Foot patrols mean safer streets

MY VIEW • Mayor’s first task: solving downtown disorder

By Richard Lamountain

The Portland Tribune, Mar 12, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

This year, Portland will elect a new mayor. One of his central tasks: to curb the routine, everyday disorder that plagues the downtown core.

Downtown is Portland’s “heart” Ñ its business and cultural center, home and workplace for tens of thousands, and the part of our city most visitors see. Still, especially during warm months, disorder prevails on many downtown blocks. Vagrants panhandle for “spare change.” Street kids Ñ many using loud, vulgar language Ñ throng around light-rail stops and public parks and squares. On some corners, drug dealers troll for business even during daytime hours.

Disorder’s cost is high. It undermines citizens’ confidence in their city’s ability to assure public decorum Ñ and thereby fractures the social cohesion and sense of safety that alone can make that city livable.

More quantifiably, note social scientists James Wilson and George Kell--ing, “serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked.” Portland Police Bureau statistics routinely have shown more Ñ and more serious Ñ crime downtown than in most other Portland neighborhoods. High-profile incidents include the Pioneer Courthouse Square riot of New Year’s Eve 2000; the lunch-hour “Xanax” shooting on Southwest Broadway in 2002; and the murders of Richard Clayton Crosby in 2000, Nicholas Moore in 2001 and Jessica Williams in 2003 by violent downtown “street families.”

Despite all this, Portland’s government has been remarkably cavalier toward downtown disorder. In 2000, the City Council lifted the downtown skateboarding ban Ñ thereby elevating the interests of juvenile (and often unruly) “boarders” to the same moral plane as the interests of downtown’s adult workers and residents. And in 2002, despite pleas from downtown store owners frustrated by loiterers and panhandlers, that same council refused to pass a new and tougher “sit-lie” ordinance.

Still, with one move, the next mayor can help atone for this Ñ and go far to curb downtown disorder.

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