Coming soon to Portland, Ore.: A touch of Baltimore ghetto.
In 2019, Portland’s white progressives can bask in the glow of Jo Ann Hardesty’s dark brown skin and let it hide their own pale provincialism.
These are people who love to bemoan Portland’s whiteness – but don’t have the guts to move some place where they might have to interact on a daily basis with folks who look like Hardesty.
They love Portland’s whiteness and can’t admit it. What do they like about Portland’s whiteness? For one thing, it’s low-crime rate. It’s one of the safest cities in America.
For Portland progressives, Hardesty was the perfect candidate for City Council. By virtue of the fact that she’s a black woman, she’s safer than a black man. Growing up in Baltimore she has the kind of street cred that impresses naïve Portlanders. Best of all she has a long history of marching against the police. All the white progressives, in their safe white neighborhoods, who have Black Lives Matter signs posted in their lawns and windows, can feel good about voting for her.
They don’t have to worry about the repercussions after she is sworn in on the Portland City Council.
Hardesty has long demanded police reform. Even in cases where police have defended themselves against armed assailants, she alleges police brutality. As a city commissioner she will be in a position to force change. The local media have climbed on board, repeating almost as a mantra that “the public” is demanding police reform.
The population of Portland is roughly 647,800. Yet it’s the same handful of people who show up regularly at public hearings demanding police reform. How much of the public do they represent?
Reformers point to a U.S. Dept. of Justice investigation several years ago that showed Portland police engaged in excessive force in dealing with the mentally ill.
Who doesn’t have problems with the mentally ill? Even the experts don’t know what to do.
Earlier this month there was another mass shooting, this time in Thousand Oaks, Calif., where 12 people died at a country-western bar. Lost amid the calls for more gun control was the fact that the shooter had been cleared by a “mental health expert” a few months earlier.
Trying to deal with the mentally ill is exacerbated by the fact that drug addicts, who can be violent, often claim to be “mentally ill.”
Portland’s settlement agreement with the U.S. Dept. of Justice requires police to improve its treatment of the mentally ill. Hardesty and other black activists have coat-tailed on that agreement, trying to win concessions favorable to criminal offenders who are black.
What, precisely, do Hardesty and her fellow activists want? Bottom-line, they want police to stop acting like law enforcement officers.
The saddest description I’ve heard of this kind of policing was in a recent NPR radio report extolling the virtues of a drug treatment program in Washington state. A reporter recorded a police officer’s encounter with a drug addict: “I’m your Uber driver,” the officer says. He’s going to take the addict to drug treatment.
This is an addict who undoubtedly has already cycled in and out of various treatment programs and committed an unknown number of crimes to feed his habit.
How many men and women who become police officers want to be treated like Uber drivers? More importantly: How many citizens who pay taxes presume they will receive some degree of public safety? How will they react when they discover they are increasingly on their own? The police can’t be there for them while they are serving as Uber drivers for addicts who rob and steal to feed their habits.
In Hardesty’s Portland, police will also be expected to stand down in the face of masked protesters, who take to the streets and throw political tantrums against those they hate.
What Hardesty and her followers don’t appreciate is that when the cops stop enforcing laws for special tribes, it sends a message to all criminal offenders: Portland is easy.
Within hours of her victory, Hardesty came out swinging. She referred to Mayor Ted Wheeler as “Mayor what’s-his-name” and denounced his attempts to control protesters in Portland.
Hardesty later blamed her forgetfulness of the mayor’s name to having a “senior moment.” Oh, please. Hardesty is a pit bull. She doesn’t have senior moments. She bites and moves on.
Who can blame her? Joe Tex wrote a song about lean, disrespected women like Hardesty years ago:
“Say man,
Don’t walk ahead of that woman like she don’t belong to you
Just cause hers got them little skinny legs
You know that ain’t no way to do. …”
Hardesty has undoubtedly had many challenges in her life. They have made her a fighter. Like many other progressives – white or black – she is fighting the wrong opponents. She blames police for what are really political failures.
It isn’t officer-involved shootings that are unraveling American communities. It’s drugs and the cultural baggage left over from the 60’s – if it feels good, do it.
A microcosm of this kind of deterioration can be found in “The Walmart of Heroin,” a story that recently appeared in The New York Times. It’s about Kensington, a neighborhood in Philadelphia, that has the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin. Many American cities – and now rural areas – have their own variation on this.
At one time Kensington was a blue-collar factory neighborhood. Industry moved out, and white residents left. Hispanics and blacks moved in, and drug dealing followed. Did the city fail to invest in those neighborhoods, or did crime scare potential investors? Probably both. The city’s political leaders either didn’t know what to do, or what they did do didn’t lead to desired results.
