From The Washington Post: Anarchists and an increase in violent crime hijack Portland’s social justice movement
The sharpening conflict between rising violent crime and efforts to reduce the size of police departments has played out across the American West throughout this pandemic year. Now cities such as Portland, considered among the most ambitious in moving to reshape its police force, have retrenched. So have Oakland, Calif.; Berkeley, Calif.; Los Angeles and several other influential cities on the issue.
The nightly confrontations with police and federal agents deployed here by President Donald Trump have been replaced by a kind of generational hopelessness, a tenuous sense of security across an under-policed city and a return to an old-school style of gun violence reminiscent of a tit-for-tat cycle of deadly reprisals, almost always among young men of color. Through April, the police reported 348 shootings, more than double those recorded over the first four months of last year.
“There is a lot of anger, a lot of frustration out there, a lot of feeling that there should be a life for a life,” Twauna Hennessee, Yoakum’s mother, a church elder resplendent in white, told the congregation. “We must make sure that we have forgiveness in our hearts. Because that’s where I am at. And we may not all be there. And it may take some time, and that’s okay, but it may never come.
(Featured image is “Gears on Tide Predicting Machine No. 2” by scattered1 is marked with CC0 1.0)
Why did the blockquote fail?
As for the violence, once again, people really need to disabuse themselves of the notion that police have any (legal) duty to anyone but themselves. There may be a moral or ethical duty, but legally, the police can wash their hands of a whole city and the only recourse the city has is capitulate, or burn the department to the ground and start over.Report
Because it’s not a blockquote tag; it’s the string “blockquote” with explicit less-than and greater-than HTML glyphs (& notation) surrounding it.
Oh, you meant why did JB include that? Got no idea.Report
Seems like an awful lot of work to make the tag fail.Report
Possibly copy and paste from a text editor that’s too clever by half?Report
The traditional WordPress editor provides two views, one labeled “visual” and the other “text”. The former is a WYSIWYG sort of thing with the tags hidden. If you type the string “<blockquote>” in the visual editor, it (rightly, IMO) assumes that you want the glyphs and substitutes them. I have made this same sort of mistake myself, typing straight HTML text in the visual editor. Still, we can all lambaste JB: “The preview button is there for a reason.”Report
You’re right.
I regret the error.Report
I sympathize. I want Glyph too.Report
Dang it.
I put it in there by typing it.Report
Finally, sir, you have crossed the line. You can have your opinions about all kinds of issues, but when you go around saying “blockquote”, society itself must stand up and hold you to account.Report
You think this is a police not doing their job problem? My guess would be not enough police or citizens who know they can get away with anything.Report
If citizens know they can get away with it, then the police are not doing their jobs. Even when police are on the ball, there are enough citizens who think they can get away with it to keep the police busy.
If the police aren’t interested in doing more than going through the motions of policing, the public has no real way of knowing that, and even if they did, the police have no duty to actually, you know, police things. They have no duty to investigate a crime, and arrest the guilty, etc.
There is zero duty for them to do anything. They can all choose to hole up in their stations and eat donuts and the only thing the public can do is disband the department. Hell, police leadership is extremely limited in what they can demand an officer do, and even in those few areas where they can, if the officer chooses to disobey, leadership is lucky if they can fire them.
So when I hear that a city is experiencing a spike in crime, and I don’t see a serious depletion of badges (being allowed 1000 officers and only having 900 is not a serious depletion, it’s significant, but we aren’t talking being down 30% or more), then I start to wonder if the police are just saying “to hell with it”, and letting crap spiral until the public cries uncle?
So, if violence on the rise but traffic tickets, or small time drug busts, or CAF all remain constant, then I have to wonder. How about response times? Arrests for violence? Etc. If you have a wave of serious crime, I expect attention to minor crimes to fall in order to shift resources. Has that happened?Report
It’s worth noting — and it’s why “Say nothing to police beyond “Am I free to go” and, if not, “I would like to call my lawyer”” is the best advice for interacting with police — is that at the best of times, the police aren’t there to “solve crimes”.
They are there to “close cases”.
There is a rather significant difference between the two of them.
(At the worst of times, of course, they’re not there to do anything but clock up overtime harassing people and covering their own asses. I once saw half the PD of my local town show up to figure out how to make an officer-caused collision the other party’s fault)Report
The article seems disjointed, like it isn’t sure of what story it wants to tell.
