In the heart of Portland, Oregon.
It was safe as fuck before the pandemic. I grew up in Los Angeles and lived in East LA awhile; lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant two years; lived in the Tenderloin for a year (not the way it is now). I've also lived in Prague, Barcelona, Saigon, Bangkok, Sydney (King's Cross, before the fall of it). The total chaos and anarchy of Portland right now is hard to explain. Almost everyone I know has been attacked on the street, or a victim of random violence in the past two years. Every other city in America that had a meth or fentanyl problem gave their worst cases a one-way bus ticket to Portland, in part because "let the liberals deal with it". I was a die-hard liberal progressive two years ago, before I had savage children on drugs waging running melees with rocks and trying to rape each other's girlfriends in front of my house all night. Now I'm just waiting for the night I have to shoot someone coming into my house.
I think the only other place I sort of felt this way was Avignon. I lived on Rue des Teinturieres. It's a bit of a siege mentality when the drug dealers outside your window are blasting music so loud it sounds like they're standing over your bed at night.
At the start of the pandemic, Portland police announced they would no longer respond to any emergency calls unless a person's life was in danger. And the district attorney ran and won on the platform that he wouldn't prosecute anyone for any crime short of murder. The result is a free-fire zone. I showed up at my local bar a couple months ago and it was a crime scene with 30-40 bullet casings scattered under the table where I usually have a drink. My friend who had walked home from there a few nights prior had been jumped and had his leg broken because he was gay- by a man wearing full Joker makeup, who is still sitting and laughing to himself on the corner two blocks from my house. A boy and his girlfriend camped their van in front of my place and the boy beat their dog with a long metal pole, screaming and high on drugs. The neighbors tried calling animal services, the police wouldn't come, and this went on for days and nights, with the dog yelping in pain until I went in the street with a gun and told him it was time to leave. He got in their van screaming at me, and wrecked it into six parked cars around the corner. And finally he got arrested.
Shit, okay, I should stop.
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