Summa Portlandia

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Article 1: Is the city of Portland, OR safe?

Objection 1: It would seem that the city of Portland, OR is not safe, due to riots occurring across the city in protest of the Department of Homeland Security’s deportation of illegal immigrants. It is highly unsafe to be in a city filled with unpredictable, violent actors seeking to destroy law and order.

Objection 2: Further, as reported by the President of the United States and national media, the city has experienced a large increase in violence, fires, and operational decline, including the loss of working sewer systems. A city whose basic infrastructure is crumbling, engulfed in fighting and flames, cannot be considered safe.

On the contrary, national news reports and independent journalism show that many of the protestors directly outside the city’s ICE facility regularly don playful inflatable costumes. Such costumes would quickly be punctured and deflate if violence or weapons were being deployed; and further, they would inhibit the movement of any protestors seeking to enact violence against a federal agent, officer, or bystander. Furthermore, the abundance of such a commodity indicates that the city maintains enough infrastructure to support its postal service and the existence of small businesses selling novelty items – both of which would suffer under increased violence and decreased public infrastructure.

I answer that safety must be predicated on both the absence of physical threat and on the relativity of threat experienced by the majority of the population as compared to similar circumstances. Portland, being a city, must have a threshold of threat typical to cities of its size and makeup that it will either cross, making it unsafe, or not cross, deeming it relatively safe, for no area with a large population of people can reasonably be assumed to be perfectly safe.

With this in mind, the question of whether Portland is relatively safe can be answered by looking at first the size & impact of the riots, and then the general conditions of the city as compared to Portland’s history and the conditions of similar cities.

On the alleged riots and their size – firstly, they do not meet the legal definition of riot (a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd), considering they have been entirely non-violent, save a handful of incidents incited by counter-protestors against peaceful protestors. Police have made this distinction themselves, declaring the assembly unlawful on certain evenings but only ever declaring a riot on a single evening in June, the validity of which on-the-ground reports dispute.

Additionally, according to eyewitnesses and the chief of the Portland Police Bureau, the protests span only up to a single city block at their largest, directly across from the ICE facility in southeast Portland. There is no traffic redirection (apart from two days in October, during which the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was visiting the building) and the road remains open to cars, bikes, and pedestrians. As mentioned prior, many protestors don inflatable costumes; there have been no regular reports of weapons beyond those belonging to law enforcement.

Additionally, crime rates in Portland compared to cities of similar size are low. Looking at cities with at least 100,000 people, Portland’s violent-crimes-per-100k ranks them number 72 in the nation (WMTV, via NIBRS) – and in fact, according to the PPB, violent crime has been on a slight decrease each year for the past 3 years. There has simply not been a noticeable or statistically significant increase in violent crime in the city in recent years, much less an increase due to riots – and in fact, while the nation’s incidence reports of violent crime have skyrocketed in the last 5 years, the state of Oregon’s rate has remained relatively stable (BJS).

In light of all this – both the small size of the protests, and the lack of criminal increase in the city at large, especially as compared to the rest of the country – I believe that it can be confidently said that Portland, OR is relatively safe.

Response to Objection 1: The protests do not span the entirety of the city – primarily, there is a single ongoing protest, spanning a single block, outside of a single facility – and they are not simply in protest of deportation as a whole. They are centered around the removal of the ICE facility’s building permit for violating their lease terms and failing to enact due process.

Response to Objection 2: There has been no significant increase in the city’s violent crime, fires, or operational decline. The sewage system is fully intact and has had no major recent interruptions. No other major, systemic infrastructure issues have been raised in recent years.

Thanks for reading this (slightly silly) creative writing exercise I decided to take on to combine my love of Aquinas’s straightforwardness with the current goings-on in my city. It’s troubling (putting it lightly) to see such a blatantly false narrative arise about Portland once again – I thought I’d just finished with the raised eyebrows or concerned “oh”s every time someone asks me where I live, but I suppose I can stretch that out another decade or so.

In seriousness – we are safe. Genuinely more than safe. The people in the most danger right now are the ones who are being abused and denied due process behind closed doors – something our city and a handful of others are documenting and working to stop. I wish the same could be said across the rest of the nation.

Further Reading

For anyone interested in some less… Thomistic coverage of the present state of Portland

📰 Trump, administration’s portrayal of Portland as conflict zone debated | AP News

📰 How bad is crime in Portland? Let’s look at the data