It opens with a story of a murder, without any context of why or how the murder happened, then veers inexplicably into describing a pattern of violence by white anarchists targeting places like the Boys and Girls club. Are these events related somehow?
The headline implicitly addresses the disjointedness by using the term “hijacking” but the article doesn’t address this; None of the people interviewed were asked about their thoughts on the anarchists or the effects of their violence.Report
I’d point to stuff like this in the article:
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Why did they disband this unit? Was it in response to the protests, or in response to the budget shortfall, or some other reason?
Why are the anarchists targeting the Boys and Girls Club? If this is hijacking a social justice protest for their own aims, what are their aims?
If the story is that the police are overwhelmed by a combination of gun violence and anarchists, it would be useful to probe these things to see what is driving them.
But the lack of any interest by the reporter in probing those causes almost makes a sly point of its own, that the only possible response to crime is after-the-fact punitive measures.Report
Why did they disband this unit?
If I had to guess, I don’t know, but if I had to guess, it’d be that there was a bunch of money cut and the department followed the “last in, first out” protocol.
Was it in response to the protests, or in response to the budget shortfall, or some other reason?
I don’t know, but if I had to guess, I’d say that there are multiple reasons. There isn’t one. There are multiple ones working in concert.
Why are the anarchists targeting the Boys and Girls Club?
What about the January 6th insurrection? Why aren’t you talking about that?
If this is hijacking a social justice protest for their own aims, what are their aims?
I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s some decentralized young-person anger, cabin fever, decentralized young-person righteousness, and a strong belief that sufficient caring about a thing will result in the thing changing and throwing rocks communicates sufficient caring.
that the only possible response to crime is after-the-fact punitive measures
Yeah, the second paragraph in the post talks about that:
How to overcome this?
Well, I have a handful of suggestions on how crime might go down and policing might be reformed but… you know.Report
Which is my point, that a reader of the article is likely to come away with more questions than answers, and all prefacing with “I don’t know but if I had to guess…”Report
Part of the takeaway is likely to be something like “defunding the police backfired!”
There are also a handful of assumptions that I’ve seen in the wild in the past that appear to have been falsified… foremost is the whole hypothesis that this part of town and that part of town have the same amount of crime, it’s just that that part of town is overpoliced and so OF COURSE the cops arrest more people there.Report
How in the world would anyone come to the conclusion that “defunding” backfired?
Again, the very article says that gun violence was rising prior to the loss of 10% of the officers, and second, there isn’t even the assertion that the murders have anything to do with underpolicing.Report
How in the world would anyone come to the conclusion that “defunding” backfired?
Probably because of stuff mentioned in the first paragraph of the story quoted in the post:
Like, if they defund and then crime goes up and then they refund, I think that one could come to the conclusion that defunding backfired.
You may point out that they’re committing the post hoc ero propter hoc fallacy but it’s downright easy to see how people commit that one.Report
Especially when the police and the media are both actively encouraging the public to fall to that fallacy.Report
I do think that it’d be a lot more convenient for everybody if crime had stayed stable.
Or went down.Report
Not crime, one specific crime.Report
Unfortunately, it wasn’t an increase in taping Major League Baseball games and then charging people to watch them.
There was a *HUGE* amount of crime that went down during the pandemic and associate quarantine. *HUGE*.
It’s just that, you know, there is that one specific crime that went up.
And that one specific crime is arguably the most important one.Report
Let me try a different argument:
Let’s say there is a city that is having a spike in cancer patients. People are getting cancer at double the rate of the previous years. Oh, and it’s rather localized to certain geographical/demographical areas.
Is the cancer the result of the fact that the city recently closed one of it’s 5 hospitals, and thus the number of medical professionals in the city has declined, or is there a much more reasonable cause probably in play?Report
Is the cancer the result of the closing in hospitals?
Hoo boy. That’s a tough one.
Odds are, there’s something that’s causing cancer rather than the hospitals.
But it is very much the job of the hospitals to take care of cancer in stage one before it gets to stage two, stage three, or, God help us all, stage four.
So the closing of a hospital will harm the people who are in stage one or stage two…
But what’s causing the cancer in the first place?
