Portland in Decline: Political Failure, Social Breakdown | National Review

The Tragedy of Portland: ‘It’s a Ghost Town, Except for Zombies’

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  A once great American city has become something short of a dystopia, where shop owners sleep with shotguns and citizens must act as police.

"...Portland’s approach to governance over the past two years has been a paradox: an unholy marriage of lax prosecution of real crime and draconian crackdowns against law-abiding small-business owners and citizens. 

• The district attorney for Multnomah County, where Portland is located, declined to prosecute 70 percent of cases related to Black Lives Matter protests last year, and the Portland Police Bureau
• leaves 911 callers on hold for hours. 
• The city surpassed its all-time annual record for shootings in late September, with three months left to go in the year — and as is often tragically the case, black Portlanders were killed by shootings at twelve times the rate of white Portlanders. 
• After the municipal government effectively stopped enforcing vagrancy laws, the homeless population exploded from about six large encampments to over 100. 
• At the same time, Oregon has consistently led the country in public-health restrictions throughout the pandemic, with Governor Kate Brown routinely forcing businesses to close at unpredictable intervals, even after vaccines became widely available...Read all.