Another Wave Of Portland Police Quit Amid Massive Spike In Shootings And Stabbings; Fire Dept. Responding To 10+ Homeless Tent Fires A Day
Reported By Brock Simmons | Published December 31, 2020
Yes, Virginia, Portland is continuing to slide further and further into 3rd world status. If you can believe it, the situation is actually getting worse, as we bring you the latest in Portland s***hole news.
The city is set to the the year with nearly 900 shootings. Yes, 900. Out of those, 225 people were hit, 53 ended up as homicides. In many other instances people were taken to hospitals, yet some didn’t want to cooperate with police. In other incidents there only reports of shots fired and shells found on the ground, yet no victims. This is despite the state legislature passing several new gun control laws in recent years, including “universal background checks”, “red flag laws”, and others. This goes along with nearly 70 stabbings on the year. This is the worst crime the city has seen since the early 90’s crime peak.
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Portland had logged about 900 shootings, compared to 393 shootings in all of 2019. On Monday, Portland police identified 33-year-old Jaron Weeks as the city’s 53rd homicide victim this year — the highest number of homicides in Portland since a wave of gang violence in the early 1990s.
Weeks was killed Christmas morning in an apartment building in the Lloyd District. A second shooting victim at the scene was hospitalized.
Two people were hospitalized in multiple shootings across Portland on Saturday night, police said. A truck rammed a patrol car, putting a Portland police officer in the hospital with a broken pelvis.The driver of the truck has not been found.
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It’s not just gun violence that has rocked the city. Trendlon Brewer, 53, was arrested last week for a series of random attacks on people with a baseball bat.
The article ends on a common theme; More police officers fleeing the city:
The PPB also faces a wave of retirements and resignations. Since the protests and riots started in June, 74 officers have left the bureau and another 25-32 are expected to leave by the end of January.
That’s out of 1,001 positions for sworn officers in Portland, and that’s on top of the already existing 100 some-odd vacancies. The bureau might be down 20% of its normal force.
48 cops retired just in the month of August.
KOIN6/Portland Tribune reveal how dire the situation is in another article:
In an unprecedented situation for Portland, a racially diverse and experienced group of police officers is taking pay cuts to get away from the city, while citing poor working conditions here.
And the city’s police recruiter tasked with boosting bureau diversity isn’t looking for replacements — because that person is gone, too.
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Chief Chuck Lovell recently announced that the Portland Police Bureau would be moving the vast majority of traffic cops and all its K-9 officers to respond to 911 calls. The goal: to deal with a wave of retirements and resignations and combat historically low response times this past year.
What Lovell didn’t say is that for the first time that anyone can remember, the number of people resigning has outstripped retirements.
While 14 officers have filed papers to retire by the end of January, nine officers have resigned since November, and seven more have filed to resign shortly.
And the number of imminent resignations may be far more. Based on requests from police departments seeking particular officers’ personnel records, “we have around 25 people that may be in the process of trying to get hired in other places,” said Assistant Chief Michael Frome, who oversees the bureau’s Human Resources Department.
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Police officers often leave smaller departments to go to places like Portland for higher pay. In this case they are leaving Portland for places like Beaverton, Bend, Hillsboro, Tigard and Boise, Idaho — where they will receive less pay.
In Boise, for instance, Chief Ryan Lee — a former assistant chief in Portland — has hired four Portland officers away from his old bureau so far. They’ll lose not only pay, but service time towards their eventual retirement.
Frome, for his part, said he doesn’t have numbers, but did say the confirmed departures constitute a racially diverse group with at least one multi-lingual officer, and he’d hire them all back if he could.
Complicating things is that the bureau has no plans to hire new officers anytime soon — so much so that it’s done away with the recruiter position that spearheads efforts to diversify the force and attract quality candidates.
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In part, that’s a result of how the bureau has shifted resources to cope with the Black Lives Matter protests that broke out in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
So why are people leaving? Frome said it’s a mix of reasons. One officer cited a desire to be near family. “Other ones say ‘I just don’t like working in Portland anymore, because the job just doesn’t make me happy,’” Frome said. “You get some (who) throw shade and say, ‘the City Council has created this horrible place for us.’ But you don’t see that from everybody.”
