1. This piece is SO INCOMPREHENSIBLY BAD. It depicts Portland in apocalyptic terms, dismissing it as a liberal wasteland. But somehow the piece fails to mention: PORTLAND ISN’T EVEN IN THE TOP HALF OF (the 50 largest) CITIES WHEN IT COMES TO HOMICIDES LAST YEAR?!?!? Sheesh.
2. It’s true homicides went up in Portland last year, significantly. In part the large percentage rise was BECAUSE IT WAS STARTING FROM SUCH A LOW NUMBER, compared to almost any large American city.
3. And lets be clear, homicides spiked in ALMOST EVERY US CITY LAST YEAR. One could have written this piece about pretty much any city – progressive or conservative. Ft. Worth? Homicides spiked! Omaha? Homicides were up more than 100%!
4. But of course he chooses Portland because every lazy reporter is writing this piece about the “end of Portland” because it echoes phony stereotypes about progressivism. This is all SO DAMN LAZY.
5. Some cities that had a higher homicide rate than Portland last year:

Dallas
Ft. Worth
Nashville
Atlanta
Tucson
Tulsa
Charlotte
Houston
Albuquerque
Las Vegas
Denver
Philly
LA
Baltimore
Jacksonville
Boston
Oakland
New Orleans
Minneapolis
DC
Milwaukee
Chicago
Louisville
...
6. Homicides spiked last year in almost every city. They spiked in conservative cities as well as liberal cities. They spiked in cities that had months long protests and those that had relatively few protests.
7. Homicides spiked in cities that increased police spending, kept police spending more or less the same, and in the few that reduced it. They spiked in cities with progressive DAs and in cities that had old-fashioned “tough on crime” DAs.
8. But these unbelievably bad reporters have their pre-digested stick-figure narratives that progressivism causes homicide even though THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THIS. It’s just the reporters’ fantasy. Made up. Or sold to them by PR flacks for cup unions.
9. Why endless stories about the increase in homicide in Portland from a low number to a low number? Why not similar pieces about Fort Worth or Jacksonville or Nashville or Dallas that have far higher homicide rates? This story is designed to appeal to lazy stereotypes.

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More from @davidminpdx

1 Jun
1. @Twitter appears to be blacking out several of my tweets suggesting that homicides went up in liberal cities and conservative cities even though that is objectively true. Image
2. Here again, is @Twitter blacking out my tweets. Image
3. Here is one of the tweets that @Twitter is blacking out in other people’s feeds. It is objectively true. Image
Read 6 tweets
1 Jun
The Pacific Northwest is God’s country.
Spectacular day near Mount St. Helens.
Read 4 tweets
19 May
1. With Larry Krasner winning by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, I wonder how many of these reporters and editors will do some soul-searching tomorrow about the entirely fantastical backlash they sough to create without any evidence at all?
2. This same piece was pretty much everywhere. Was no real evidence for any of it, other than “shit the police union was saying.”
3. I mean the sheer sameness of the takes was pretty astounding.
Read 5 tweets
18 May
1. A 75-year-old Louisiana woman was freed after four decades in prison. Reform District Attorney of New Orleans Jason Williams said she never should have been convicted in the first place because she killed a man who was raping her. nola.com/news/courts/ar…
2. The woman had a strong “stand your ground” style self-defense claim, but prosecutors in the early 1980s ignored her account, in part because date rape was not yet a culturally accepted idea. nola.com/news/courts/ar…
3. How sexist was the prosecution? One assistant DA questioned whether she was “sort of asking for it.” Another faulted her for failing to run out of her own house – even though she had no legal obligation to do so. nola.com/news/courts/ar…
Read 4 tweets
18 May
Strikes me this article on Biden’s clemency plan is extremely disappointing for several reasons. nytimes.com/2021/05/17/us/…
Most critically: Biden says that he’s going to let prosecutors at DOJ who prosecuted these cases make decisions on who deserves clemency. This is a TERRIBLE idea. It relies on people who committed a vast injustice to admit their error and fix it, rather than an outsider.
The process is also EXTREMELY bureaucratic and difficult for most incarcerated people/formerly incarcerated people to navigate.
Read 6 tweets
22 Apr
1. The new ultra-conservative Supreme Court abandons the more muscular understanding of Miller/Montgomery which demanded that a judge find a juvenile is “permanently incorrigible” before sentencing a juvenile to life without the possibility of parole. supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf…
2. The court guts 100,000s of hours of work by lawyers like me and others to end the barbarous practice of sentencing children to LWOP. It says that so long as a judge has discretion to sentence a child to less than LWOP, the constitution is satisfied.
3. This is pretty deep in the weeds, but in some ways today’s ruling by Kavanaugh is the fault of Justice Kagan whose poorly written opinion in Miller v. Alabama (as opposed to Kennedy’s broader Montgomery) makes such a retrogression easy.
Read 14 tweets

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