Maybe the gang bangers will start playing hacky-sack
At first, I thought it was a joke. After all, it was April Fool's Day.
But no, it was not a joke. Four out of five Portland City Council members think the best way to combat the alarming surge in gun violence in the city involves no additional police resources, but instead a couple dozen new unarmed park rangers.
That's right, unarmed park rangers. I am not making this up. Oh, and social workers to talk to people when they show up with gunshot wounds in the Emanuel emergency room.
No new cops. None.
It's like something a third grade class somewhere would have come up with. But this is Portland City Hall now.
I expected some common sense from Mingus Mapps and Dan Ryan. But no. We're going full-blown Jo Ann Hardesty.
It's hopeless. This city is gone now, and it won't be back for many, many years.
Meanwhile, we're on pace for 100 homicides in 2021. Given the warming weather and the latest lunacy, I'd put the over/under at 135.
I can't believe it either. I think everyone had high hopes for Mingus Mapes but surprisingly, or not so, he's pretty much been MIA.
ReplyDeleteWheeler sticks Mapps with the dirty water bureau and poof, just like that, he's gone.
ReplyDelete"It's hopeless. This city is gone now, and it won't be back for many, many years."
ReplyDeleteBingo.
And it's entirely reasonable to believe it is on a trajectory getting much worse.
I doubt that park rangers have jurisdiction over much beside parks. This will be great though, for those softball games that suddenly turn into gunfights. I imagine the union repping the rangers will have something to say about this, since it seems a long way from what the rangers likely signed up for. All that is beside, of course, the deranged magical thinking behind this whole utterly impossible scheme.
ReplyDeleteYou think more police officers to shoot unarmed folks in the back is in order?
ReplyDeleteNo, more police officers to arrest people who shoot other people. I know the cops are jerks, most of them racists, but somebody has to arrest and prosecute the shooters. It's called "society."
DeleteAnd that's the conundrum. We are stuck in a place where the options are to have shooters running amok in anarchy, or a "society" where racist jerks run amok arresting and shooting people, some of which we hope will be other shooters.
DeleteForget it, Jack. It's Portland.
ReplyDeleteI would have gone with a pic of Yogi Bears nemesis Ranger Smith chasing Yogi with a "pick-a-nick basket.
ReplyDelete