Likely to not be hospitals. Unless the hospital is radioactive or something.Report
The problem with the police is they want us to think they can handle stage one or stage two, but the reality is what they have been training themselves for, for the past few decades, is to at best tell people they are in stage 4, or to clean up the dead.
They have no idea how to deal with stage 1 or 2, and when they encounter it, they fall back on their training.Report
Oscar, I’m not one of the “the police don’t need to be reformed” guys.
I’m one of the “the police need to be reformed” guys.
I’m merely not one of the “defund the police” guys.
Defunding was sweet on the tongue but bitter in the belly. I would have preferred reforming QI, asset forfeiture, no-knock raids, so on and so forth. Hell, Police Union abolition.
But defunding? That’s a good way to get a case of the blue flu. And if we have another year of the blue flu, we’re going to see enough crime to get even the whitest person with a Black Lives Matter bumper sticker to start arguing that more police means less homicide which will save more Mattering Lives than fewer police will save.
And anyone who disagrees, obviously, doesn’t believe that BLM.Report
What if I told you Neo, that there actually was no defunding happening?
And what if I told you that crime has risen even in cities and towns where no defunding was even proposed?Report
What if I told you Neo, that there actually was no defunding happening?
Do you mean “there is no defunding going on right now, following the refunding efforts” or do you mean stuff like “there was never defunding that made it past a mayoral desk”?
And what if I told you that crime has risen even in cities and towns where no defunding was even proposed?
Sounds like I’d ask you to talk to the people who are pushing to explain that crime has actually gone down.Report
So…where does this leave your point that defunding backfired, if there isn’t any defunding, and crime may or may not have even gone up?Report
My point wasn’t that defunding backfired.
It was that it was easy to see how someone could come to the conclusion that defunding backfired.
Like, if someone said “Defunding backfired!”, I would not ask “How could you possibly think that defunding backfired?”
I would know that there are many reasons to reach that conclusion and not all of them are crazy or completely unfounded.Report
Oh ok.
I’m not saying that anyone who thinks that is crazy, but I can see how easy it is for someone else to think that anyone who thinks that is crazy.
Since you and I agree that there was no defunding so it didn’t backfire, maybe we can have a beer while those other two guys work it out.Report
“Since you and I agree that there was no defunding so it didn’t backfire, maybe we can have a beer while those other two guys work it out.”
I don’t know that we agree on that until I know what you mean.
I’ll ask my question again:
Do you mean “there is no defunding going on right now, following the refunding efforts” or do you mean stuff like “there was never defunding that made it past a mayoral desk”?
As for the question of whether or not crime went up or down, there are crimes that went *WAAAAAAAAAY* down.
But homicides are up. Like, a lot.
If you are a person who can understand how someone might, in good faith, make the argument “it’s just property” in response to property damage that took place during a mostly peaceful protest, I’d hope you’d see how homicides going up might be alarming despite burglaries going down.Report
What I’m saying is that across America there was virtually no significant defunding happening, last year or this.
So any effort to connect rising/ falling crime rates to non-existent defunding seems pretty silly.Report
What I’m saying is that across America there was virtually no significant defunding happening, last year or this.
So if I find examples of articles claiming that police budgets have been cut, those articles won’t count because the amount cut was not “significant”?
For what it’s worth, I think that that means that you and I do *NOT* agree whether there was defunding.
Granted, it’s because I’m using a different definition than you are. But I think that my definition is more relevant to the crime debate than yours is.
So any effort to connect rising/ falling crime rates to non-existent defunding seems pretty silly.
If it exists (according to my definition, anyway), then I think that it’s at least well within “post hoc ergo propter hoc” distance.Report
Yes, that’s how theories work.
In order for the theory: “Reduced funding is the variable that explains rising crime rates” to be true, yes you would not only need examples of reduced funding, but a pattern of reduced funding and rising crime rates, as well as steady funding with no rise in crime rates.
If crime goes up even in the absence of funding changes, that pretty much wipes out funding levels as the explanatory variable.
In short- even experienced criminologists have a very hard time tying any variable to crime rates.Report
There’s also the question of “Where did the funding go?”.
If the PD lost $10M, and it was used to fund a tax break for the local billionaires yacht club, there might be a connection.
Might.
