LA Times: Liberal Portland dream falling apart

By Taxpayers Association of Oregon
OregonWatchdog.com

The LA Times newspaper did a big expose on the failure of Portland which includes a lot of liberal voices lamenting the state of their City.  Please read the article or view 5 interesting quotes below.

“You don’t have to watch Fox News to look around Portland and say, ‘This is not cool,’” said City Commissioner Mingus Mapps, a Democrat and former political science professor at Brandeis University.Fatal drug overdoses nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021 across Multnomah County..“Portland has proven abolishing the police doesn’t work,” he said….“If we continue to fail,” he said, ‘liberalism will have been discredited’.”

“John Toran, 47, the Black owner of a construction company who was born and raised in Portland, said he understood the bail fund was trying to counter malicious prosecution and inequality in the criminal justice system. But, he said, people felt less safe and the city had a duty to respond.“‘Progressive’ means something different now than when it did when I was growing up,” the longtime Democrat said. “Now, when I think of progressive, I think of extremism.”

“But the surge in crime has resulted in an identity crisis.“It very much begins to erode that whole progressive ethos that the city has had,” said historian Chet Orloff, adjunct professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University.”

“In the summer of 2020, Portland’s city commissioners voted to cut the police budget by $15 million — short of the $50 million some demanded — and disband its Gun Violence Reduction Team, which critics had long accused of disproportionately targeting young Black men. It also invested in the Portland Street Response program, which dispatches unarmed paramedics and health workers to help people experiencing mental health and substance abuse crises.The next year, as the city contended with a record number of shootings and homicides, commissioners turned around and voted to increase the police budget. They also set up a new gun violence team with more oversight.But violence continued to escalate. Thousands moved away. After decades of growth, the city’s population dropped in 2021 by 1.7%.”

“One incident in particular, involving the Portland Freedom Fund, a self-described “abolitionist organization” that focuses on helping low-income, Black and minority defendants post bail, tested Portlanders’ commitment to the Black Lives Matter movement. In August, the organization posted bail for Mohamed Osman Adan, who had repeatedly attacked and threatened Rachael Angel Abraham, the mother of his children. A week later, Portland police arrested Adan after finding Abraham, a 36-year-old Black woman, in her home strangled to death and slashed in the face with a kitchen knife.”

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