From the Urban Gypsy column in the up and coming Street Roots out tomorrow. Julie McCurdy and her dog live in Portland without a home. She is a regular contributor to Street Roots.
I sit here — bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. Who knows, it could be from trying to dream and keep one eye open at the same (safety purposes, dontcha know). Or in fact, it could be from the brain freeze I’ve been getting from trying to figure out the logic of the recent actions of the boys in blue. I remain convinced they keep me stocked in article material on purpose.
So here’s the latest examples of the Portland Police Bureau’s genius at community relations with the gypsies, as well as jail space management. A couple of weeks ago, a young associate of mine was picked up in a homeless sweep of the downtown homeless. She was detained in jail for four days for offensive littering. In fact, what happened, according to my friend, was that she looked homeless and dropped a french fry while eating lunch. A couple of days ago, I watched as a woman wielded a hatchet at another homeless woman. I watched as the boys in blue arrived and put the hatchet-wielding woman in the car. I was almost excited to see the boys in blue actually doing their job. In fact, they let this woman out of the car three blocks down the road on her promise of good behavior. Four hours later, she returned to the same woman and slammed her head into a concrete wall five times. Yes the injured woman lived, but would have been less traumatized had the police actually arrested the attacker. By the way, the hatched-wielding woman remains on the street to cause whatever harm she wishes (hard to sleep when dodging hatchets).
In yet another stunning example of “what not to do;” a camera crew from the television show “Cops” accompanied by the Portland police from the North Precinct invaded St. Francis dining hall during dinnertime, without warrants. Did I mention that they had a camera? They went into the restrooms with that camera, without knocking. They filmed people without the their consents. Oh, and by the way, they did this after being told by staffers that the suspect they were ostensibly in search of was not on the premises. This happened at 5:09 p.m., Sept 10. Why do I remember? That’s the day all the community and staff’s work at police relations went up in flames. Way to go, PPB! Stop the madness, already.
Do any of these events make sense to you? Because they do not to me. How is it that a woman who is (in my opinion) obviously a threat to herself and others, is allowed to wander around randomly swinging hatchets at people, while another woman is jailed for four days for dropping a french fry? How is it that the police find it acceptable to violate an entire community’s dignity and step all over their civil rights just because they can? They are not God, yet they act as if they had the right to make his decisions. Believe this: if they had to live and sleep in these streets, these streets would be a different place entirely.
Have we become so callous as a society and a city that these things are allowed to continue because of indifference? Or will we stand up, en masse, and say enough is enough?
Here are the thoughts of a few staff members at St Francis dining hall. Valerie Chapman, pastorial administrator of St. Francis, had this to say: “At this point in time, I am still trying to figure out who authorized the television cops to come into our dining hall, which is private property, accompanied by the PPB. The other thing that’s important to me is that the other police I work with on a regular basis, including Capt. Mark Krueger and Officer Robert Pickett have both apologized, but it was nothing they knew about until after the fact.” Becky O’Neil-McBrayer, co-director of St. Francis dining hall, had this to say: “Our mission is to serve a meal in dignity and peace. How can we achieve that when the police intrude at dinnertime?”
Megan Dunning, also co-director of St. Francis dining hall, said: “St. Francis dining hall is a place of peace for people who find very little of either outside of our walls, and Thursday’s incident left our community feeling outraged and violated. Staff had extensive damage control to perform long after the departure of armed officers, plus a “Cops” camera crew. Our extremely vulnerable guests needed to be assured that staff had no warning or part in the incident. We were just as outraged and shocked that this was allowed to happen.”
Here’s the thing. I’m not the Lone Ranger, and I am not the only person who feels this way. There are many of us who do. Nope, I don’t have the answers (this to the man who told me to solve these issues). I do not have the answers, but we can, as a city, come up with some, if we put our thinking caps on. I know we can. I have complete faith in the people of Portland’s ability to stand past impossible to the merely highly improbable.