As violence surges, some question Portland axing police unit

I am so glad I left Portland. It is an astoundingly beautiful city, set in world class scenery, that is being driven into the ground by absurd and dogmatic ideology. You reap what you sow.

> Yarborough and some other families wonder if ending the unit is partly to blame for Portland’s dramatic spike in shootings, but officials and experts attribute increased gun violence in cities nationwide to the hardships of the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment, economic anxiety and stress on mental health.

I don't mean to demean the real problems in our society but if I connect all the dots, not just in the US, but worldwide they paint a clear picture: The COVID-19 pandemic. From farmers protests in India to Paris riots, ofcourse many protests in the US. I feel strongly about it - is this an incorrect conclusion? If it is, what else could be the reason for flaring of many issues all of a sudden starting from March 2020? If it is, does that mean that if the pandemic didn't exist, these issues wouldn't drive thousands of protests and the level of activism we see today? Just before the pandemic started, remember how peaceful everything was? There were hardly any protests before the pandemic besides the major ones such as Women's march and Teachers march, but nothing like what we saw in Portland.

Here is my prediction: After the global economies are back to full 100% with travel booming and rebounding, everyone is going to go back to same old business.

It's worth noting that every quote in this article, except the one from the Mayor, is from someone who works for the police.

Here is the classical misdirection:

"The push was led by Jo Ann Hardesty, the first Black woman elected to the City Council. She cited a 2018 audit showing nearly 60% of people stopped by the gun violence team were Black — though they make up less than 6% of the city’s population.

Nearly half of the 55 total homicide victims in 2020 were people of color, many of them from Portland’s historically Black neighborhoods, according to city statistics."

They generally never tell us the ratio of perpetrators by race, for some reason, always the victims.

Saying 55% of victims were 'of colour' sounds really bad, but since we know that almost all crime is intra-racial ... we know that probably about 55% of the perpetrators are 'of colour'.

Notably, the city official is adamant that the police were 'racist' because 60% of those pulled over were 'of colour' ... except that correlates almost perfectly with the ratio of people of colour who seem to be involved in gun crime.

The City Councillor (and many 'SJW' types - this kind misrepresentation is in the press, daily) has difficulty with her own data: if 60% of the violent crime is committed by a group, then it's at least crudely reasonable that they're going to get stopped at that ratio.

That would be 'not racist'. Anything else ironically, including stopping people of colour at rates considerably below their participation in violent crime would literally be racist, ironically.

Obviously, it's really not good that there's so much crime within the African American community, and although overly aggressive policing no doubt exists, it's obviously not the problem.

'The Solution' of 'Less Policing' which is to say literally ignoring the problem is radically ignorant, if anything, more police presence is likely necessary, especially by 'Police of Colour' who have respect in the community.

(FYI one thing never noted in the coverage this summer is that police forces, unlike up until the 1990's, now quite strongly reflect their constituents in terms of race. It's rare that they don't).

Jobs, social programs, getting fathers out of jail for petty crimes like weed, getting people to finish school - all of those 'society building things' are probably the only path where we can see light at the end of the tunnel. Any and all policing measures are more or less a band aid.

It's far too easy (and usually irrational) to blame the police.

Police do not prevent violence. The right wing often touts the reason you need firearms is because the police aren't close enough to save you. The left wing obviously is the who is pushing to defund the police because again the police don't prevent violence. Police in supermajority are about issuing you tickets for having a busted light or making too much noise or driving too fast. Police are 99% about easy summary judgement misdemeanors. They are about revenue generation for the government and social control.