But if it was diverted to try and deal with other precursors to crime, like drug abuse, or domestic abuse; or it went to programs to take some of the load off of the police, then you have a harder hill to climb.
But, as I alluded to elsewhere, the police have a time tested technique for getting their budgets back, and that is called doing the absolute bare minimum job they can get away with without the city sending the whole leadership team packing. And we the public have absolute crap metrics by which to measure such things (and often those metrics are not made public).
And that is all on top of the fact that we are coming out of a pandemic right as summer gets cooking, so suddenly there are people who may have been nursing anger and grudges for a long time while, who weren’t getting mental health help, who are lashing out as things open back up.Report
Don’t let reality get in the way of some Twitter zeitgeist that is in NO WAY influenced by the tiny bubble of Twitter folks I follow.Report
This one ain’t just Twitter. It made it all the way to the Warshington Post.
The blood/brain barrier was permeated.Report
Yeah, which is why I pushed back against it.
We see this periodically at the leading edge of “X Panic”, where media outlets make these sort of lazy generalizations and conclusions, and no one bothers to push back as to whether any of the Satanic sex clubs or Superpredators or Crack Babies really exist.
Now we’re seeing a spate of articles which have as their implicit conclusions, “Gotta get tough on crime”.Report
As far as I can tell, if you define “crime” as “pretty much everything”, crime plummeted.
If you narrow it to homicide, it’s going up.
We probably should hammer out what is being measured before we panic.
Maybe homicide going up isn’t that big of a deal.Report
I think the guy who wants to pin “defunding” as the driving variable, should probably decide what he wants to measure and how it relates to his theory.Report
Amount of depolicing in a jurisdiction against the rise in homicide.
That’s what I would like to see (and see public pushes for defunding as a leading indicator of depolicing).Report
And there’s that pesky Bad Luck, coming around again despite everyone’s best intentions.Report
Discussions elsewhere have probably made me overly sensitive today. In the quoted text, the author says “The sharpening conflict between rising violent crime and efforts to reduce the size of police departments has played out across the American West…” Then the examples are a small number of cities from a strip less than 100 miles wide along the Pacific Coast. Granted, it’s the Washington Post, whose notions of geography are little better than those of the New York Times, but still…Report
I got friends in Portland who like to joke that, according to the media, their town has been burned to the earth at least a dozen times in the last year.
According to them, it literally doesn’t impact their life. Unless they need to go to a federal courthouse at 1:00 AM. The “rioting and anarchy” is like…one square block.
They do say the Portland police are notoriously awful, even by American policing standards.
I’m kinda curious how that came about.Report
I’m with you. Media and RW-Media says that the shut down corner where Floyd died in Minneapolis is a lawless hellhole where people fear to tread night and day. It’s certainly an obstruction but in terms of lawless hellholes it’s pretty quiet and deserted most of the time. And we’re talking about basically a line of three blocks roughly.Report
There isn’t a cause so noble as not to attract a few dipshits. I can point to a lot of wackos in the libertarian movement that you might find really endearing but a lot of people see as utterly crazy. Does this make the libertarian movement entirely without merit? Many would say so just like the detractors of BLM believe that the attraction of a few malcontents makes the entire movement wrong.Report
I believe that the complaint in the article is mostly focusing on the violent crime rather than the wackos throwing bricks through the window at the Boys and Girls Club. Granted, it does discuss how the wackos are not exactly helping when it comes to what I imagine we’d guess their goals are. (Equity, an end to racism, socialized medicine, free college, etc.)
Does this make the libertarian movement entirely without merit?
No, not at all. I have seen these wackos used to discredit the stuff that has merit, though. Effectively, even. It’s like it creates a thought-stop and then you don’t even have to talk about whether marijuana should be legalized or the Fed should be audited. Just yell “RON PAUL NEWSLETTERS” or something.Report
The disruptions by the anarchists do very much appear to me to be a deliberate hijacking of the BLM protests, and what stands out is the striking racial disparity.
As I witnessed, a large crowd of mixed race was peaceful, while a tiny handful of white young men did the damage.
And as was documented, white supremacists deliberately infiltrated the movement and committed violence in the hopes of sparking chaos and racial hatred.
At this point, I’m ready to say that there is effectively no daylight between the white supremacists and the anarchists. Even if they chatter about different things their actions have the same outcome.Report
I can’t find the pair of photos, but several years back there was a set of large, peaceful protests where the usual black bloc idiots showed up.
