[jasonwatkinspdx]

Also just for some context, a perennial problem in Oregon is that many of the people in government agencies are opposed to the majority view of Oregonians.

One simple example of this is cannabis legalization. After the ballot measure passed, the Oregon Liquor Commission dragged its heels on implementation deliberately. The agency is primarily staffed by people who live in Salem or the surrounding area, and are considerably more conservative than the average Oregonian, due to how our population is concentrated in Portland. In the end the legislature had to force the OLC to implement things, and they basically chose the "Do what CO did" route which ironically enough was even more liberal than what was decided on before OLC started obstruction.

Another example is the Oregon DOT. All they focus on is freeway and highway expansion. They are actively hostile to multimode transportation and mass transit. Near where I live there's been a years long battle over widening I5. They want to encroach on an elementary school where particulate levels are already high enough often the kids aren't allowed outside at recess. DOT's plan would bring the highway practically right up to the side of the building. And the worst thing is adding 2 more lanes will not accomplish anything long term. The most simple thing we could do to help traffic on that section of I5 is ban trucks heading further north from using I5 through the city, and force them onto I205 to go around instead. It even takes roughly the same amount of time, but all the long haul truckers just robotically go right through the core of downtown.

And finally, saying the police aren't writing tickets because treatment wasn't available is being too charitable to them. They're opposed to these policies and are deliberately trying to sabotage them. If they hand out tickets and no treatment option is available a judge can simply wave the fine.

So please, when you hear stories about Oregon and Portland, please understand we're in a decades long siege against our own police and bureaucrats, who are far more conservative than the average voter here. Thanks to the alt right weirdos, Portland and Oregon are now a favorite punching bag in media, who never want to provide this context to what's happening.

[kibwen]

> police and bureaucrats, who are far more conservative than the average voter here

The history of Oregon is grimly fascinating. It was more-or-less illegal for black people to live in Oregon from 1844 to 1926 (although this became complicated to enforce thanks to the 14th amendment in 1868). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws

[amanaplanacanal]

Yes. Oregon was a big Klan state. You can still see the results in how few black people there are here. The high school I went to in the 70’s had only two black kids in over a thousand students.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Yeah, there's a really ugly history of racism here and the remnants of that remain very real problems.

Not that long after that law was struck down, there was a large migration of black families to Portland to work in the shipyards during WW2. Kaiser et all built a factory town a bit north of Portland proper named Vanport. This place is a fascinating bit of history because it was racially integrated with no real tensions. After the war was over most of the families decided to stay.

Then some years later a flood destroyed Vanport. It was clear rebuilding it would result in the same thing in the future. So the wonderful leaders of Portland asked themselves "where can we put these black people?"

They decided on my neighborhood, Albina. At the time it was mostly germanic people here, because they had been forced into this area in the same way decades before in a prior immigration wave. One interesting sign of this is if you check out all of the now black baptist churches, you'll find cornerstones written in german memorializing their construction.

That said, the black community here thrived. They built a flourishing downtown with lots of business, banks that would not discriminate, etc. Note that this was the only neighborhood black people could live in. Overt redlining continued here until the 1970s.

Flash forward to that time and two different projects were deliberately used to destroy that downtown as well as steal a portion of the neighborhood. Building a freeway interchange for one, and the construction of a hospital as the second.

The hospital is particularly galling as they used eminent domain to take people's businesses and houses, paying far below market value, and even worse stole vastly more land than the hospital needed. At the time they justified it as needed for "future expansion."

Just about 15 years ago in this neighborhood you'd find the hospital surrounded by several blocks of either nothing but grass, or grass and just one or two small buildings.

And then Portland got hit with the massive migration wave creating our housing crisis. So the hospital started selling the land to developers to build apartment and condo buildings.

While we definitely needed more housing, it's revolting that black businesses and homes were stolen and destroyed under a lie, only for the hospital to profit off selling the land to developers building housing for upper income folks a few decades later.

We're definitely on the trajectory of progress, but there is still so far to go, and the fight over it is very real.

I hope this helps give people here some context as to why the BLM protests here were so intense. There's real anger and it is justified. Many of the people at those protests either experienced this directly, or are the children of people who did.

[araes]

From an outsider perspective, it looks like a siege that's escalating. Apparently now setting attack dogs on prisoners in dead ends cells. (context: from what I read the prisoner refused to be handcuffed and insulted a guard, resulting in [1] @ approx 30 sec.) Apparently this is getting rather common in US incarceration though.

[1] https://www.insider.com/how-dogs-are-trained-to-attack-us-pr...

[WalterBright]

Heavy trucks clog I5 and crack the freeways into rubble. An efficient and environmentally friendly solution is to incentivize long haul containers to be shipped by rail.

[ChainOfFools]

Quite a lot of them are but there are relatively few branch lines that run directly into business districts, which tend to shift and metastasize far faster than new rail construction can keep pace. NIMBYs are generally accommodating to new job-producing office park proposals but will dig their heels in at the slightest suggestion of running a new branch or god forbid a new ramp into any part of town. So rail infrastructure is stuck with whatever was built out during wartime exigencies, which means there's nothing really newer than the late '60s in terms of infrastructure for rail.

The upshot of this is that you get the trucks on the local roads and thoroughfares anyway, they're just last-mile intermodal or short-haul drayage instead of long-haul, but that doesn't eliminate the perfusuon of 80,000 lb 54 ft metal boxes milling around on streets 7 days a week, streets that were seldom if ever engineered with this kind of abuse in mind.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

No, on that specific section of I5 there are a large amount of long haul trucks too. It is not at all just last mile and local delivery stuff. Note I'm sitting approximately 1/4th mile from the section I'm talking about so please don't say I'm clueless.