Portlanders see homelessness as city’s biggest issue — but reject police intervention
Breccan F. Thies
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Residents of Portland, Oregon, say the homeless crisis is the biggest problem plaguing the city but still believe police intervention is not the answer, according to a new survey from the Portland Budget Office.
Nearly half of the 5,000 Portlanders surveyed said homelessness was the biggest problem in the city, followed by the cost of living, which 21.8% of residents said was their main cause for concern.
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In contrast, nearly 58% of those same respondents said police should not respond to emergency calls about unsheltered homeless people, and 47% said they should not respond to the same calls when someone is having a mental health crisis.
“Many Portlanders don’t want police responding to 911 calls about the street homeless or mental health crises,” Portland trial attorney Kristin Olsen told the Washington Examiner. “But that ignores the reality that Portland’s street homeless pose a real danger to the public, given the intersection between guns, fentanyl, severe mental illness, and violence on our streets.”
The attack of one of her best friends, Dr. Mary Costantino, an interventional radiologist, made headlines recently after she was knocked unconscious by a homeless person who threw a metal bottle at her, unprovoked.
Some 72% of Portlanders said they do not feel safe walking at night in the city.
“In Portland, we need to start making a distinction between functional homeless people who are in shelters, temporary housing, or couch surfing, people who are trying to get back on their feet, and the street homeless who are fundamentally unable to care for themselves due to severe drug addiction and mental illness,” Olsen continued. “We’ve ceded our public spaces and our safety to the latter category. The reality is that one-third of Portland’s homicides involved the street homeless population — and the street homeless in Portland are armed.”
Instead of police intervention, Portlanders preferred that the city open substance abuse or mental health clinics by a majority of 65.2%, followed by nearly 62% supporting subsidized apartment buildings, and 54% saying they would like to see the city pursue indoor shelters.
However, Portland has limited mechanisms for requiring that the unsheltered homeless seek care for things like drug addiction, an issue exacerbated by Oregon’s Measure 110, which legalized all hard drugs in the state with no treatment apparatus attached.
“We need to grapple with the reality that Oregon’s decriminalization of drugs coupled with the ubiquity of fentanyl in Portland has caused a significant rise in the street homeless and, predictably, a rise in violent crime committed by the street homeless who are plagued with fentanyl addictions,” Olsen explained.
The issue runs even deeper, Joel Griffith, a housing expert and economics policy fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.
A common phenomenon among unsheltered homeless populations is that they often reject housing and shelters because many have requirements that residents cannot continue to consume drugs and alcohol.
“This idea of allowing people to destroy their lives by living on the streets in decrepit conditions, or by using these hardcore narcotics that have been decriminalized, that is hardly humane,” Griffith said, saying it is a “lack of compassion and respect for the citizens of these communities.
“Whether it’s the business owners that have to deal with a range of behavior, or public defecation, or camping on private property, or communities where no longer children can actually walk through a park for fear of being accosted or being actually exposed to individuals at various stages of undress,” he continued. “That is all too common.”
Oregon was home to one of the country’s most significant spikes in homelessness, growing 23% from 2020 to 2022, far above the national average, which was less than 1%. Likewise, from December 2021 to December 2022, in the wake of Measure 110, the Beaver State’s overdose death rate increased by 6.76%, while the national average grew by 0.5%.
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Griffith said some form of institutionalization needs to be part of the discussion in every city to deal with the country-wide homeless crisis.
“No one wants to see an increase in the prison population except for the fact that an increase in that prison population means a betterment of life for the community,” he said. “In many instances, it actually means a better life for those that are actually going through that rehabilitation process.”