Will the Country's Leftmost City Pivot Right?

Portland, Oregon jilted the criminal justice system in 2020. Does it want it back? Related: the "fentanyl dashboard" explodes

May 2020 was a bad month, Americans variously coping and not coping with the devastation and confusion wrought by COVID and the police killing of George Floyd. In no other city would the rupture prove as profound as Portland, Oregon, where social and political frustrations resulted in 188 consecutive nights of rioting and fires; of internecine struggles and a commitment to make an enemy of authority.

This was the same month the city elected Mike Schmidt as district attorney. Like San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, also elected in 2020, Schmidt believed in "shrinking the criminal justice system, giving power back to judges from prosecutors, [and] holding police accountable." (Those attentive to the news cycle may recall what happened to Boudin.)

The loosening of the justice system saw Schmidt's office decline to prosecute 91% of the more than 1000 protesters arrested from May - December 2020. Judges continued the unlacing, repeatedly releasing violent felons for no bail and contributing to a murder rate that nearly tripled between 2019 and 2022, including the murders of women and infants.

No one liked this, not even Schmidt. I reject comments along the lines, “This is exactly how the Left wants things.” Portlanders, in my opinion, made some bad decisions for what they believed were good reasons: they wanted to create a better criminal justice system, as do we all. They wanted softer landings for people in the harrows of addiction, as do (I hope) we all. As I wrote about in “The Gloss of Good Intentions” (which my pod-partner says I should retitle simply, “The Road to Hell”) doing so required people occasionally look away from the consequences of those intentions. I have more than once told the story, including last week during a conversation with Katie Herzog on “Blocked and Reported,” about the Lyft driver who gave me the stink eye when I asked about the alarming number of people camped out on freeway embankments. He insisted there were not more homeless in the city, which every data point and one’s own eyeballs told you, was not true, but if we recognized this - which a divided “we’re going for blood” city government for a very long time was determined not to - then we’d have to acknowledge we were driving in the wrong direction, and nobody wants to do that, not when the eyes of the world had been on you and the bold choices you were making in a bid for real progress.

So people ignored the cracks in the skin, so to speak, and fentanyl slipped in. That’s what misery does, it looks for opportunity, “Look, honey, an opening, let’s not miss our chance.” As we learned yesterday, fentanyl has done an exceedingly good job at making herself at home in Portland, and if her colonization continues at the rate is has for last five years, Multnomah County will see nearly 20,000 drug overdoses a year from fentanyl alone.