Nowhere to run


I'm still in shock from yesterday morning's home invasion-carjacking-wrong way freeway driving-random shooting-police killing incident in Portland. It all went down in broad daylight in various places all too familiar here in the northeast part of town. Next to the Beverly Cleary Middle School. At the hotel at Lloyd Center. Places tbat used to feel safe. Used to.

I tried scanning the local news for something else to think about, but what I kept finding shook me up even more. The blood is flowing all over this part of town. Here's a corpse discovered at the same time the carjacking violence was going on; the victim had been shot dead. On Northeast 66th just below the Rose City Golf Course.

Here are three patrons of a local bar and an event venue, shot and hospitalized on Friday night. They were hit while inside the adjoining establishments. At Seventh and East Burnside, just west of the Jupiter Hotel. More than a dozen shots went through the front of the building. Two people were wounded seriously.

Then I see that a corpse they pulled out of a car on Sunday at Northeast 45th and Portland Highway in the Cully neighborhood had been shot dead. At first they thought that the guy had died from ramming his car into a power pole, but in fact he had been murdered first.

Meanwhile, the cop haters are doubling down. On social media. In the Mercury. To them, it seems like this is all fine.

I couldn't disagree more with those people. We need more cops, badly, and right away. It would be nice if they were good cops, but at this point I'm ready to take any that are not utterly rotten to the core.

Where is our governor? She picked yesterday to tout her program to burn through all kinds of public money trying to make sure that felons all get jobs when they get out of prison. It's all for "equity," the new sales pitch for everything. Whatever, dear.

Comments

  1. As I read all~ 20? (are we closing in on ~20 years? (next year?)...I'm not a jack bog blog expert) years of your block over a month of two and took some notes, as well as all the comments, the blog has taken a kinda reactionary & cynical turn.

    In a way, a lot of things you were right about early, but people weren't ready to hear about locally came true, so props to you! Prolly wasn't popular in the comments then.

    IDK what the answer is either, I think your analysis that the cop union is too strong/too big a rock or nut to crack at this time, so it's not worth cryin' over & lawlessness is prolly worse & we better just chart a course, grit our teeth and try & get thru it, rotten as the institution, incentive structure & mission (reactive and self-justification) mostly is (PERS & the police union).

    Sure, lack of opportunity and being late to the party for deindustrialization & suburban flight other hardships experienced by the Bronx & Hell.A & San Francisco bay area all came late to us and we didn't forsee them or heed the warning & there's no more frontier with an outdated, inept at best, & wildly corrupt undemocratic form of state and 'by far largest city/metro area' form of govt isn't helping regardless of how rotten the policing structure & bobble heads in govt. are.

    IDK how we rely on the police less for mundane BS like basic traffic collisions and reporting (dash cams (like russia if you wanna buy insurance) & insurance co-ops (like Finland, Norway & sweden (to a degree) with graduated licensing & liability/basic property damage) and achieve diligent honest investigation to then cautiously take future preventative action, but we better be honest with our selves about how bad its gotten instead of being in denial (I mean it maybe isn't worse than the bay area, Bronx or Hell.A got at its worst/in its worst parts so people are still in denial saying 'it's not that bad/no big deal '??), that it can always get worse and that we're sowing the seeds for something really bad by denying how bad its gotten and tarring individual actions taken by individual cops as 'bad bad bad' and offering no alternative.

    But if you talk to people on the ground even that have suffered some police abuse in rough areas, even they're not necessarily anti 'more cops total' or housing people in some parking garages or jail cells instead of tents (it sucks living in a tent!). Not perfect or glamorous, but better than doing nothing or being a bleeding heart bleat in denial?

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  2. I'm trying to understand how it is that having more cops on patrol would have prevented the home invasion and carjacking. Seems that the PPB actually responded to the perp's mayhem.

    Some prospective criminals will be deterred by the possibility of being apprehended. But crime prevention? That would require cops on every street corner, in front of every school, more cops than you can shake a stick at. A place like that is what we would call a police state.

    And yeah, I want more officers, but good ones, not nearly-rotten-to-the-core officers.