In general, he said, “They’re leaving because they just don’t enjoy working here anymore.”
Asked about the trend, Brian Hunzeker, the new president of the Portland Police Association, said he suspects other cities are seeing officers leave in mid-career as well. He said it’s not surprising officers are unhappy given Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty’s claim in July that police were setting fires to blame them on protesters, as well as District Attorney Mike Schmidt’s decisions not to file charges against numerous people the police arrested after declaring that protests had become riots.
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Oh the irony of the DiVeRSiTy recruiter position being eliminated due to budget cuts rammed through by the city council who tout DiVeRSiTy as one of their top priorities.
Some now former Portland Police officers have penned letters citing their grievances, most of which has to do with the city council. In fact, treatment by the city council is one of the major reasons why officers are leaving, while vichy “mayor” Ted Wheeler and the now-infamous councilwoman JoAnn Hardesty politispeak their way through all the excuses and bloviations you can dream up.
Deputy Chief Chris Davis, who has facilitated the rioters, and has recently tried to bail from the sinking ship by applying for open Chief positions in Fresno and Milwaukee (he didn’t get either job) took to YouTube to explain the “staffing” situation a few months ago:
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In one horrifying story, neighbors had to band together to track a stalker/peeping Tom that had been sneaking into little girls’ rooms at night. Police didn’t have the resources or manpower to respond. Portland police could only spare one detective to handle all robbery cases during the summer-into-fall riots. The neighbors eventually ID’ed the perp and he was arrested. The suspect in that case, Brandon Pirkey, was currently on release facing charges in other case. Predictably, Multnomah County Sheriff Mike Reese let him go again.
Perhaps they had the wrong guy. Or perhaps DA Mike Schmidt declined to press charges, because there are no charges from the March incident in Pirkey’s court records.
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MEANWHILE, local alt rag Willamette Week has accidentally published the news, as they tell the story of one man who was trapped within the recent Red House occupation zone:
They blocked the alleys and they blocked the side street of my house. They wouldn’t allow us to move our cars because they had fully barricaded us in. They said they had basically claimed the area and we weren’t able to leave.
On Saturday last week, an individual went around and broke the Ring cameras off of people’s front doors, on their doorbells, with a crowbar.
They had sentries, essentially, that are posted up there. They had an individual with an assault rifle positioned right next to our driveway. They have people regularly back at their station, but they also patrol around the block with weapons and tactical gear and bulletproof vests. They watch us, you know, and they’re regularly standing around as we move in and out of our backyard.
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I could go out front on foot, but there were several people outside, and they were armed and they would watch us. They’d follow us around the block. And they were very suspicious that we were coordinating with the police. Like I said, they had guns up front, too, in addition to everyone inside of the zone.
Generally, they didn’t say much to us. They knew we weren’t happy that they were there, but basically we had kind of cut a deal with them that they needed to keep some distance from our property and not trespass or create fire risks and hazards next to it. And, in exchange, we were leaving them alone. That was kind of the truce that we had.
Everyone thought the cops were going to come down, so they were prepping for that. The side streets were lined with tires and wood that they were soaking in gasoline and lighter fluid in anticipation that, when the police would come, they were going to light it on fire and create a big flaming barricade to prevent them from coming in.
They had bonfires on and adjacent to our property next to the gasoline-soaked tires. We were asking them to put it out—and they refused to do so and would yell at us.
They got really hostile and told me to fuck off and that we were part of the problem, or that we were just another gentrifier. We were scared they were going to attack us in our house.
If you had a problem, or you were scared for your safety or that you were going to be attacked, you had to negotiate with the individuals or the leaders themselves, because the police would not come out proactively because of concerns about security and the situation escalating. If you wanted them to stop, you had to go down and negotiate with them yourselves.