The media went with a photo of three black bloc guys and a trash can on fire with the whole “lawless” thing.
Someone ELSE took a photo of it — in which you see about a dozen news photographers clustered around three guys, a single metal trash can with it’s contents on fire, and three guys in black. So close to the action, in fact, that it was quite clear NOBODY felt even vaguely threatened. It might as well have been a staged shot for a movie. (If the movie was titled “Minor fire in an all metal trash can sitting on it’s side in a sea of concrete”)
It really summed up media reporting on “protests”. On the one side, you had tens of thousands of people peacefully protesting. On the other, you had three guys setting a single trash can on fire, and four times as many people photographing it for the news.Report
Ah, 2017. We were so young!Report
What I think is a failure of the major media outlets is that we haven’t seen any interviews or profiles of the anarchists themselves.
Plenty of press on people like the Bundys, or BLM activists and of course tons of coverage of the “send in the troops” folk, but the actual guys who have turned the entire city of Portland into a burned out hellscape are mysteriously absent from the coverage.
I don’t think its intentional, just lazy reporting. The burning trash can is easy, tracking down and interviewing the guy who set is is hard work.Report
The failure is less not interviewing black bloc idiots (who don’t want to be interviewed, by and large) and far more in “not placing things in context”.
When you lead with photos of a burning trash can and three morons who are so unthreatening that your own photographers are crowding them, and not with 30,000 people peacefully demonstrating, you’re slating the story massively.
“Arson and looting’ is what people see in that photo, not ‘30,000 peacefully protest’.Report
Don’t we have a frequent contributor here who actually lives in Portland? Maybe we should find out how he is surviving the collapse of civilization in the Pacific Northwest. If he can still be reached and the wires aren’t cut.Report
I’d love for him to come in and explain that the media is biased but, if he doesn’t, I’m stuck with less reputable sources such as the WaPo.Report
We discussed this at great lengths last year, but I’m not the OT search Guru you are. If i had to guess, I’d say you could poke around in our archives and find a ton of references that might show you how things were on the ground in Portland, assuming you want to find such information.
My friends in Portland still say its confined to about 6 blocks around the federal courthouse, absent the occasional vandalism elsewhere. But I’m sure the east coast based media are more in tune then Portland residents are.Report
All I do is put in site://ordinary-times.com/ into the google and a single word (like “CHAZ”) or, if there’s a particular phrase, I put in the entire phrase (e.g., “it’s just property”).
Here’s where we discussed the two children getting shot at the CHAZ.
Here’s another discussion.
And here’s where we talked about medics refusing to go into the CHAZ after a different shooting.
Here’s where we discussed property damage.Report
I, on the other hand, would love for him to come in and explain what’s so. We can then draw our own conclusions about the media, if we care.Report
I have sent him an email asking him to show up and comment.Report
I just saw that email, but I live in Seattle, not Portland. Maybe you’re thinking of Tod?Report
Dude, thanks for showing up.Report
No problem; while I can’t give a firsthand account of the events in Portland, I can recommend the Robert Evans podcast miniseries ‘Behind the Police’, which is a very in-depth look at the subject.Report
Unless he’s moved again, Burt Likko lives in Portland.Report
I have asked both Burt and RTod to show up and comment.Report
If you all want to know more about the collapse of civilization in my neck of the woods (Western Washington), give this excellent interview a listen: https://youtu.be/CANbDNySQVcReport
I’m happy to give an on-the ground POV even if I’m no longer a frequent contributor.Report
Like Tod, I also live in Portland. I chose to move here about three years ago, in fact, after considerable study which included an understanding that there are frequent protests and conflict between the politically active citizenry and the police. But it also included an assessment of the city’s very user-friendly public transit network, business opportunities, thriving performing arts scene, its earned status as a center of the craft brew movement, and … look, I think it’s paradise here, especially right now in the summertime.