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    1. Well you seem to throw all of the eggs into the same basket. Why would I put my life on the line for a community that is constantly either second guessing me, or assuming the worst of me? Yes, they are getting paid to do so but there is something called morale. Look up the word sometime. And the truth is that a large swath of the force has resigned due to all of the issues that I mentioned previously. So that leaves less protection for all citizens, while the remaining police force is looking for the exits.

      People can try to over analyze things and blame the union or this and that, but ask yourself this question. Would you want to be a cop in Portland right now?

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    2. It's a two-way street. My uncles were Chicago cops, and when I rode around with them, they knew all of the business owners on their route. They talked to people just to be friendly, as well as to get the occasional heads-up about nefarious goings-on. They lived in the neighborhood, cared about it, and people knew they cared. It's my impression that a whole lot of Portland cops don't live in Portland, and hold it in contempt in many ways. I've almost never seen cops in Portland out of their cars and walking around to get the feel of a neighborhood, and meeting the public. I've had cops in cars I just walked up to to say hello and introduce myself act like I had two heads.

      Having said that, I have friends that are Portland cops, and they care deeply about the city and its people, and have put up with fallout from recent events that they don't remotely deserve. Being a cop at the best of times wears on you. Having a lot of people that assume the worst is certainly a problem when it comes to police morale. We all need to think better of each other.

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  3. ^Totally. Cops don't prevent crime & barely deter it, at best they record it and investigate it & maybe make recommendations based on the collected data.

    It's lack of opportunity + a bunch of sleazy speculation and graft & us not heeding the warnings of other major american cities that have been thru this.

    But more cops from the community while still trying to chip away at their union, relying on them less/as little as possible for mundane civil or petty criminal matters & investigations, chipping away at costs of their lavish PERS benefits & defacto strike isn't a bad idea, even if short term/short game action is that results in an increased # of total police officers under the PPB banner & dispatch, if that makes sense?

    Yeah, it's not perfect, yeah you're going to get some less than stellar boots on the ground, & giving the police or spooks more power as an institution of carious banners (PPB, state troopers, FBI, NSA, DHS & CIA , patriot act expansion etc) should make people feel a little sick/queasy (tho the libs seem to be cheerleading it/love the FBI now, apparently).

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  4. Chipping away at police over-time pay/incentives & more of them total so we all don't feel the pain as much if/when they go on defacto strike or can cull thru to sift out the bad apples in the long game and chip away at the police union & PERS golden parachutes?

    Gotta think practical strategy & long & short term too, eh?

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  5. Other thing is, bad a deal as PPB (or rather their union + PERS structure) is for us, they're kinda the devil we know & pay a gazillion dollars for (mostly PERS retired) policing with our sky high property taxes.

    Lets figure out how to get some honest investigation & deterrence outta them since we pay an arm and a leg for them to sit around and whine on strike, fund their retirees that aren't working, sit around in our broken courts getting paid overtime & come into our city like an occupying army with gold plated military-like equipment provided by contractors that have the inside track/grease the right palms or buried deep in the bureaucracy or with the right revolving door positions of influence in govt. that work for the unaccountable, increasingly international & increasingly monopoly & rent extracting corporations (directly or indirectly much as they don't admit it to us & we don't admit it to ourselves).

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    1. Jay, no one reads your long-winded political diatribes. Maybe you should write a book as opposed to commenting on blogs? Just saying.

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    2. Theory: Jay is Bill McDonald after an ayahuasca experience.

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    3. Reading a bunch of older 'my lawn' nostalgic Gen-X and Boomer & older burnouts whine about how younger people read comics & don't know (or care?) when Pearl Harbor Day is or things are getting worse, but have time to read and whine about not wanting to read a blog comment that's not that long.

      Oh the Iron-E.

      But things were better or 'more mature' (LOL!) when there were only 5 channels and state-mandated mono-culture idiocy!

      Now, there are ~2-3 corporations that have swallowed up all franchises & local news or platforms, but there's a million ways to have an opinion or be an idiot!

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    4. Jay, I was responding to someone who questioned if my generation would even know much about the First World War. I wasn’t just editorializing out of thin air. And yes, the current generation(s) are sorely lacking in both historical knowledge and maturity. WWII was probably the most important event in recent world history, and we are still living with the results.

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  6. Just to be clear, I have no reason to believe Xennial contemporaries would have done any better or don't also suck in various & different ways appropriate to the times & context LOL.

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