Dystopia on Display
What has happened to Portland libraries was predictable
In the future we will all be social workers, and nobody will be a cop.
Ask a Portland librarian.
“We started losing regular patrons a few years ago,” a librarian told me. “Patrons coming here (the Central Library) were concerned about germs before there was a pandemic. The smells and things left behind. They didn’t want to touch keyboards, or sit at a table. … They didn’t want to stay and visit the library.”
This librarian wasn’t surprised last month when there was a stabbing in the elevator.
“All kinds of people come to the library. We reflect the community. We’re limited in what we can do when things go wrong. Everyone who works here wants to be helpful, but we’re not trained in combat … I don’t have a black belt in anything.”
A couple of weeks after the stabbing at the Central Library downtown, another patron at the Woodstock library – a man who was a regular visitor to that branch – had a bad Monday and whipped out two knives. He threatened to cut people, including himself.
Paramedics took him away. The library was closed to everyone the next day “to allow affected Woodstock Library staff members to process and decompress following the incident,” according to a statement by the library.
There have been enough similar incidents this year at branches of the Multnomah County Library that even Willamette Week took note. Normally, Portland’s alternative weekly can be depended upon to provide sympathetic coverage of anything related to homelessness, mental illness or drug addiction. But this story acknowledged that librarians don’t want to be security guards.
“Their union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 88, says the model used to staff libraries for the past two decades puts library workers squarely in the path of potential violence, serving as de facto security guards of unstable patrons,” Willamette Week reported.
Librarians have long been pressed into service to act as quasi-social workers. Portland, like other metropolitan libraries, has professional social workers on staff. At the Central Library, two social workers from Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare offer help.
This is happening at the same time that Portland police are being coached to act more like social workers, and still another police oversight group is being formed to investigate use-of-force complaints against cops. Meanwhile the city council is promoting Portland Street Response – unarmed personnel who answer calls related to mental illness, provided the behavior is not violent.
What has happened to Portland libraries was predictable. A few years ago, the Hillsdale branch library that I regularly visit installed needle disposal boxes in the restrooms.
“Do you want to end up like the Belmont library?” I asked one of the librarians at Hillsdale.
She offered a diplomatic, “Those decisions aren’t made at my pay level.”
By then, I had stopped going to the Belmont branch library when I was in the neighborhood of Southeast Hawthorne. You can tell a lot about a neighborhood by its branch library. At the Belmont, you needed a key to use the restroom, and there were signs on all the tables warning patrons not to leave their property unattended.
On my last visit to the Belmont library, I was sitting at a computer and a man stumbled to the PC opposite of mine. He reeked of booze and weed. He wasn’t there long before I heard a crash. He had passed out, and his head hit the keyboard.
A librarian revived him. He pulled himself together and staggered out. In the distraction, I had forgotten to keep an eye on all my belongings. I looked around for a spiral notebook I had been taking notes in.
“They’ll steal anything,” the librarian told me.
Undoubtedly, some people are happy to see the quietude of libraries fade away. Too WASP. Good riddance to the uptight.
Once you start to accommodate a change in behavior, new standards become acceptable.
The first time I encountered Nathaniel, a tall, broad-shouldered young man at the Hillsdale library, he was sitting at a computer, shouting at the screen.
“Cheetahs! Giraffes! Leopards! Leopards are the best! Leopards have spots!”
Nathaniel liked to watch videos of the African savannah. When he saw something that he especially liked, he rocked back and forth, shaking the table.
Occasionally, a librarian would remind him to quiet down.
Nathaniel sold “Street Roots” outside the library. He had autism and didn’t make small talk or eye contact. After he sold some papers, he would come inside.
One of his visits coincided with another man sitting at a computer watching X-rated videos his wife wouldn’t let him view at home. He sat across from Nathaniel who was absorbed in the African savannah.
Nathaniel caught sounds of the man’s entertainment seeping through the back of his computer and stood up. He leaned over to get a better listen. Then he announced loudly to everyone in the library: “PORN! HE’S WATCHING PORN!”
This was amusing, almost like an unexpected floor show. A mother or father visiting the library with their child might not have found it so funny. Depending on what else a library staff member had to deal with that day, it could have been a light-hearted moment or a foreboding of something worse to come.
Librarians do not want to be first responders to violent behavior. As it is, some librarians currently assume various disciplinary duties. In Nathaniel’s encounter with the library patron watching porn, the librarian in charge – who happened to be a large man – gave the patron a one-year suspension of his library card.