Following the cue from JS, supra, and educated by my on-the-ground experience (below), I can tell you that nearly all of the protesting has taken place in an area in and around three blocks which, technically, are three separate public parks: Lownsdale Square, Chapman Square, and Terry Schrunk Plaza. These are surrounded by two private office towers, and various federal, state, county, and municipal government buildings. Here’s a map. My own perspective was that I used to maintain an office on Sixth and Main, a couple blocks away (I now have found more affordable digs with a better view of Mt. St. Helens about eight blocks north) so I drove right through all of this stuff most days over the summer. During the day, it was just fine. At night, yeah, things got rowdy.
The focal point for all of the protests has been (except during the later summer of 2020 when President Trump moved Federal security forces in for no particularly good reason that I could understand; we gave his Acting Secretary of Homeland Security a particularly Portland welcome when he came to schmooze the PPA’s union officials) the Justice Center, wherein criminal courts and the PPB are housed. There are also periodic protests near the Portland Police Association (that’s the police union) building out in the North quadrant of the city. The PPA is a very strong union so its members mostly disregard orders from the Chief and the Mayor that they don’t like, and they have effectively defanged most forms of internal discipline within the PPB for misbehaving officers; oddly, political activists around here in this usually pro-union city see that as something of a problem.
Portland is not a violent or dangerous city. Yes, it’s a city, and yes there is sometimes violence and crime and even murder. But compare it to other major cities. In any category. The following cities have higher murder rates than Portland (in descending order, most murder-y listed first): St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Kansas City, Cleveland, Memphis, Newark, Chicago, Cincinnati, Mobile, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Stockton, Tulsa, Washington DC, Atlanta, Nashville, Columbus, Oakland, Louisville, Greensboro, San Bernardino, Buffalo, Norfolk, Savannah, Fort Wayne, Des Moines, Toledo, Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Albuquerque, Jacksonville, Houston, Miami, Bakersfield, Fresno, Tampa, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Anchorage, North Las Vegas, Lexington, Wichita, Tucson, Durham, Denver, Boston, Aurora, San Antonio, Orland, Fort Worth, Jersey City, Sacramento, Reno, St. Petersburg, St. Paul, Los Angeles, Omaha, Corpus Christi, San Francisco, Santa Ana, Colorado Springs, Plano, Glendale AZ, Arlington TX, Mesa, Long Beach, Chesapeake, Madison, Laredo, and Seattle. (source.) In all of those cities you are more likely to be murdered than you are in Portland, OR. (Portland, ME is, however, more peaceful than us, so yes, there is room for improvement and Portland, ME has nice restaurants too I’m told.) Similar stories can be told for rape, assault, and various property crimes. My girlfriend’s van that she was fixing up to give her son got stolen a few months ago and that was a real bummer. (Friends found it about two weeks later walking their dog; it had been used to 1) drive through a fast food place, 2) shoot up some meth, and 3) get shot exactly one time through the hood, and she had to scrap it.) There’s a lot more graffiti than I’d prefer; the city used to be better about getting it cleaned it up and hopefully gets back on code enforcement again soon.
So when I tell you that the “antifa anarchists” are a couple dozen lefty folks who mostly spend their time smoking weed and playing video games, please don’t dismiss this as hyperbole. They get their dudgeon up when the Proud Boys — who were founded by a dude who lives right across the river in Vancouver, WA and still have one of the larger clusters of their grouping — decide they’re going to trump into town and brandish their guns and ill-veiled white nationalist rhetoric. And Oregon’s state laws about free speech render the city effectively powerless to stop them, only to kind of herd them around. So a couple dozen black-clad lefties threaten to clash violently with a couple hundred open-carrying Proud Boys, and it’s odd how many of the Proud Boys seem to have relatives and friends on the force at PPB which I’m sure doesn’t affect how PPB tries to keep the peace at such events at all. Meanwhile, after taking things like writing up police reports to verify insurance claims after auto burglaries away in the only successful “defund” initiative, the Mayor is now looking to re-fund the violent crime investigation unit, and likely going to succeed, although it will take some time.
This article fits into an emerging ouevre of “Is Portland Over?” public fretting, some of which seems to be funded if not simply written by folks who have rather selfish reasons and a nose for following Donald Trump’s political lead. (The author of that famous piece runs a business consultancy in nearby Lake Oswego; he makes money helping businesses relocate from downtown to the suburbs.) All of it has something in common: it’s all bullshit. Our real problem, not at all unlike many other cities, is homelessness, and what to do about it. And it’s not an easy problem to solve — if it were, we’d have found a solution over the last hundred years or so.
