PDX Dispatch 1/14/23: The Racial Wreckening, Trans Power Rising and Duhmocracy

101 Damnations

In 2022 Portland set its annual homicide record for the second year in a row at 101. A high percentage of cases are classified “no arrest”. Murder rates continue to increase here even as they are easing up in other cities.

Portland antifa under the BLM banner enthusiastically joined in the George Floyd riots of 2020, occupying downtown for months. The police station, federal courthouse and Apple store all remain barricaded going on three years since. Police abolitionists only succeeded in seizing a fraction of what they sought from the Portland Police Bureau’s budget in the heady early days; they nonetheless got the most bang they could for the buck, so to speak, when a beaten Mayor Wheeler ended the Police Bureau’s Gun Violence Reduction Team, long targeted by abolitionists for targeting Black! youths (for targeting other Black! youths), on June 9, just days into the rioting. There could have been no doubt in his office that the result would be more homicides.

Based on a proven model gang units like the GVRT work by harassing and arresting those identified as the most active gangbangers, seeing a small minority initiating most of the cycles of retaliatory violence that typically follow an assault or murder. The strategy relies heavily on stops and searches that are the bane of police abolitionists. Combined with new policies discouraging or barring traffic stops generally (as racist) the result of taking the unit off the street is a lot more gangbangers roaming about locked and loaded.

Covid proved a ready excuse for local media when our increase in murders were part of a national homicide trend; now that the trend is easing up nationally but not here, the media-cited “experts” are not even casting a glance at the host of anti-police policies which remain in effect and show direct correlations with violence, before plunging the question back into obscurity.

Even in the cities where homicides are falling, the numbers are still significantly higher than before the pandemic, according to Jeff Asher, a crime analyst based in New Orleans and co-founder of AH Datalytics, a data consulting firm.

“It’s something that’s not fully understood just yet,” Asher said. “It’s usually a complex set of factors that affects various cities.”

If it’s not simply Covid it’s all complexity and variety, apparently. But never shall that complexity or variety include BLM and the “reimagining” of public safety–which remains, long after the pandemic faded.

Both retaliatory gang shootings and shootings involving people living on the street drove up the killings here, police said.

A relatively new development here: guns in the hands of the homeless.

The Police Bureau, tracking homelessness-related homicides for the first time, estimated that roughly a third of 2022′s killings involved homeless people — both as victims and perpetrators — but police wouldn’t identify the specific cases because of ongoing investigations.

Many of those killings involved guns, Hughes said. It’s a departure from the past when knives and beatings often resolved disputes between those living on the street and guns were treated as a commodity to trade for drugs or other things, she said.

An assumption I’ve long made is that guns don’t last among the homeless for that reason, and if an individual has the discipline to keep his gun, it’s still too easily stolen or eventually seized by police. The latter is less a problem since the city effectively legalized camping on the streets and police contact with the homeless, as with Black! knuckleheads, has dwindled close to zero.

Other killings stemmed from slights on social media, drug disputes, robberies, domestic violence and random violence, according to investigators. The oldest victim was 82-year-old Donald Pierce, beaten while waiting at a downtown bus stop in an unprovoked attack, police said.

Pierce and an 88 year-old friend were savagely beaten by a white homeless man.

More than half of Portland’s homicide victims in 2022 were people of color, mostly Black men – the same breakdown as the year before. That’s far disproportionate to the 6% of Multnomah County’s population that identifies as Black and 3% who identify as Black men.

The biggest increase appears to be in what Steve Sailer calls “deaths of exuberance” (as opposed to white “deaths of despair“). It’s like the Wild West in parts of Portland’s more vibrant east:

Also as in 2021, dozens of spent bullet casings of multiple calibers were left behind at many of the crime scenes, suggesting the involvement of multiple shooters, police said.

The “involvement of multiple shooters” is worthy of something like the aforementioned Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings (that more wounded than killed indicates a Black! assailant); I’d wager multiple gunmen predicts Black! assailants with even more consistency.

Trans Flex

In Washington state a change.org petition succeeded in getting Vancouver police officer Rey Reynolds, who unsuccessfully campaigned for Clark County Sheriff, suspended for “harmful” comments toward transgender people, when he said he’d simply enforce laws on the books to oppose such as all-ages drag shows.

…if he was elected sheriff in the county he said: “Exposure laws, indecent liberties, all of those things are laws that we have on the books right now that can be prosecuted. And we can arrest on those things… We used to arrest people for running around naked and doing sexual acts, now we have parades where they’re allowed to do it and they’re not being arrested.”

