzeker is quoted as saying in an internal affairs interview. “All the information that I currently had, which was very limited... was unverified. It was unknown to be true, and it was something that if she were interested in doing her own follow-up work...she could do that.”

According to the investigation, Bernstein called back soon after asking for a case number or police reports and saying other people were denying the story. Hunzeker said he “took offense to the fact that she was calling police officers liars.”