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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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-int0-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.
For anyone reading this, I'm so sorry to share more bad news. Despite successfully catching him last night, the police released him within hours: https://t.co/MTbfSgyhrz
— Troy Howard (@thoward37) October 20, 2020
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The post Another Wave Of Portland Police Quit Amid Massive Spike In Shootings And Stabbings; Fire Dept. Responding To 10+ Homeless Tent Fires A Day appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.