Oregon, My Oregon

John Sexton at Hat Hair reports on the Oregon Governor's Plan to Revive Portland: More Cops and Outlaw Public Drug Use. That's so crazy it might just help!

Portland has been a disaster for the past several years. The city was the scene of some of the most violent (and eventually deadly) protests in 2020. It partially defunded the police and did away with a police unit focused on stop gun violence. And in November of 2020, the state or Oregon took another wrong turn when it passed Measure 110, which decriminalized the use of hard drugs. Both decisions have been disasters.

The decision to defund the police resulted in skyrocketing violent crime. Even when Portland’s hapless mayor tried to reverse course and rehire police, they couldn’t find people willing to take the jobs.

Meanwhile the decriminalization of drugs also created new problems including a rise in overdoses and even more problems with drugged-out homeless people on the city’s streets. Even the homeless drug addicts were giving the city mixed reviews:

“Portland is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.

He ticked off the advantages: He can do drugs wherever he wants and the cops no longer harass him. There are more dealers, scouting for fresh customers moving to paradise. That means drugs are plentiful and cheap.

Downsides: Tent living is no paradise, he said, especially when folks in nearby tents, high on meth, hit him with baseball bats.

So it has gradually dawned on the geniuses in charge that the city/state took some wrong turns back in 2020 and may need to dig itself out by actually changing things. Back in August, Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon announced she was forming a task force designed to help revive the city of Portland by carefully studying the problem and making recommendations.

Too soon old, too late smart.