In October 2017, to great fanfare, Portand announced that they'd get rid of their gang database. The database seemed to be heavily loaded with minorities, and therefore by Portland logic it had to be racist.
An audit six months later showed that the police weren't entirely gormless: they kept an informal list of who's who. The usual suspects harrumphed frowningly, of course. One difference between the old and the new was that there was a clear record of why someone went on the old list--not so much for the new one.
Police said the list is no different from fliers that narcotics enforcement officers develop identifying suspects in drug trafficking cases. It's simply a synthesis of police reports and compiled for officer safety, they said.
They distinguish it from the long-standing past practice of designating gang members, which sometimes rested on a suspect's admission of ties to a particular gang, the presence of a gang tattoo or the flashing of a gang sign in a photo.
How discriminatory can you get, that you use a lad's own admission of gang affiliation to put him in a gang-member database? Can't have that. And so he winds up on a different "suspect list" because of "mere conversations" which don't need to be recorded. Either way, everybody knows he's a gang member--probably including the usual suspects. The latter strongly remind me of "Big Tim" Sullivan, who pushed through gun control in New York to protect his street thugs from getting shot by their victims. Am I unfair? I doubt it very strongly. I read history and what I see in modern politics looks very much like ancient politics.
FWIW, homicides went up slightly in 2018 in Portland, but the increase wasn't statistically significant.
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