Here to tell you that Mapps, Gonzales and Ryan are worthless commissioners and I’ll be glad when they are flushed.
The thing is, they’re absolutely right when they say “the system is broken”. It’s the ENTIRE system.
Enforcement is broken because cops won’t do their jobs.
Prosecution is broken because there are no public defenders for indigent clients.
The courts are broken because nobody can be tried, so they’re released.
Even if, by some miracle, somebody got tried, convicted, and sentenced, the jails were overcrowded and filled with Covid causing prison releases.Any ONE of these problems is bad enough, adding them all together is insurmountable.
I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know how to fix it. We can’t “just hire more cops” because everybody has to go to the Police Academy in Salem and they only run ONE 40 officer class at a time, 4 times a year, for the entire state… and there’s a 6 month waiting list.
And that wouldn’t solve the defender, court, or prison problems.
Prosecution is broken because there are no public defenders for indigent clients.
The courts are broken because nobody can be tried, so they’re released.
I agree with everything you said but there was an update on the public defender issue the past couple of months at least. $100M is not as much as we need to address the problem entirely but I always appreciate a step in the right direction, no matter how small.
Well, the alternative is paying the class action lawsuit:
Hey, legal action works, look at that haha
I didn’t see the articles on the lawsuit back in May, thanks for linking it!
You’re somehow missing the biggest one: there shouldn’t be homeless, there is enough housing, and all this would be fixed if the roof T of the problem, capitalism, was replaced with a system that doesn’t threaten being homeless to anyone.
Nobody gets housing for free and thanks to measure 110, we enabled every junkie in the country to come here.
That’s the larger problem. We don’t have treatment programs and we lack the laws to commit people against their will. Portland Street Response in particular doesn’t even have the ability to put people on holds.
Yes, yes, houselessness is squarely their fault. What a stroke of privileged genius.