Everyone who was directly surrounded by this was really, really scared and nervous. And people kept their mouths shut because they were worried about their safety and protecting their homes.
If you want the city to do things, you either have to get a bunch of guns and take over a neighborhood and threaten violence, or you go find Wheeler in real life or Commissioner Dan Ryan or whoever else and you surround their home and you scream at them and harass them until they give you what you want. Otherwise, they hide from you. It’s incredibly disappointing and unfortunate that that’s what the city’s decision-making has come to.
That’s right, police just stand aside and let antifa take over parts of the city, terrorizing neighborhoods, threatening citizens, and essentially holding people and houses hostage.
Oh and we haven’t even touched on the continuing homeless epidemic yet. The latest is that the city and county are working together to distribute $500 debit cards to 4,000 houseless individuals in Portland. This is your money, as it comes from the federal CARES act.
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And what will they be doing with that $500? Buying new “camping” gear because they keep lighting their’s on fire. FOX 12 reports:
Portland Fire & Rescue says they have seen a huge increase in tent fires among the city’s homeless population this year.
PF&R told FOX 12 they are responding to about 10 to 11 tent fires every day.
With temperatures dipping into the low 30s, and sometimes upper 20s, it is increasingly tough for the homeless to stay warm – and sadly, two weeks ago a tent fire became deadly.
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PF&R says a lit candle caused a fire in a tent by the Interstate 405 on-ramp near Legacy Emanuel Hospital. Two people were inside the tent. One person escaped, but firefighters say a woman died after suffering burns over 75 percent of her body.
“The candle in her tent knocked over while she was sleeping,” said Scott Kerman, executive director at Blanchet House. “And we know that the people we serve who live on the streets or in tents will use candles and small fires for a lot of different reasons – for warmth and for cooking maybe. But also for light.”
Yeah, you have to wonder what they are “cooking” with candles.
Don’t let your city turn into Portland. Never elect these lunatics to power.
Reported by 
It was not enough for bakery shop owners Melissa and Aaron Klein to pay more than $136,000 fine to the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. The state has now wiped out all cash from all their bank accounts too – and 
Still, closing the business and issuing a gag order was not enough for 
?)
Several politicians have recently been offering free goodies to voters. One of the most popular of these, oddly enough, is something that several state governments have already tackled: free college tuition.
The details vary by state, but Oregon, Tennessee, Georgia, Michigan, and Louisiana (among others) all use tax dollars to pay for at least some of their residents’ college tuition.
Louisiana provides a great case study for advocates of similar federal policies. Louisiana just so happens to be in the news right now because the governor is threatening to suspend his state’s version of free college tuition for everyone.
Louisiana’s Tuition Program
Louisiana’s plan is called the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, or, more commonly, TOPS. This extremely popular program uses tax dollars to pay full tuition (and some fees) at any of Louisiana’s public universities. Other than residency requirements, all high school students qualify as long as they have a C average (2.5 GPA) and at least an 18 on the ACT.
So the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students doesn’t cover every student’s tuition, but it ends up covering it for a large chunk of middle-/upper-class families.
How It Started
The program started out in the late 1980s as the brainchild of oil tycoon/philanthropist Patrick Taylor. The program, which wasn’t originally named for him, started out as a tuition assistance plan only for low-income individuals.
In 1997 the state removed the income caps. At that point, all Louisiana students, regardless of financial need, were made eligible for “free” tuition at any Louisiana public college. Once in college, students had to maintain a C average to keep their TOPS awards.
As of 2010, approximately 70 percent of Louisiana’s high school graduates headed to college within one year. That’s nearly 20 percent higher than the rate in 2000.
Who’s Paying for It?
It’s easy to call the program a success because of this increase, but it’s just as easy to point out that the program doesn’t really provide free education. In one way or another, someone pays for it.
The eventual implosion of the program was easy to predict back in 1997 for the same reasons that pretty much any similar subsidy is destined to fail. Subsidies don’t really lower the cost of products and services; they only lower the up-front price that some people pay.
