The Portland Poll on Public Order

Another result of the Oregonian poll, noted in my previous post, is reported here.  It describes further consequences of police pull-back:

Residents across the metro area say downtown Portland has become dirty, unsafe and uninviting and many anticipate visiting the city’s core less often after the pandemic than they did before.

Those are the worrisome findings of a new poll of 600 people in the Portland metro area commissioned by The Oregonian/OregonLive. Asked for their perceptions of downtown, respondents frequently used words like “destroyed,” “trashed,” “riots” and “sad.” Many cited homelessness as a particular issue, and said there is an urgent need for the city to find housing and support people living on the street.

People need to feel physically safe and not be worried that they are going to be mugged, of course. But that is not all. They also need a more general feeling of order. They don’t want to visit a place that is “trashed.”

“Support” for people living on the street is the feel-good answer for what to do about the homeless problem. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for progress. I will get back to that below.

Restoring safety, order, and beauty to downtown is essential to revitalizing it. But plywood is not an attractive “window treatment.”

Large protests ended during the summer, but in the months since the city has been unable to stop small groups of vandals from sporadically attacking businesses and civic organizations at night, which has led many downtown businesses to continue to keep plywood over their windows.

“I love Portland, generally speaking,” said Matthew Forsyth, a 65-year-old Southwest Portland resident who participated in the poll. “It’s just that downtown right now, it feels like it needs to be revitalized and it doesn’t feel safe.”

This is the consequence of tolerating riots. Peaceful protests that make their point and move on are one thing. Burning and looting are entirely different. Government can and should crack down hard on anyone engaging in such activity. (And yes, the same goes for people breaking into a public building to disrupt its function.) Sustained obstructions of streets or occupations of parts of a city are also different. Government need not and should not tolerate such behavior.

Regarding the homelessness issue, it is common knowledge among those actually grappling with this problem that “the homeless” are not a single group with a single problem and a single solution. As a first cut, we have to recognize at least three subgroups, which I call the “have nots,” the “cannots,” and the “will nots.” For the have nots, support may be enough, but that is not where the main problem lies. Cannots with mental illnesses or substance abuse problems may not accept treatment voluntarily. And then there are the will nots who simply prefer life on the street to a life of work and responsibility. They need to be told firmly that the choice they have made is not theirs to make.

Portland’s downtown, like many others, needs law and order to restore safety, beauty, and activity. Effective laws and effective law enforcement are an essential ingredient to revitalize a downtown. Sabotaging law enforcement to draw applause from extreme ideologues amounts to murdering the city’s core.