Portland PD Tries to Revive Gun Violence Unit After Canning It Over Racial Concerns, Can't Find Recruits
Social justice movements are fantastic at making issues worse than they were to begin with, which is becoming the unfortunate case in Portland, Oregon.
The Portland Police Bureau’s Focused Initiative Team has been able to garner the interest of only four law enforcement officials to fill the 14 slots needed to have a fully functioning unit, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Homicides are on the rise in the liberal city, with gun violence being the main cause.
Fifty-three people have been killed so far this year, the second-highest on record, as 1987 saw 70 homicides, according to the report Monday.
The unit used to be called the Gun Violence Reduction Team, but that was dissolved last year amid calls to defund and even abolish the police.
This new force will have its own citizen-advisory board for increased oversight to prevent disproportionate racial profiling, which was a chief reason cited for shutting down the old unit.
An outlined mission of the newly formed team is to “identify and dismantle institutional and systemic racism in the bureau’s responses to gun violence,” according to National Review.
The flowery language is simply a way to appease the leftists of Portland.
These officers are already well aware that they will have hostile reception in certain areas, so you cannot blame them for not wanting to join that team.
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“They’re demonizing and vilifying you, and then they want to put you in a unit where you’re under an even bigger microscope,” police union leader Daryl Turner told The Wall Street Journal.
Portland was one of the cities that dealt with major riots following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody last May.
After #antifa started multiple fires on the street & set the police union building on fire again tonight, Portland Police declared a riot & moved in. #PortlandRiots pic.twitter.com/z9iPU5ejKu
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 29, 2020
It was one of the few that acted in response to cut funding to law enforcement.
The City Council voted to defund the police by at least $15 million last June, with only one of the four members voting “no” because she believed it did not go far enough, according to KGW-TV.
“While I sit here as a middle-aged white guy who is fortunate in so many ways, I do believe that I have an important role to play in this transitional period,” Mayor Ted Wheeler told protesters that month, the outlet reported.
“As I speak there are hundreds of you out in front of my apartment building. … I hear you and I see you. … And I’m going to be with you all the way.”
Hopefully, this task force will be able to combat the rise in crime, even though it is clearly off to a rocky start.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