Portland isn’t over. There’s every reason to think it’s about to come roaring back to life. Every day when I either drive or take public transit downtown, I see more and more people also returning to work downtown. I see more and more people heading out to restaurants and bars in the evenings and on the weekends. Traffic is getting harder to navigate again. Oregon’s vaccination rate is expected to hit 70% in about two weeks and our Governor is anticipated to be ready to re-open the state shortly after that. While I may sound a bit like a chamber of commerce flyer here, we have a strong and diverse industrial base, a thriving port, world-class restaurants itching to re-open, volcanoes to hike and rivers in which to play so as to attract tourists, and one of the nation’s best airports. Real estate has been shooting up in price for months, because people understand all of this and want to get in on the rising tide sure to add equity to property holdings.
There are many big cities in the United States I’d be less happy living in. I love it here and I encourage anyone to come out and check it out with their own eyes and ears. (And nose and tongue; we have so much good food!) I’ll be happy to show you around: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the delicious, all in one day. Come hungry, come thirsty. Bring good walking shoes and a cell phone wired with Apple Pay or its equivalent. We’ll have a great time.Report
My takeaway is that the murder rate is going up, but other cities are worse and it looks like the defunding will be reversed.
And the food is great.Report
A couple important caveats here. First, demographics predict most of the variation in homicide rates in US cities, and Portland is running on demographic easy mode. Of course it has a low homicide rate.
But also, by citing 2017 numbers, you’re missing the point. In 2020, Portland recorded 55 homicides. With a population of ~650,000, that comes out to a homicide rate of about 8.5 per 100,000, more than double the 2017 rate of 3.7. Portland recorded its 37th homicide of the year today. Things may change as the COVID-19 situation gets under control, but that’s an annualized rate of 13.7 per 100,000. This is a staggeringly high homicide rate for a city with Portland’s demographics.
It’s not that Portland is a bad city. I like Portland. I gave some serious thought to moving there about ten years ago. It’s that the far left is making it worse than it was, and worse than it could be. The city government needs to stop negotiating with terrorists.Report
It’s very fair to insist on more recent numbers. Here’s some, which seem to reflect similarly on Portland as the numbers in my initially-cited source above, and indicate that a spike in crime rates is a national, not a regional or urban-specific, phenomenon (although the surveyor’s data is incomplete; it strikes me as plausible that we have to go all the way back to 2017 to do a comprehensive, apples-to-apples statistical analysis).
I’ll let those who are more curious about your comments concerning demographics dig in further as to the nature of the dynamic of which you write. The only demographic oddity about Portland of which I’m aware circles back to the subject matter of the underlying article. It is the product of nearly two hundred years’ worth of effort by certain parties to create, and as our periodic visitors from the communities just north of the Columbia River demonstrate, those efforts are ongoing, though I hope and pray they fail.Report
So Burt, the Tl;Dr is that you have enough ammunition and canned food, and your jerry cans of petrol should hold out a while.
Got it.
I could have written a similar account of life here in downtown Los Angeles, where the wife and I regularly walk through the neighborhood in complete safety and freedom.
The funny thing about murder, versus most other types of crime, is that murder rarely reflects the overall experience of life in the neighborhood.
This is because the vast majority of murder is between people who know each other and have history as opposed to street crime like mugging or assault or hold ups. If the guy across the street murders his wife, the neighbors don’t think they are living in a “bad neighborhood” they just think of it as an isolated incident.
Even living in a zip code with a high rate of murders doesn’t necessarily mean someone feels unsafe or in terror.
If you aren’t in regular contact with criminals or gang members, your chance of being murdered by a stranger become astronomically tiny. In fact, the person you love the most is statistically your most likely murder suspect.
So what this means to me is that the experience of living in Portland or Los Angeles, and the overall sense of safety and security can’t be deduced from looking at murder rates.Report
Chip, the point of the original article was not “PORTLAND IS A WASTELAND LIKE IN MAD MAX ONLY WHITER”.
The original article was “Anarchists and an increase in violent crime hijack Portland’s social justice movement”.
You may notice that Burt acknowledged the increase in murder (but it’s not as bad as elsewhere) and, for some reason, he believes that the police went through a defunding-adjacent event that will be reversed.Report
That was the headline.
