Fighting the homeless ghetto

Will the Portland City Council have the courage to ban daytime street campers?

Demetria Hester was riding high during the Portland riot season of 2020. She was back this week leading a gang of anarcho-protesters outside City Hall.

Only the crowd was smaller. There was an air of desperation.

There were even a few people milling about who weren’t on board with the latest protest — fighting a proposed ban on daytime camping on public property.

A woman with short, silver hair approached a young woman holding a sign that said in part, “Defund Private Police and Dismantle EDSs.”

Kathryn Freeman, who lives in Northwest Portland, asked the young woman, “What is EDS?”

The young woman didn’t know.

“If you’re going to put it on a sign and protest it, shouldn’t you know what it means?” Freeman asked.

“Bullshit! Bullshit!” the woman with the sign shrieked.

Hester, holding a megaphone, strutted outside City Hall while the council meeting was under way. She made enough noise that it carried into the chambers.

“This is a human right! … Fuck Ted Wheeler! … Whose streets? Our streets!”

Freeman watched Hester.

“The problem I have, it’s not just their streets. It’s everybody’s streets,” Freeman said quietly.

A man wearing a T-shirt advertising Oregon’s Finest Cannabis Dispensary didn’t recognize Hester.

“She’s hurting my ears. I don’t like it that loud,” he said.

Freeman and the Oregon’s Finest man took separate sides on the homeless ordinance that the council was hearing testimony on. It would ban camping on public streets between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. In addition to other restrictions, it would allow police to arrest violators after the third warning.

“Give them a place to live,” said the Oregon’s Finest man. “They should have housing, health care. This is what Cuba does.”

“Have you been to Cuba?” Freeman asked.

She described a situation near her neighborhood where someone planted a tent in the middle of 21st Avenue and screamed obscenities.

“I don’t think that’s OK,” she said.

They were interrupted by a woman with large gaps in her teeth. She showed a driver’s license and offered a lively string of gibberish, something about “looking for Commander Trump.”

We nodded, and she moved on.

“My taxes go up every year for programs,” Freeman said. She’s happy to pay taxes, but she wants to see them benefit all people — not just the homeless.

She moved to Portland from Santa Monica more than 20 years ago after her daughter went away to college. Freeman loved the liberal politics, the library system, Forest Park, the Rose Garden, the small shops. Portland was special.

When she still lived in Santa Monica, the city had a lot of homeless. She remembered walking out on the beach one morning as two homeless men were preparing to start the day. They gathered up their belongings, but one of them left some garbage on the beach. His friend scolded him.

“Can’t you see how beautiful this place is? You can’t leave garbage out here.”

Portland’s homeless and their advocates don’t see how they are trashing the city.

Based on the five hours of testimony from more than 100 persons, the trashing of Portland was not utmost on the minds of those opposed to the camping ban.

Duane Reynolds, dressed in a tie-dyed shirt, and sporting a shaved head with a red rooster-like comb on top, roared with meth-fueled intensity. He refused to sit at the speaker’s table and stomped around, approaching the dais where the mayor and commissioners sat. Two security people hovered nearby.

“I’ll testify the way I want…,” Reynolds shouted. “I’m not scared of you! You should be scared of us. … Everybody wants to play games with the money given to us.”

Reynolds, who is a vendor for Street Roots, a weekly paper covering homeless issues, said that for all the billions that have gone towards housing, “You didn’t buy us a single house!”

Actually, the city has had some housing successes. Had Reynolds been present for the morning council session, he could have heard a report about how the Portland Housing Bureau is returning black residents to North/Northeast Portland who were displaced, and how it is turning black renters into black homeowners:

“A $20 million dollar commitment, eight years ago, has grown to over $95 million invested in the established priorities. The results speak for themselves, more than a 500 families in new affordable housing, over one hundred new homeowners and 1,000 families saved from displacement. What began as promises made has become promises kept,” the report states. “Portland continues to be unaffordable for the Black/African American family. The prioritization must continue.”

Portland’s homeless population, estimated to be as high as 6,000, poses a tougher problem because of drug-induced mental illness and the accompanying criminal behavior. If you want to see how Multnomah County has responded to housing the homeless, read Richard Cheverton’s “Reality Arrives at 333 SW Park.”

The threats and swagger by the homeless advocates don’t help their cause. Worst of all was Hester, who is black and trying to reprise past BLM glories. Sitting in the council chambers, wearing a jaunty red beret, she leaned towards the microphone and taunted Mayor Ted Wheeler.

“My colonial name is Demetria Hester, which you should already know because I Maced Jeremy Christian the night before he went on his rant,” she said.

