Breaking news... eventually

A crazy guy shot two cops in inner northeast Portland in prime time Monday night, and he's still out there somewhere, armed and dangerous. Everybody with a gun and a badge for miles around showed up and went on an all-night manhunt after it happened, but the perp got away. The officers who were shot had to go to the hospital, but one is out and the other one is apparently also going to be okay.

The shooting happened a little before 9 around 17th and Clackamas, which is back between the Grace Church and the Holladay Park old folks' home. It's close to Sullivan's Gulch, the ravine in which the freeway and the railroad cut through. There are always a bunch of tent dwellers in there, particularly around a scary, dark underpass behind the movie theater at 16th and Multnomah. If I had to guess, that's where the guy came from, and that's where he went after he did the deed. But that's just me speculating.

I'm in that area a fair amount, and there are too many sad stories to see there. Especially the violent, mentally ill people that you have to watch out for. And now and then the gangsters show up with guns blazing. The trendy bar on the southwest corner of 15th and Broadway had become a regular shooting gallery before it finally gave up the ghost.

Anyway, in Monday night's drama, a number of main streets were blocked off for many hours, and there were cop cars galore all night. The mayor and the police chief showed for a photo op, but by the time they got there, the perp was in the wind.

What struck me most about the incident was how strange the flow of information has become. I was wasting time on the internet when people started posting about the shooting on Bluesky. My immediate instinct was to go to a more reliable source, but guess what, there wasn't any. It was just after 10, and there were two local news shows going on the television, but neither one of them had a single word about the shooting. They were showing MLK Day speeches, and the weather, like nothing had happened. Off to the internet I went, but none of the TV station pages had anything. The Oregonian site was as worthless as you might expect, and as far as I can tell they had nothing on the story until 5 yesterday morning.

Then I tried YouTube, and I found a couple of what appeared to be live streams, but all they were showing were police crime scene tape and parked cop cars, a few with their lights flashing. One stream had no one narrating at all, and the other, which I think was coming from a broadcast TV station, had a hapless guy who couldn't pronounce the street names and appeared to have just dropped in off a space ship. He knew he was in the Lloyd District (close, but no cigar), and that there were a lot of police, but beyond that, he kept repeating that he didn't know what was going on. Eventually I stumbled across a stream with a right-winger standing next to the crime tape, ranting about how this was all because Portland is a sanctuary city. That was enough to make me turn off the iPad.

I thought about switching on the radio – we have one tuner left in the house, and I think it still works – but where would I tune it to? Portland doesn't have a 24-hour local news station any more, does it?

It took more than an hour after the shooting for the local mainstream media to get on the story. And at that point, they were telling everyone in the vicinity to stay off the streets and lock their doors and windows. Which seemed like advice that we might have wanted to get sooner.

It makes me wonder what we're going to do for crucial news when the big disaster strikes and time is of the essence. I guess it will be up to the likes of NextDoor to save us. But you know what? For all the suppposed glories of our "information age," it seems like we're getting less actual information than we got in '80s. Roll over, Mike Donahue, dig these TikTok videos.

UPDATE, Jan. 22: More photos of the shooter. He's still on the loose: