A homeless schizophrenic chased Louise for about a city block, screaming incoherently and finally throwing a half-full water bottle at her. Reports of similar incidents are posted by the minute nationally across social media from nextdoor.com to Facebook and others.
Large parts of Portland are being cleaned up as the city gets vaccinated and back to work, but overall our city is still pockmarked with homeless camps; the one that now occupies a dog park we used to visit is dotted with stolen and abandoned cars and stolen bicycles, and drugs and assaults are reportedly common.
Local politicians across the country are feeling the heat:
"City Commissioner Mingus Mapps, who rejected the mayor's additional funding for the [Portland] Police Bureau earlier this year," wrote Maxine Bernstein forThe Oregonian, "now is vigorously calling for more police resources and this week said he wants to see a 20% reduction in gun violence in the next 15 months."
Similar shifts are happening in city governments and police departments across the nation. Police ranks that were diminished by pre-vaccine Covid last year, that disease killing more cops then who died in the line of duty in 2020 and older cops eligible for early retirement took the opportunity to get out before they got sick. Those police forces are now being rebuilt, but it can take as much as a year from the initial hiring for a police officer to complete their training and end up on the streets.
Nonetheless, murders and shootings are at epidemic levels here and across the nation as the mental and emotional toll of a year of lockdown and the loss of 6 million jobs have pushed marginally stable people over the edge. Homelessness has exploded across the country just as the Supreme Court has struck down the federal housing eviction moratorium.
All too often the homeless themselves, human beings who are far more often victims of 40 years of trickle-down economics than villains, are on the receiving end of this violence.
Murder rates in Austin, Albuquerque and Pittsburgh have doubled and shootings and murders here in Portland are, according to NPR, five times higher than during the lockdown year of 2020 (when all crime decreased nationwide).
And while the official statistics for petty crime aren't showing a huge surge, that's almost certainly because people aren't bothering to contact the police any more unless they need a report for insurance purposes; anecdotal sources like nextdoor.com and Facebook indicate a significant increase in all sorts of unreported crime.
But even if people aren't reporting crime, they're sure talking about it. Much of that talk is rapidly turning political, and since most city's mayors are Democrats, that represents a peril for the party nationally.
The Biden Administration has taken a step toward helping the situation by tweaking the authorizations in the American Rescue Plan (passed earlier this year without a single Republican vote) so billions from that federal program are now available to towns and cities to "fund both police and community-led violence intervention programs."
But mental health and addiction services are stretched thin across the nation, a problem exacerbated by the pandemic and set up by Reagan-era policies that gutted mental health services.
Back in the late 1970s, President Carter pushed through the Mental Health Systems Act that expanded federally- and state-funded residential treatment facilities for mentally ill people as well as giving the mentally ill more options like local treatment clinics and the ability to self-administer medications.
President Reagan not only repealed it during his first year in office, leading to an explosion of mentally ill people among our homeless populations, but followed up by cutting federal funding for mental illness by 30%.
The New York Times editorialized in 1981 that "deinstitutionalization has become a cruel embarrassment, a reform gone terribly wrong, threatening not only the former mental inmates but also the quality of life for all New Yorkers."
In a 1984 follow-up article, the Times added: "The policy that led to the release of most of the nation's mentally ill patients from the hospital to the community is now widely regarded as a major failure."
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