As I pointed out, the article didn’t really make any coherent point about the social justice movement, anarchists, or murder.
See, you aren’t making an argument here, other than to point to a poorly written article which itself makes no argument.Report
When it comes to the social justice movement, it talked about the problems when it came to conflating “Black Lives Matter” and “Defund The Police”.
When it comes to anarchists, it was talking about the people attacking, among other places, the Boys and Girls Club.
When it comes to murder, it mentions the increased shootings, the increased murders, the dissolution of the gun violence unit, and interviewed people at a funeral of a victim of violence.
To the extent that there is a thread that ties all of this together, it’s that the “real” social justice movement was supposed to be Black Lives Matter but a bunch of bloc-heads turned it into defund/abolish the police… which resulted in, among other things, the police department’s budget being cut and the gun violence unit being dissolved… which resulted in, among other things, more violence, more murders, and the funeral that featured prominently in the story.Report
Those are your conclusions, not the article’s.
The article didn’t attempt to conclude that any one thing “led to” another, which is a good thing since there wasn’t any sort of evidence presented.
For example it devoted many paragraphs to the murder of Jalon Yoakum, yet nowhere did it discuss why he was shot in a parking lot.
Was it a random shooting, a robbery gone bad, a gangland slaying, a jilted lover, or jealous rival?
We don’t know, because the article didn’t say. But those facts would point either toward or away from your thesis.
It talks about the anarchists but never delves into their motives or what led them to do this.
The article doesn’t make any assertions of causality, which is part of why it is so disjointed, just juxtaposing disparate events next to each other.
Like I said upthread, if you want to make the case that defunding “led to” this or that, you need to actually make that argument, with supporting facts.
This article doesn’t do anything like that.Report
I suppose that, on one level, it could be argued that there is no connection between the increased murders and a particular murder.
Even when the murder rates were at 2017 rates, people were still being murdered, after all.
At 2021’s current rate, it looks like the murder rate will be triple 2017’s rate. Is that tripled rate due to random shootings, robberies gone bad, gangland slayings, jilted lovers, or jealous rivals?
We don’t know. We just know that the murder rate is rising, rising, rising.
We don’t know why.
We don’t know whether defunding the police has anything to do with it.
We don’t know whether the removal of the gun violence unit dissolving has anything to do with the increase in gun violence (defined as “increased shootings and increased gun homicides”).
We don’t know anything.
We don’t even know how someone can look at those things and see a connection between them.Report
Right, which is why we should push back very hard on the scare stories like this which have the subtle agenda of “get tough on crime”.Report
Well, one of the things that I think happened is that there was a movement to address these issues of Social Justice and do something like “meaningful police reform” but, like, it got hijacked by a bunch of black blocheads who made a message of “DEFUND THE POLICE!” instead of stuff like “reform police unions!” or “get rid of QI!” or what have you.
And now there’s an increase in homicides following not merely calls to defund the police but stuff like actual budgets being cut… and now the budgets are being uncut.Report
What I think happened is a bunch of people started attacking police unions, and now murders are rising.Report
It’s weird how homicides rise in response to that sort of thing.Report
” If the guy across the street murders his wife, the neighbors don’t think they are living in a “bad neighborhood” they just think of it as an isolated incident.”
My parents live in one of the safest areas of Texas. Incredibly low crime (and that’s primarily teenage morons), been that way for decades. Even during the 80s and 90s it was low crime.
About six houses down from my parents, less than 10 years ago, was one of those “Mother shoots husband, kids, herself” story. Four dead.
As you noted, she didn’t stop thinking she lived in a safe neighborhood despite the triple murder whose gunshots she undoubtedly heard but didn’t recognize as gunshots.Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5yJZUyr_cMReport
Are these Portland Antifa trying to murder the state legislature and make the losing gubernatorial candidate dictator-for-life? I’ thinking that might have been left out of the WaPo article because people don’t seem to take that kind of thing seriously.Report
For some reason, the article spent more time on the increase in homicides than on the Capitol Insurrection.Report
Destroying the republic to own the libs.Report
It’s enough to make you wonder if the Washington Post has a hidden agenda.Report
No, although interestingly, Salem was the scene for what in retrospect looks like a practice run for the January insurrection at the US Capitol.Report
Same tactics down to the bear spray.Report