I’ve seen this argument made elsewhere by opponents of trans mania, and nothing demonstrates the fact it isn’t the law as written but the law as enforced that matters like the explosion in trans promotion among children and law enforcement’s lack of interest. The double standard allowing the exposure of children to sexual content for purposes of radical socialization threatens what’s left of the old barriers between kids and adult content (I assume you still can’t take your 12 year-old to the strip club with you; or “family time” as Dad used to say),–and you have to wonder if taking those barriers down completely hasn’t been the point of this all, and trans tolerance just the “soft underbelly” (somehow!) of the old non-pederast world.

Heroes of Democracy

Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan nails her theses to American democracy’s door:

“I am sending you my 2023 Protect Our Democracy agenda, which calls for targeted investments in how we run elections to ensure that they remain free, fair and secure,” Fagan wrote in the letter. “As you weigh your choices and decide which priorities to focus on, please remember that without investments in our elections, we will not have the necessary public trust to address the challenges that Oregonians face today. This agenda is not in competition with other priorities; it is foundational to them.

Fagan says the Protect Our Democracy Agenda will ensure that local elections are free and fair.

“The rising tide of anti-democracy forces in our country erodes trust and threatens our freedoms,” Fagan wrote. “Thanks to our track record of pro-democracy policy, Oregon is uniquely positioned to show the rest of the country a better way forward.”

Fagan’s proposals include devolving control over elections from the county to the state government…

SB 165 will begin to address funding deficiencies at the county level. Over the years, local elections offices have relied on county funding and unpredictable federal funding to operate. There has been little state-level leadership in providing stable funding at the local level – even while state-level laws have dramatically increased the complexity of local operations.

…expanding the voter rolls…

HB 2107 would build on the success of Motor Voter by expanding automatic voter registration to the Oregon Health Authority. Approximately 171,000 people on the Oregon Health Plan are eligible to vote but are not registered. This measure would provide them with a secure and simple option to become registered. The bill also includes a pilot project with the Oregon Department of Corrections to test automatic voter registration for adults in custody when they are released and regain the right to vote.

LC #2862 will also expand access to our democracy by increasing the number of available languages for the State Voters’ Pamphlet. We are proposing adding Traditional Chinese, Khmer, Mien, Romanian and Somali to ensure the communities who speak those languages can participate in our democracy.

…and of course “election security”

Election Security – SB 166 Democracy is built on trust. That trust has eroded, and restoring it is a top priority. But we can’t just ask for trust. We must demonstrate it. We must earn it. SB 166 includes 3 pillars for security that will help restore public trust in our elections systems. First, it affirms the right to vote a secret ballot. Second, it increases penalties for threatening or harassing an elections worker. Third, it improves election security at the local level by requiring local security plans to be consistent with best practices, including physical and cyber security, and provides the Oregon Elections Division with the necessary time to evaluate the threat environment counties face.

The Secretary of State is an ambitious politician with her sights trained on the governorship.

So just how “hard” is it to vote in Oregon? Is Fagan trying to make elections more Democratic, rather than democratic?

Oregon has been determined to be the “easiest” state in which to cast a vote (by progressive academics):

Voting is easier in Oregon than any other state in the nation, according to the latest analysis by a team of political scientists tracking the issue.

“Oregon, which has one of the most progressive automatic voter registration processes and mail-in voting, maintains the first position as the easiest state in which to vote,” the researchers wrote in a summary of their findings published online ahead of publication in a scholarly journal.

Oregonians have voted by mail since 1998–the first state to implement it.

Oregon has had online voter registration since 2010.

Oregon’s legislature passed a “motor voter” law in 2015.

Someone’s just introduced a bill to expand voting in jails:

OLYMPIA, Wash. (KPTV) – A new bill in Washington would make voting easier for some people in the state’s jail system.

Last year, the state restored voting rights to people released from prison thanks to a bill introduced by Washington State Representative Tarra Simmons. More than a decade ago, Simmons served time in prison for a drug charge. Since then, she became a lawyer, then an elected official, and she’s behind a new push to expand voting for people in jails.

Not to be confused with voting in prison by convicted felons (though I fully expect that soon).

The Democrats in this one-party state seek out pools of low-information, pliable but apathetic minority non-voters with legal innovations, like oil companies resorting to technological innovations like horizontal drilling and fracking.

Soon it will require more effort to avoid voting here.