Emergency Response Part 2 - Alternate Realities

An unexpected interlude.

My original plans for the Emergency Response series kept getting pushed by pressing issues. There were plenty of those last week, but also stories intersecting perfectly with the topic. The history lesson will end up in Part 3.

In Emergency Response Part 1 - Who Killed CAHOOTS? we learned how a functional alternative to police response succumbed to the successor ideology demand to abolish policing. Immature ACAB activists poisoned relationships between CAHOOTS, police, and fire. It took less than 3 years to kill the 30 year old program. Many lives were saved over those decades. So much good was done. That’s all over now.

The heart of the matter is the fight over whether an organization like Portland Street Response (PSR) is meant to be part of a system of alternatives to police response or alternatives to policing itself. In essence: are we adding to or replacing the toolbox? Is policing so corrupt and evil that it must be dismantled? If so, what will happen to Portlanders in crisis while we attempt that process?

In my radical years¹ I did editing and layout for the zine ALT2EMS, or Alternatives to Emergency Medical Services. I was taken in by the utopian argument that we can, and must, completely replace our need for police or anything similar to policing. No mental health holds, no carceral system, no “criminalizing poverty.”²

No gods, no masters, no bedtimes.

For years I watched radical activists attempt to create alternatives on a small scale. I saw what mental healthcare looked like to most of them, and what justice looked like. I watched people who had gotten sober after being arrested and turned their lives around argue for letting people in the throws of addiction have full autonomy to die on the streets. People who were clearly unable to care for themselves with anything resembling dignity were given every tool to perpetuate their own misery. The radicals blamed drug and mental health crises on capitalism. Root causes. Colonialism.

Third world resentment politics clouded out sense and true compassion.

It should be obvious where I stand on PSR: additional tool in the toolbox. There are circumstances where a police officer is not needed or ideal. Portland Police Bureau (PPB) supports PSR under this vision. There’s no turf war. Officers don’t want to be called to chat with someone having a mental health emergency while presenting no threat to others. That’s not the best use of their time.

The problem is half of our city council and a stunning number of Portlanders seem to want PSR to be a step along the path to completely replacing police and jails. They have naive views of what that society would look like. Mac Smiff (earning $106k/year on Councilor Sameer Kanal’s staff) can write For I See No Other Way in the Portland Mercury, calling to dismantle our current legal system without offering much more than a hippie commune/kibbutz picture of the future where things just… work out.

Candace Avalos Needs the Cops

Councilor Candace Avalos found her car, her neighbor’s car, and their shared carport (attached to their houses) engulfed in flames. She and her cat Valentino escaped safely. So did the neighbor, I guess?

The non-zero chance of a targeted attack was terrifying. Rene Gonzalez (who himself experienced firebombing) issued condolences. Dan Ryan also knows what it’s like to feel unsafe at home due to political threats and posted his support. Essentially the entire local political system rallied behind her. Bluesky leftists were positive it was right wing terror. Most of them, including Avalos, are opposed to a Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). We’ve been assured the JTTF targets Muslims but locally they mostly investigate white domestic terrorists attacking local political figures. Exactly what this might have been. Hmm.

Candace’s friends raised $13k on GoFundMe (which she might not be legally able to accept but when has that stopped the Peacock?) She makes over $130k a year and is required to have insurance. She’s staying in a hotel, billed to that insurance. She’s going to be fine, but what’s another $13k for our bravest local politician?

Then the police reported there was no evidence of a targeted attack. Most of us breathed sighs of relief. Candace wasn’t satisfied. Councilor Loretta Smith said… something:

“Medgar Evers’ house got blown up. Dr. King’s house. Malcolm. All of these things have been associated with speaking truth to power. Just like Candace has been speaking truth to power,” Smith tells WW.

Avalos has spoken truth to exactly zero power. She is the status quo and a threat to nothing except perhaps efficiency. Loretta Smith was saying shit for free press.

The same online leftists who shower Avalos with praise believe that Rene Gonzalez set fire to the car in front of his house and Dan Ryan is exaggerating a mob showing up to his home. Councilor Angelita Morillo has a history of liking trollish little posts like that. These kids do not care about real political violence directed at opponents but a theoretical attack dominated the local news cycle for over a week — completely overshadowing the Zionist Hunt the DSA had just kicked off. Hmm, again.

The PPB pulled out all the stops for Avalos — exactly the response every Portlander should expect. She still found time to question their dedication, after voting to defund them several times and positioning herself solidly in the anti-police camp on council. They “finally” made an arrest: a homeless black man named Vashon Locust with a checkered past marked by mental illness. Candace needed to pivot:

@counciloravalos

Councilor Candace Avalos on Instagram: "After speaking with Dis…

She went from anti-police, to needing police, to not believing they were taking her seriously, to being Malcolm X, to appreciating them and suddenly wanting to slow things down and have conversations about mental health and dehumanizing people and OH MY GOD SHE IS GOING TO LEARN NOTHING FROM THIS.