Homeless camps took root. One elaborate camp called El Campamento became a community – and a law – unto itself. There was considerable optimism when Philadelphia demolished it. Then political reality hit:
“The city offered treatment, but most of the displaced heroin addicts didn’t accept it,” according to The New York Times. “They moved into crumbling churches, abandoned buildings, vacant lots. They pitched tents on the grass at McPherson Square, where library staff regularly rushed outside with bottles of Narcan to save the overdosed.”
The brutal details of life in Kensington could be the future of Portland if Hardesty and the City Council insist on making police reform their number one priority. The police are not to blame for drug addiction or homelessness.
Misplaced sympathy and compassion for the homeless have helped turn homelessness into a lifestyle.
As one homeless man in Philadelphia explained in The New York Times: “It’s easier to be homeless here. You get help up here. You get food. Everything I have I was given from somebody. The drugs are here — they are closer and cheaper.”
He sounds like any number of drug-addicted panhandlers who now call Portland home.
Hardesty wants to build guys like that “affordable housing.” Instead, she might want to take a lesson from one of America’s most famous black mayors: Willie Brown.
He served as San Francisco mayor from 1996 to 2004. Initially, Brown cracked down on the homeless, ordering police to forcibly remove them from city parks and sidewalks.
A couple of years in as mayor, though, he shifted tactics. He started spending more money on shelters and drug treatment. By the time he left office, San Francisco had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the homeless, and the problem had grown worse. As he was leaving office, Brown acknowledged in the San Francisco Chronicle that he had no idea what to do about the homeless.
Subsequent San Francisco mayors spent more money and still more money on the homeless. It was the easy and compassionate thing to do. San Francisco now lands on most Top Ten lists of American cities with the most homeless. It is a very progressive city in a very progressive state.
In Portland, Hardesty wrote in a letter to the editor of The Oregonian: “On election night, I was so proud that we proved ourselves as a community to be compassionate and kind, and I am coming into this role ready to uphold those values.”
Compassionate and kind for whom?
Last week a 26-year-old black man with a lengthy criminal history shot and killed a 70-year-old white woman and a 51-year-old white man in separate incidents in downtown Portland.
Let’s see how Hardesty pins that on the police.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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I’ll have more to observe later on, but I just came across a phrase new to me that captures activist Portland’s motive force: Selma-envy.
A side note from my job about what works or might work: Last week an angry black man called claiming someone had been stealing reefer from his hotel room. We said we didn’t know anything about it and would not pay for his lost weed. His reply, “Is this a race thing?”
I didn’t answer but he clearly thought he’d get traction. I personally thought it was a white whore and black doper thing, but didn’t make reply.
A few times I’ve had bums demand of me, “Don’t you know I’m homeless?” after some tedious depredation (prowling cars, shoplifting, stealing showers, bathing in the restaurant sink, and etc.).
If no one is around and it is deserved I’ll say yes, but your also a thieving fucking bum, and if I’m really certain, turn the man around at the shoulders and kick him in the ass. Sometimes I have to fist fight, but those never come back
That last treatment is only for recidivists. The cops aren’t going to help me.
I read the NYT article. For some reason I expected (hoped?) the pictures would be worse than what we have here in Portland. Alas, the worst they could come up with are things you can find in a dozen places in Portland that you can see in passing from here to there. Ride the Springwater from OMSI to Ross Island Sand and Gravel and you’ll see the hill side above is just one continuous stretch of garbage spilling downwards at you. You’ll see worse (or at least more) at some of the out of the way places: Ross Island Caves, under I-5 at the Burnside Bridge, under the Tacoma overpass of Johnson Creek, any number of places along the Springwater Trail east to Gresham. Those are really scary though… and dangerous.
Build it and they will come is a thing. We’re building it, and making sure it’s not inconvenient to boot… at least for the homeless. Their sheltered neighbors just need to get with the progressive program and be happy for what they have, needles on the ground and all.
The thing I always think about when I hear people call for Housing for All is who are the neighbors going to be of these people? I get that the Homeless, like all groups, are not a monolith. The Advocates like to claim most of us are a paycheck or two away from being homeless, but the reality is most of us are a paycheck or two from picking up a (second) part time job, maybe staying with family and friends, a few might even have to sleep in our cars here and there until we navigate the system and get back on our feet.
Housing won’t change a person. What you see now is what you have. The homeless we don’t see laying in doorways and squatting on sidewalks absolutely would thrive with government housing as they’ll go about their lives like they have, likely happier for the hand up. The ones we do see however with the carts and the tarps, the bike parts, needles, and heaping piles of garbage… well, I don’t want that person to be my neighbor housed or not.
The dark box mystery of Housing First is frustrating in that progressives just stare at you when you question it. It reminds me of the South Park episode with the underpants gnomes. They had a diagram of success where step one was “collect underpants”, step three was “profit”, but step two was a question mark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts
You raise a question that never gets asked and answered when it comes to discussion of the homeless and mentally ill:
“The thing I always think about when I hear people call for Housing for All is who are the neighbors going to be of these people?”
