I have an office/sometimes work from the Old Chinatown/train station area. There's a lot of addicted, ill, homeless and unstable people on the street in that area. I see what you are referring to. 1/
It can be disconcerting or even scary to be around clearly ill and unstable people – people who suffer from schizophrenia, people who are drug addled and desperate. I get that. 2/
Maybe its just that I lived in NYC for a long time, but I have learned to just accept it. It may sometimes feel disconcerting, but it's not actually physically threatening. And if you feel weird, trying to avoid engagement is often a useful approach. 3/
And when I say its not physically threatening, I mean that as a data matter. Yes, there are a number of awful, outlier events, but those events are rare – in terms of violent crime, Portland is a far safer city than it was 10-20-30 years ago. 4/
To put it slightly differently – and this is a key point – I've come to cultivate a sense of *personal responsibility within me* for that sense of fear that I sometimes feel around unstable people on our streets. It's as much about *my* fear as it is about them. 5/
It's also *the entirely predictable result* of a society that doesn't take care of its most vulnerable people. The people who fight for low taxes are the direct cause of that problem. 6/
Societies seemingly must confront the question: what shall we do to care for people who struggle to care for themselves? If not cared for, those people will struggle and inevitably cause disorder in our public spaces. 7/
But that's what we've chosen to do. Since the state hospitals shrank and were killed off in the 80s, we've mainly chosen a policy of aid through the criminalization of vulnerability and the repetitive caging of vulnerable people. 8/
We've literally criminalized living while homeless – camping, sitting, lying, urinating is all criminalized. For addicted people, we criminalize behavior (i.e. drug use) that their disease compels. And obviously desperate people are much more likely to break the law. 9/
We've created conditions where we can arrest these people at any time – there is always some public order offense we can put on them. Jaywalking. Not crossing the street at a right angle. Blocking a sidewalk. And its up to us how often we want to choose to cage them. 10/
The caging is largely pointless. They get churned through the system & reemerge. And the churning makes their lives *massively more unstable in ways that is damaging to their health & life chances. Tons of people die in jail & in the hours immediately after they get out. 11/
And in a thousand lesser ways, arrest and jail destabilizes the lives of society's most vulnerable people. Their property gets seized, their home dismantled, they get separated from their often delicate support systems, it costs them money they don't have. etc. 12/
But that's what we do. Over and over. And that's what Mayor Wheeler and the Columbia Sportswear Dude and that God awful piece in the Oregonian is calling for (though the latter disingenuously hides its call under the phony pose of objectivity.) 13/
They try to draw an utterly phony distinction between the "good" homeless/mentally ill who don't break the law and the lawbreakers. But as I said above, merely existing in public space is illegal for those people. They're all lawbreakers. 14/
So by saying they only support the homeless law-abiders, they're really saying they don't support the homeless. Not to mention the drug users – who often sell as well as use and who steal stuff to maintain their habit. Arrest is their solution. 15/
And so they cynically drum up fear. And they plant endless op-eds and phony "objective" articles in the newspaper. They erase the fact that violent crime is down massively. They take single exceedingly rare events and sensationalize them. 16/
They need the fear to justify yet more money for more police. Because caging humans is our social policy for managing the vulnerable in mass incarceration America. That is how we do it here. Through the drumming up of hysterical feelings. 17/
To put it differently, mass incarceration is a politics. This is how it unfolds in real time. That Oregonian article is central to the whole conceit. It normalizes the policy. This is how we do it. Disorder exists in downtown space. Some feel scared. Cage the vulnerable. 18/
Of course this is not all inevitable. We could spend vastly more money preemptively helping these people rather than our policy of aid through arrest and caging. We choose mass incarceration. 19/
We don't measure the costs of that policy in lives destroyed, families injured, communities weakened. I mean that literally. The experts don't include those costs in their studies. 20/ nytimes.com/2018/01/07/opi…
And as the newspaper endlessly raises up the voices of those who are fearful of the vulnerable and the awful outlier events, it erases the repercussions of our policies on the vulnerable – like the unreported story of this 37 year old mother who died in our jail. 21/ 
And when does her safety get considered? And her kids connection to her? Why is it that the downtown elites and their largely fanciful projections about un-safety get endlessly voiced in our political dialogue but not the safety concerns of people like her? 22/
And since we *chose* this utterly failed, costly, cruel, cage-driven approach to these problems, shouldn't we perhaps ask ourselves some harder questions, rather than continuing to act out, yet again, the toxic politics? 23/
After all we could choose to address these problems other ways. At other moments in our history we have. No "solution" will be perfect; there will always be issues. But we know this approach is utterly broken. And there are plenty of examples of things that work better. 24/
In any event, I reject the idea that cranking up the arresting and caging machine is the appropriate response to the mentally ill, homeless, destitute, drug addicted people on our streets. 25/
That would involve law enforcement giving up some of their largesse. *Shrinking rather than endlessly growing, both in budget and in the scope of what we are asking them to do. 26/
I think we can do better than the cynical politics of mass incarceration. And I am certainly going to continue to call out people – reporters, politicians – who engage in it. 27/
I hear surprising numbers of people calling for not cosmetic, but meaningful change. And I see the results of that new politics in DAs offices in places like Chicago and Philly. 28/
That energy is going to come to Oregon, and when it does, those who fought to preserve the cynical politics of mass incarceration are going to find themselves on the wrong side of history. We are paying attention. 29/
But that change begins inside all of us. We must come to take responsibility for the role that our largely irrational fear plays in our response these vulnerable and sometimes disturbed people. 30/
And we must also come to take responsibility for engaging in/accepting a politics of fear and for repeatedly choosing to address the problem of human vulnerability through such short-sighted, cruel, and ultimately ineffective ways. 31/
To put it differently, its not about them – after all, every society has vulnerable people. It's about us. 32/32