In 2017 Christian, who is white, stabbed three white men, killing two during an altercation on a MAX train, which began when he insulted two young dark-skinned women, one of whom was wearing a hijab. One of the men confronted Christian, and the other two came to his aid after Christian physically attacked him.

The day before that deadly assault, Christian insulted Hester at a transit stop, and she Maced him. He, in turn, threw a full Gatorade bottle at her.

In council chambers, Hester sneered at the mayor and commissioners, “You sit here so smug and self-entitled. … You’ve lined your pockets with money you were supposed to give the community.”

In Hester’s view, houseless people are the new blacks, and they will be housed in prisons.

She concluded with a threat: “July 1st, when this comes in effect, be ready for what you have to deal with — us in 2020, us in the streets. Be ready, be ready. We’re coming for your jobs, your houses, your cars. What are you going to do then?… Decide, because we’re coming for you Ted Wheeler. Fuck you.”

Hester is the woman who was hailed in a gushing profile in The Oregonian for her performance in leading the 2020 protests. Read it here.

When the BLM protests turned into a moneymaker, Hester was on the frontlines. She objected to white mothers and their Wall of Moms raising money on her cause.

When a couple of volunteers set up Riot Ribs every night across from the Federal Courthouse to feed protesters, OPB Radio immediately gave them a nice story and allowed “Rico” and “Beans” – as they were identified to protect their identities – a chance to have their say.

The money started to stack up.

“We’ve raised over $300,000 within 21 days and, frankly, this is too much money to reasonably spend,” Beans told The Portland Mercury. So she and Rico turned over Riot Ribs leadership – and money – to Don’t Shoot Portland, a police accountability group founded by Teressa Raiford, an unsuccessful candidate for City Council and mayor and an unsuccessful litigant in a lawsuit against police.

Hester, also involved with Don’t Shoot Portland, became the point person for Riot Ribs’ transition.

She was a suspicious choice to put in charge of handling $300,000 and future fund-raising. Hester had prior felony convictions for theft and forgery. Those were forgotten during her turn as Jeremy Christian’s victim.

Hester was correct when she complained that had police arrested Christian the day before his attack on the MAX train, those deaths could have been avoided.

What she and other police reformers won’t acknowledge is their own complicity. They have lobbied for a system where cops are expected to turn the other cheek when dealing with the mentally ill, the homeless or criminals in general.

Police had a previous encounter with Christian, but he appeared to be mentally unstable. He also had served time in prison — making him part of another protected group that has received much sympathy from the media and politicians. (Ever heard the phrase, “You wouldn’t want to be judged by the worst thing you ever did, would you?” That is a classic rewriting of our criminal justice system.)

Now here’s Hester throwing threats at Wheeler and city commissioners, looking ahead towards what she and Portland’s famous anarcho-protesters are going to do if they don’t get their way.

Like a performer who has seen better days, Hester may have misread the room.

Scattered amid all the outrage in council chambers, a few rational voices praised the council and encouraged them to move forward. The final speaker was a young man who had visited Portland in 2018 and loved it so much, he later moved here.

Within three weeks, his car was stolen. Police found it at an unsanctioned camping area. He described going grocery shopping and seeing someone in the street smoking fentanyl and someone defecating in a pizza box.

“I am really concerned. … Police don’t have power to do anything,” he said.

Another sign that other Portlanders besides Hester’s crowd are commanding attention was in the council’s morning session when they agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by 10 disabled individuals, who sued the the city for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.

These 10 people are blind or have to use wheelchairs or need assistance walking. The sidewalks — which should be open to the public — are blocked by tents and campers who have staked a claim.

Chief plaintiff Tiana Tozer, 54, was hit by a drunken driver when she was 20 and is permanently disabled. She found no sympathy from Disability Rights Oregon, an organization that lobbies heavily on behalf of prison inmates — offenders like the one who left Tozer mangled in the road.

Another plaintiff, Cody Hammerling, was left totally blind after being hit by a car.

“I’m forced to walk in the street with my dog. I can’t see anything, obviously, and it’s really scary. I went blind being hit by a car to begin with, and now I don’t have a car around me to protect myself from (other cars),” Hammerling said.

Since this is Portland, these plaintiffs were attacked by homeless advocates for having good legal representation — attorney John Di Lorenzo.

Wheeler said he normally doesn’t like getting sued, but not this time. The settlement, he said, will bring important changes.

As a result of the settlement, the plaintiffs will receive $5,000 each. More importantly, Portland will be required to remove a number of camps off the sidewalk.

The council will decide next week whether to approve the ordinance to ban daytime camping.

At some point, city council meetings on the homeless issue could attract that growing middle-class of black homeowners that Portland is trying to nurture. They might have something to say about Portland turning into a homeless ghetto.

Nobody wants to live like that — not even the homeless.