If anyone dares to pose that question, they are dismissed as a NIMBY.
Last night I went to a meeting of the Mental Health Alliance. This is a group comprised of the Mental Health Association of Portland, Disability Rights Oregon and Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare. They came together earlier this year after the Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for Justice and Police Reform (mostly blacks) filed a friend of the court brief to coattail on the Dept. of Justice settlement.
In response, the Mental Health Alliance formed and filed their own friend of the court brief. Last night’s meeting was in preparation for tomorrow night, when the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing (PCCEP) meets for the first time. PCCEP is the latest iteration of community oversight of the Portland Police Bureau.
I know it gets confusing, all these groups and acronyms. This is the bread and circuses that Portland city government has become.
The previous attempt at community oversight fell apart when various anti-cop protesters hijacked the meetings. This latest effort looks like it could turn into blacks vs. the mentally ill/homeless. Bring on the South Park gnomes for some laughs.
I realize how brutal and stupid what I wrote last reads. In mitigation I plead the following:
I work in a world the left dreams about but never provides. People of all colors, races, and religions peacefully work together without benefit of much education and often without a lot of English.
That’s just the customer base. What they all have in common is an effort to get along with one another, to stay on top of their petty selves, and make enough money to buy a house and maintain husband/wife and children in health, food and where and when they can, fun. It is not easy, but their jobs give them dignity and responsibility and opportunities for a richer future, especially for their families.
This city does little to help them. Marginalized and self-marginalized people come round 24/7 and try to get what they can from these people without having earned it.
Young guys I could never keep up in a pursuit slip phones and laptops and purses off of tables, desks, car seats, bar stools, and public benches. The streeties steal drivers laundry.
It is a small community of working people breaking into or establishing themselves in the middle-class or lower middle- class. They are accruing or have accrued the means to be self-supporting taxpayers who really are a pretty good bunch.
Yet the metro area nourishes a low-level predatory class of vagabonding destroyers who chew and nibble and gnaw at the fringe of a pretty fragile phenomenon.
Which group gets civic protections and sympathetic press? The police are sick of indulging the catch and release
program of local government. Plus, they run a risk of degradation or draining controversy every time they make contact with Portland’s marginalized diversity.
I don’t really scrap that much and I’ve lost pretty badly at least once.
Larry, what you wrote isn’t brutal or stupid. It’s real. You see the victims; the Portland City Council doesn’t. Neither do most progressive leaders. They must think all crime victims are rich, white Republicans.
As you point out, it’s the predators who receive the civic protections and sympathetic press.
If you’re interested, The Skanner newspaper recently posted a link to a survey on strategic planning for the Portland Police Bureau. You can find it here:
https://www.research.net/r/DR59V8S
I don’t know how much good it will do to complete, but the Selma-envy crowd will likely have their say.
Joann Hardesty, formerly Bowman , is proof that there are second or third acts in Oregon politics. Long before it’s current fashion Joann was a big champion of criminals in the Oregon legislature, from 1995 to 2001.
And an equally virulent opponent of victims’ rights.
I hope that the OTHER 500,000 Portlanders eventually speak up, before they are totally marginalized.
I first encountered Jo Ann Bowman when she was a freshman legislator and trying to cause trouble for one of my clients. She was arrogant and ignorant and all bark and no bite. Clueless about the legislative process.
As Commissioner Hardesty she will have bite, but she will also have more to lose. A six-figure job with real benefits. Let’s see how that changes her.
I took the survey on strategic planning. Mostly I entered my endorsements or thoughts in the space provided. The choices that were offered seemed fixed or driven by an agenda other than public safety.
Yes, the survey does seem stacked against the police given the choices that are offered.
About three years ago, at one of the first meetings of the Community Oversight Advisory Board, there was criticism of a PSU survey done on the Portland Police Bureau because it seemed too positive. One of the board members proposed using a minority-owned firm that was more “culturally” competent.
That police oversight board later fell apart. This past week a new group met for the first time — the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing, 13 folks who will advise police on its treatment of the mentally ill.
In their introductions, many of these committee members stated — almost as their bona fides — the problems they’ve had with law enforcement. This group is supposed to monitor how Portland police meet requirements of a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice on use of force with the mentally ill. Portland could have opted for a court-appointed monitor and probably should have. Citizen groups don’t lend themselves to neutrality.
I hadn’t realized . . .
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/wife_of_a_liberal_senator_gets_mugged_by_reality.html
Merry Christmas, Pamela. Keep fighting the good fight.
Thanks, Matt.
Merry Christmas to you, too. Let’s both keep fighting the good fight.
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