(In 1997, this program inspired my very first public critique of a government policy. Back then, I thought it was a terrible idea.)
No Such Thing as Free Tuition
A person receiving “free” tuition may not see it (or even care), but subsides actually raise the total cost of an education. The core problem is that they remove the paying customer—in this case the student—from the equation.
Without the subsidy, the paying customer receives the direct benefit for the service and bears the direct cost. If that person doesn’t think the cost is worth it, they don’t pay.
Louisiana’s program replaces this paying customer with groups of government officials. These officials neither receive the direct benefit nor endure the direct cost of obtaining an education. These groups do, however, benefit a great deal from obtaining more of your tax dollars.
And they rarely bear any direct cost from either increasing your taxes or delivering a substandard education product. (The incumbency rate is fairly high for politicians.)
On a practical level, Louisiana’s program converts tuition payments into a state budget item. In other words, a large chunk of each school’s “tuition” becomes nothing more than revenue sent in by the state bureaucracy.
In Louisiana, four separate higher education systems—each its own bureaucracy—fight over these “tuition” payments. Smaller schools inevitably get the smallest shares, but that’s kind of another story.
A Burden on University Resources
When the influx of students hits—more people going to school when tuition is “free” is pretty much a foregone conclusion—it strains universities’ existing resources. So the transfer of money has the natural tendency to lead to expanded facilities, faculty, and staff.
But these increases call for a permanently higher level of funding, and all of these effects tend to reinforce each other. That is, school officials have a built in reason to ask for larger transfers, and politicians have a built in excuse to raise taxes.
When the state’s coffers are not flush with cash, the schools’ budgets get cut. Thus, universities have every incentive to raise more money from students who are not a part of the Taylor Opportunity Program.
Of course, for any given level of Taylor Opportunity Program students, a higher posted rate of tuition results in a larger transfer from the state. If the program covered full fees and tuition for literally every student, then taxpayers would bear the full cost. But it doesn’t, so non-TOPS students bear some of the cost.
(Pretty much every student ends up paying higher fees directly, too, but that’s almost an aside.)
Non-subsidized markets don’t work this way—prices can actually fall in response to changes in demand and supply. Subsidized systems, on the other hand, are destined to result in higher—not lower—tuition.
Recent numbers support this explanation. The Taylor Opportunity Program has nearly doubled in cost since 2008, and most of that increase has been due to higher tuition.
What I failed to fully appreciate in 1997 was how bad of a deal the Taylor Opportunity Program would end up being for the smaller schools. Then I spent almost a decade teaching at Nicholls State University, a regional state school in Thibodaux, La.
Small Universities Are Hardest Hit
In one sense, the Louisiana program amounted to a cruel trick for these institutions. Smaller schools are the ones least able to sustain the permanently higher costs associated with the new TOPS-generated revenue stream.
When the state budget goes south—and it always does in Louisiana—smaller schools get slammed. (Louisiana State University has more than 25,000 students, so small changes in per-student fees go a long way).
No matter how much we want it to, subsidizing something simply doesn’t make it more cost-effective.
The Taylor Opportunity Program does give certain people a better deal on tuition at one point in time, but then it makes up for it somewhere else.
Ironically, the earlier waves of Taylor Opportunity Program graduates are among those about to get hit with a tax increase. That’s what politicians mean by free.
Aside from the subsidy/cost issue, there are many other reasons why this is bad public policy.
First of all—and I know this sounds crazy—everyone should not go to college. Some people simply aren’t cut out, and many just don’t need to. Yes, people with college degrees tend to earn more than those without, but it does not follow that everyone should go to college.
When the program was started, Louisiana public universities offered students a good value because they were relatively inexpensive. Now that Louisiana taxpayers have spent more than $2 billion on the program, tuition rates are out of reach for many students that don’t qualify for the program.
While the best solution for Louisiana would be to get rid of the program altogether (unlikely since politicians love the program), the best residents can hope for now is an increase in the program’s academic standards and some form of means testing. At least these changes would better direct subsidies to academically prepared students with more financial need.