The Portland Police Bureau has reached a significant milestone in its 6-year-old settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice.

On Friday, the bureau announced the DOJ had found the police force to be in “substantial compliance” with the 2014 agreement intended to reform how the force responded to people with “actual or perceived mental illness.”

The Justice Department reached the agreement with the Portland Police after the DOJ found officers exhibited a pattern of using excessive force on people experiencing mental illnesses. The settlement laid out in detail the changes the bureau needed to make to its use of force procedures.

According to Portland city attorney Tracy Reeve, the term “substantial compliance” is a lawyerly way of saying the city has met all the terms laid out in the 77-page agreement — while leaving a tiny bit of wiggle room.

“It means the city has, in essence, complied with its obligations under the settlement agreement,” Reeve said at a news conference Friday announcing the finding.

The compliance finding doesn’t end the DOJ’s oversight of the Portland Police Bureau. The bureau still has to prove it can maintain all the reforms it’s made for one year.

But police reform activist Dan Handelman, who runs Portland Copwatch, said while the bureau may have answered the call regarding technical aspects of the agreement — like the rules regarding policies and training, data collection and analysis — the bureau had ignored the “thrust” of the document: rebuilding trust between police officers and the community.

He added that he felt the finding of compliance did not wholly square with the fact that fatal police shootings of people with mental illness have continued in Portland.

At Friday’s news conference, Chief Jami Resch said the agreement is about officers knowing how to minimize these kinds of shootings — not to eliminate them altogether.

“Being in compliance means that we have done everything to minimize using force on those experiencing mental illness. We will continue to seek ways to minimize the use of deadly force.”