Standoff (January 17)
PORTLAND, Ore. (PORTLAND TRIBUNE) — No injuries were reported after a nearly 12-hour standoff between Clackamas County police and a suspect in Damascus.
County deputies first engaged with the suspect at about 4 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 17, and later arrested John Redenbo, 59, who was wanted for a parole violation stemming from an assault charge. Upon arriving at Redenbo’s residence on Old Barn Lane in Damascus, deputies saw Redenbo go inside and barricade himself. Deputies were unsuccessful in their attempts to contact Redenbo.
At about 6 p.m., two people came out of the house. One of them was identified as Sade Cleora Geraldine Hollis, 29, of Damascus, who had a warrant for failing to appear on an identity theft charge in Washington County. The other person was not identified.
Based on the situation and the seriousness of the criminal charge, the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Special Weapons and Tactics team responded to the scene at about 7 p.m.
Members of the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Crisis Negotiations Team responded to the scene as well and began attempting to communicate with Redenbo. They were initially able to speak with someone inside the residence, but Redenbo ignored their attempts to speak with him.
At about 3:30 a.m., SWAT team members were able to take Redenbo into custody without further incident. He was transported to the Clackamas County Jail and booked on a no bail parole violation. Detectives are now investigating possible weapons charges against Redenbo.
Officers responded about 7:45 p.m. Sunday to a call in the 3200 block of Southeast 90th Place and found the body of 31-year-old Samuel Feltis, who had suffered what police called “traumatic injuries.”
After an examination, the state medical examiner ruled that Feltis had died of gunshot wounds, police said.
Back in December OPB reported
With less than two weeks remaining in 2020, Mayor Ted Wheeler, Police Chief Chuck Lovell and Office of Violence Prevention Director Nike Greene announced preliminary plans to try and curb a dramatic increase in shootings and homicides.
The plan, announced Friday evening, calls for more detectives to be assigned to investigate and follow up on shootings, and more outreach and hospital-based trauma responders to be deployed when someone is shot. The mayor has also asked the Police Bureau and Office of Violence Prevention to submit budget requests to better allow those agencies to respond to gun violence.
The announcement comes months after an Aug. 6 press conference when Wheeler promised a plan was imminent to address a problem that was ballooning as early as March, when the city recorded a 150% increase in shooting injuries.
So far this year, there have been 858 shootings in Portland, with 224 people shot and 39 homicides involving a firearm, far outpacing previous years. Now, as a year many hope will be a statistical outlier in nearly every way comes to a close, there is little consensus as to what should be done to address the problem — and concern that the spike in shootings may not be an aberration.
Abolitionists have been pointing to the increase beginning in March, two months before the Summer of George kicked off. We’ve had eight months of increasing violence since then.
It appears March through April 2020 was in fact a bloody stretch, but we can see the long term trend line for the year is upward slightly, from 33 to 41, before all BLM hell breaks loose.
OPB has been awful and the author of this piece particularly so.
In August, two months into near-nightly racial justice protests, an embattled Wheeler was in the midst of a narrowing reelection campaign. With gun violence surging, the mayor and City Council were facing criticism from many in the Police Bureau for dissolving their gun violence reduction team.
“Those were decisions that were made outside of the Police Bureau and they’re having a very direct impact on the lives of people here in the city of Portland over the past three weeks,” said then Assistant Chief Andy Shearer, days before his retirement in August. “And there are people that have been shot and people that have been killed, and that very well may not have occurred had we still had a GVRT in place over these last three weeks.”
Shearer called the spike “staggering and unacceptable.”
Experts say it is critical to intervene to stop cycles of retaliatory violence, which supporters of the GVRT claim was an aspect lost when the police unit disbanded.
“Right now, in the city of Portland, there is no uniform component that is contacting any of the subjects involved in gun violence or any of this back and forth retaliation stuff,” said Sgt. Ken Duilio, one of the former gun violence prevention team members who is now working in the detective division. “Let’s not get rid of the unit focused on gun violence, because then people are running around the city completely unchecked, involved in the back and forth. The city is becoming a shooting gallery.”
Of particular concern, Duilio said, is the increase this year in people injured by gunfire. Some months in 2020 saw a 200% increase in shooting injuries, a hit rate increase Duilio attributes to more people being involved in each incident. In previous years, finding 40 to 50 casings at a shooting was considered very high.
“Now, we’ve had several between 60 to 80 and we had one that had 151 casings,” he said. “You might have a shooting that has on one side three or four shooters, and on the other side three or four shooters. And they’re all shooting and they’re all emptying their clips.”
The problem abolitionists have with police gun units is that they take so many black men out of “the community”, which is of course exactly how they work to lower violence, which is not the work of criminal masterminds a la The Wire, but the chaos resulting from black America’s perverse honor culture of petty insults and retaliation. Somewhere a cop described the strategy as getting people off the streets until whatever personal beef dies, so to speak, down.
The reality is police are saving the thugs from themselves. One wonders why at this point.
OPB is having none of that cause-and-effect business.
“I think that narrative — ‘Is this due to the pandemic? Is it due to disbanding the GVRT?’ — I think are false narratives,” said Portland State University criminology professor Brian Renauer. “There is something that was occurring before both of those happened.”
Renauer said the key to understanding the data and formulating solutions is to understand the population most impacted and involved in gun violence.
Between April 2019 and June 2020, the California Partnership for Safe Communities and the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform were hired to work with the mayor’s Office of Violence Prevention to do an analysis of gun violence in the city.
That report found the Black community is disproportionately impacted by gun violence, making up 50.7% of the victims and suspects. The report also found that less than 8% of the victims and suspects were under 18, contradicting a long-held assumption that gun violence is perpetrated by and impacting young people.
Instead, the report found the most impacted age group is 25- to 34-year-olds. That data point supports one of Renauer’s theories: that the recent upward homicide and shooting trend isn’t related to the current economic downturn. Instead, he points to the 2008 recession.
Renauer said high concentrations of people living below the poverty line, high rates of unemployment and other socioeconomic indicators often correlate to higher rates of neighborhood violence. But, Renauer said, changes in those indicators can be slow to manifest.
“Maybe we’re actually feeling the ramifications of the struggling economy in the early 2010s that impacted families, impacted the youth growing up in those families,” he said. “And now, we’re seeing the repercussions of it as those youth are now in their teenage and young adult years.”
There is no reasoning with these people.
untethered 