You might hope her take away would be to see police as a necessary part of our emergency response system — one tool in that toolbox I mentioned. I bet she’ll still vote to take money from them at every turn. It’d be nice to think some money will go to her neighbor, who seems to have lost the same amount of stuff, but I guess he also has insurance and isn’t locally famous. Oh well.

Jamie Dunphy’s Office and DIY Solutions

Top Portland council aide on paid leave amid revelations he took in homeless woman, abandoned her at state park - Oregonian

Amani Kelekele (previously earning $131k/year on Dunphy’s staff) took in a homeless woman and then abandoned her when things went exactly as you might guess.

…scooped the woman off a Milwaukie street days prior in an attempt to help her avoid arrest, he wrote in a memo to his boss obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Less than 36 hours after Kelekele left her at the isolated campground, park workers asked state police to remove her.

The story is awful. This woman’s life is slightly worse now. She was tased in the arrest and her dog ran away. That initial “arrest” Kelekele was trying to help her avoid?

Despite Kelekele’s written account, police and social service outreach workers in Milwaukie said the woman was not about to be arrested. In fact, advocates trained to work directly with people experiencing homelessness and mental health crises had spent days attempting to get her help.

Don Holden, one of the many outreach workers who spent hours with the woman, said Kelekele’s actions reflected a reckless lapse in judgment and undermined their coordinated efforts.

“He left a person who can barely take care of or fend for themself miles away from any services or help,” said Holden, a homeless liaison with the group LoveOne. “I think it’s horrible abuse.”

Was Keleleke’s distrust of police and our current emergency response system a factor in his catastrophic lapse of judgement? It’s pretty easy to see how it might have been. There are real consequences to these luxury beliefs. The system was working for this woman, however slowly, but a city hall staffer knew better.

See also my recent:

So, our City Councilors and their staff are perfectly happy to call the cops³ for themselves, and when they do try to work outside the system it goes poorly. The current form of PSR and our city’s resistance to properly connecting all the tools together because *gasp* there might be police in the equation is hurting people.

Mayor Keith Wilson didn’t run on that sort of nonsense. He ran on ending unsheltered homelessness and the crisis on our streets using all the tools in the toolbox. How’s that going for him?

Mitch Green and the DSA vs Keith Wilson

We have reached the part of Keith Wilson’s unsheltered homelessness plan where resuming camping enforcement is on the table. PSR likely won’t be involved at all because its supporters don’t believe in that sort of thing.

The enforcement plan is exactly the soft cuddly approach you would expect from Keith Wilson (who you people voted for by an overwhelming margin and won’t stop complaining about to me):

“No one will be arrested simply for camping, nor should they.” Basically they’re going to refer people to shelter, arrest people with existing warrants, and enforce basic livability laws. Works for me. How did the first week go?

Portland resumes camping ban enforcement: 81 warned, 40 arrested, 39 moved into shelters - KGW

City leaders were especially pleased that two people whom police contacted accepted deflections, and 39 people accepted shelter services, moving from street camping to spending the night inside an overnight shelter.

Baruch Hashem. I wonder how the DSA feels? One of Morillo’s best friends, speaking before council, referred to this plan as “fascism” so I have to imagine we’re in for some... elevated rhetoric.

Mitch Green fired first with this ridiculous statement.

The choice before us is clear. We can either align ourselves with the politics of division, of sweeps, of cages, and of death, or we can choose the politics of solidarity, of housing, of healthcare, and of life.”

His party backed him up with a call to investigate the mayor for fraud.

Portland DSA Condemns Mayor Wilson’s Cruel Camping Ban, Calls for Investigation into Misuse of Public Funds - Thorn (DSA)

“Mayor Wilson’s decision to unleash the police on our most vulnerable neighbors on the very day they lose their food assistance is an act of stunning inhumanity,” said Chris Olson, Co-Secretary the Housing Working Group in Portland DSA. “He is exploiting a national tragedy to advance a policy of sweeps and cages that we know, from overwhelming evidence, kills people. To call this ‘compassion’ is a lie. It is a deliberate choice to inflict suffering in a misguided attempt to make poverty invisible.”

Olson is an unsuccessful city council candidate whose political journey can be summed up as evangelical pastor → riot tourist → PDX transplant → armchair revolutionary.⁴ He also has a substack. Like Mitch, Chris makes big claims and provides no evidence.

“We have serious concerns that public funds were squandered to create a pretext for this camping ban,” said Brian Denning, Co-Chair of Portland DSA. “Did the Mayor waste money on a shelter system he knew was insufficient, just to create a veneer of ‘available shelter’ and justify a punitive crackdown? The City Council has a duty to investigate this potential misuse of taxpayer money. Every dollar spent on a failed shelter strategy is a dollar stolen from a rental assistance program that could have actually kept a family in their home.”