The incident is innocent compared to the Woodstock disturbance or an even more serious physical assault in February at the Midland library branch, where a man punched two employees.
We have gone so far to accommodate bad behavior by the public – provided it can be linked to homelessness, mental illness or drug abuse – it shouldn’t be surprising that some public buildings (schools, city hall, county and state government) seemed eager to close for COVID.
I recently asked a librarian at Hillsdale if some employees missed the lockdown, if they preferred dealing with the public at a distance, handing them books on hold through the front door.
“Perhaps,” was the careful answer.
I pointed to one of the current library displays promoting books on dystopia.
“Suitable for the times, don’t you think?”
The librarian hadn’t read any of the dystopian books on display but noted some political events have led to utopia gone wrong. The voters’ passage of Measure 110 decriminalizing drugs, for instance.
You never know when you’re going to get a floor show in Portland.
Or how it is going to end.
I've gone back to college in my 60s to earn another bachelor's degree, this time at Portland State. Because I am not in a hurry, I've been enrolled since 2013. Over the years, the quiet floors at PSU's library were my favorite places to study - until they weren't.
I did take one voluntary break from the PSU library when an equally peaceful and quiet place where I could concentrate without interruption became available much closer to home. Nothing lasts forever, though, and the day came when I had to find another place to study. When I returned to the PSU library after several years' absence, I immediately noticed two major changes. First, for reasons known only to an administrator who is probably contributing to the staffing bloat that has caused PSU's in-state tuition to rise from $6K to $9k over the past five years, on the quiet floors a number of carrels had been removed and replaced by lounge furniture.
Secondly, I noticed the homeless had finally discovered PSU's library. I encountered them performing ablutions in the men's room, rummaging through rubbish bins and, of course, simply killing time.
Not only are PSU's quiet floors conspicuously marked as such on the walls near the entrance, there are signs to that effect on each side of the carrel that also ask users to avoid making unnecessary noise. Floors where talking is permitted are never far away. On the occasions when I have had to remind PSU students they were on a quiet floor, they have always either quieted down or moved.
One day, however, a pair of tough-looking guys who looked like older street punks wandered onto the quiet floor where I was studying, put down their oversized backpacks and flopped down on the lounge furniture not far from where I was studying. They immediately began conversing loudly. I debated moving to another quiet floor but opted instead to treat them the same way I would a PSU student. So, I walked over to them, let them know they were on a quiet floor and suggested they move to the next floor down if they wanted to chat. Instead of offering a PSU student's polite apology, one of them scowled at me and said "you can't tell me what to do."
It would not have surprised me if they were armed with knives at least, so I retreated, packed up my things and headed for a different quiet floor. In the elevator lobby I called PSU security to report the incident. The person who answered the phone could not have cared less. All they wanted to do was get off the line. I was told that since the PSU library is considered a "public building" (why or by whom, they did not say) the situation I was reporting did not warrant security's involvement.
Later, as I was leaving the library for the day, I happened to look over and see the pair of vagrants waking up from an hours long nap on the library's comfy furniture and making preparations to move on to their next way station.
On my way out the door I stopped at the circulation desk at the front floor. I recounted the chain of events and my thoughts about them to a slightly built man who looked to be in his mid-30s. He sighed and said in such situations he was available on request to speak to people who were not obeying the library's rules of conduct. I thought, but did not tell him, that it was no more likely that they would pay more heed to him than they had to me. In their world disputes are probably not settled with words.
Angry and disgusted by the Kafkaesque situation, I left and vowed not to return. In what sort of well-regulated society is a tuition-paying student (one with a 4.0 average, no less) required to yield to the disruptive behavior of an potentially dangerous homeless person squatting in the campus building that embodies the university's mission?
Subsequently I read on another social media platform about a PSU student who was fired from his job at the library when he told management he did not feel safe patrolling the library, including the rest rooms, for homeless people.
Then COVID happened and the library was deserted.
I have read that that PSU has at last done what it should have the moment it became clear that homeless people were entering the library, which is to lock all access doors and make entry contingent on having an electronic key card. I am surprised that this measure didn't cause the the usual loudmouths in the homeless activist "community" to lambaste PSU for committing one of their favorite imaginary crimes. It couldn't have been for setting up a "concentration camp," since the last thing we need is for the homeless to be trapped inside our libraries with administrators and users. A better charge might have been the perennial favorite of obstructionist homeless advocates: expecting homeless people to abide by reasonable rules followed by law-abiding citizens amounts to "criminalizing poverty."
This is so good!! I read it a second time! Now, I’m sharing it on FB!!