1. If you’re reading national media portrayals of Portland as dangerous, you really ought to read this thread. Other than a few blocks (almost exclusively at night), Portland is a quiet, friendly, safe place. Safer from violence than any time in the past three decades.
2. And in that downtown area that does get violent at night, the violence is almost entirely police violence waged on overwhelmingly peaceful protestors.
3. Yes there’s been protestor graffiti. Yes early on, many weeks ago, there was significant property damage & some looting. Yes these days there are isolated protestors who throw water bottles at police or light small fires. But the overwhelming bulk of protestors are nonviolent.
4. The overwhelming amount of violence, including regular gassing and beatings, comes from the police. The police regularly inflame and escalate rather than deescalate. Like some of the youth protestors, they are itching for a fight.
5. Also the police violence here has almost nothing to do with Trump. There have been six plus weeks of police violence here — and up until the last few nights it was almost exclusively LOCAL police inflicting the violence.
6. And again Portland is geographically large. Outside of a ~10 block radius of the downtown you might have very little sense of what is going on. (Except during the first week or two of the protests when there were large and peaceful protests in many neighborhoods around dusk.)
7. This is true for the overwhelming majority of Portlanders living in a multiplicity of neighborhoods of various races and classes.
8. Portland is an actual place. Trump may use it as a synecdoche for antifa/protestor violence in a cynical ploy to rile up his base, but the fact that the national media echoes that depiction just reveals how lazy they are and how easily they are duped.
9. The feds have riled things up here. A week ago the protest movement seemed tired. It had shrunk to only a few hundred, occurred largely later at night (not at dusk) and was focused almost exclusively in the downtown. That is changing.
10. When I say Portland is as safe from violence as its been in decades, here’s data. Violent crime the last 10 years has been relatively constant. And those 10 years – 2010s – were the 10 safest years since *1970. (Graph only goes up to 2018 but not much has changed since then.) 