Keith is killing people and he’s misusing public funds as a smoke screen so he can carry out that mass murder? Am I getting that right? It also sounds a lot like Sameer Kanal’s argument that every dollar spent “killing brown people” abroad could be housing people here. I might argue that every dollar spent feeding hotdogs into Mitch Green’s maw in Vienna could literally be used here (it actually comes from the same budget) if we’re just being inflammatory.

At least PSR probably isn’t mixed up in all of this. They’d probably screw it up by “assist[ing] people experiencing mental health and behavioral health crises.” Phew.

Remember kids, Keith Wilson’s boot on the neck of your most vulnerable neighbor was laced by the IDF while Keith made out with Donald Trump. Or maybe he’s licking Trump’s boots while this is happening? Somehow PPB is involved. Those fuckers all own boots. Maybe the IDF taught them a special lacing pattern? All I know for sure is there’s a lot of licking going on.

I gotta remember to go boot shopping. My right one has a leak.

In summary: Big Business. Billionaires. Sweeps. Cages. Death. ICE. Genocide. Boots. Oligarchs. Capitalism. Jews Zionists. Trump. Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.

Are you convinced yet? No? Well here comes Angelita Morillo, Shit Goblin of Inner Southeast Portland to ram the point down your capitalist throat!

Angelita Morillo vs Keith Wilson

Portland ‘livability at risk’ if City Council cuts funds for homeless camp removal, mayor warns - Oregonian

The measure, introduced by Councilor Angelita Morillo, would cut about $4.3 million from the Impact Reduction Program — nearly a third of its current fiscal year budget — and redirect some of those dollars toward housing, food assistance and refugee support.

The Impact Reduction Program (IRP), which Angelita calls “Sweeps Teams” are the people who clean up needles, feces, sprawling campsites and makeshift hovels across our sidewalks and in our parks. She hates these guys and makes no effort to hide it. It isn’t really more complicated than enforcement bad. This is probably punishment for Wilson’s camping enforcement. We are the ones being punished.

The story was first covered in the DSA’s local Pravda (Portland Mercury) by none other than Jeremiah Hayden, who recently lost his job at Street Roots because they’re broke — a sad saga for another day. You may remember Hayden from his role in the Andy Chandler debacle. Now all the DSA propaganda writers are in one spot. It’s never been easier to avoid them.

“We’re in a position right now, where people are going to end up being unhoused for the long-term, and we have to take action,” City Councilor Angelita Morillo said, explaining a proposal to divert funds from homeless encampment removal to bolster housing and food assistance.

You’ll miss it if you aren’t familiar with Morillo’s theory around homelessness. To summarize: it’s only going to get worse. Trump. Capitalism. All the stuff I listed above. To quote something she said to Sophie Peel: “We essentially have to redesign our entire economy right now…”

Her proposal is reckless in part because it’s based on an alternate reality where capitalism is coming to an end. Homelessness is only going to increase. Nothing will improve until we build free housing for everyone. The rich will pay for it. We will achieve Communism in Portland and it will spread across the nation — which probably should collapse because it’s an illegal occupation of Turtle Island.

What will actually happen if this measure succeeds? From the Oregonian, again:

Wilson told Portlanders in an email newsletter Sunday that the proposed reductions to the campsite removal program would force the city to lay off up to 100 workers, scale back existing service levels by 75% and leave tons of biohazards on Portland streets.

From Wilson’s email (referenced in the O piece):

That’s not all. The amendment also takes away funds from domestic violence victims, more than a million dollars from our parks, $873,368 from the Portland Police Bureau, $251,363 from the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management, $428,950 from the Portland Fire Bureau, and millions from our critical economic development efforts.

That’s concerning, even if Morillo denies it. I’m reminded how she has joked for years about my little slice of Portland:

Now she’s posting TikTok videos about me (flattered) and setting her background music in a public message to the mayor to play “bitch, you a pussy.” To be fair, I do stuff like that all the time but it’s reasonable for someone to call me out on it.

What can you do if you don’t think “cops bad, rules bad, let people do whatever they want?” From Wilson’s email request:

You have a voice in what happens this Wednesday. Contact your city council representatives, sign up to testify, and tell your friends and neighbors to do the same.

Portland’s progress is real, but it is also fragile. Let’s work together for compassionate solutions that will bring about our renaissance, not perpetuate more hardship in our neighborhoods.

If you’ve got a spare moment to reach out — especially to Councilors Smith (D1), Pirtle-Guiney (D2), and Novick (D3) — please do so. Or just send Mitch Green pictures of the trash you pick up every week. He’ll enjoy that. Guess how often IRP crews have to collect trash on his cute street in the SW Hills?

It’s none. Zero times. I checked.

1. I understand that many conservative readers still see me as very radical. Trust that the local communists don’t. They think I’m one of you.

2. A favorite phrase of the intellectually lazy but emotionally manipulative.

3. Good. They should be.

4. You would be amazing (or perhaps not) how many of these kids come from evangelical homes.