As I write this, one of the city’s premier journalists is cooling his heels in the county jail for five days, a longer stay than your garden-variety fentanyl doper or thief or street thug/rioter. All for some obscure crime that, we are told, caused the city of Gresham to lose $16,000. As money mishaps go in our corrupt cities, that’s a rounding error. And yet our former DA, Mike Schmidt, and the county sheriff’s department regarded this as some sort of high crime and misdemeanor and spent almost three years investigating and prosecuting it.
The horror! The scandal!
The Oregonian, with a senile cackle, had its fun when Dahlgren finally faced his day in court…
Here was the lede…
A man with a reputation for telling hard truths1 about life on the streets of Portland admitted in court to lying and stealing from the city of Gresham while providing homelessness services there.
Kevin Dalghren pleaded guilty to first-degree theft, aggravated identity theft, and first-degree official misconduct Tuesday afternoon and is now serving a five-day jail sentence.
…which in typical Oregonian fashion, told their version of the story, briefly and not well.
Here’s another lede that might get closer to reality:
A man whose reporting exposed tough truths about the city and county mishandling of the homelessness crisis was sent to jail for something he was supposed to have done four years ago, although the charges were never adjudicated in court. He gave up his right to a trial by jury because he ran out of money. Justice isn’t cheap.
The Oregonian’s story2 about Dahlgren’s plea bargain (a staple of prosecutors who well know the expense—and risk—of a defendant trusting a progressive Portland jury with their future) was dropped onto the boiling pot of Twitter/X by Oregonian city hall hitman Shane Dixon Kavanaugh, who repeated the sloppy, smeary headline—twice—although the story had run under Zane Sparling’s byline.
Predictably, the creatures hiding behind their aliases on Reddit and Twitter/X had a field day when Kavanaugh dumped the story. Typically, digiorno got the headline, not to mention the facts, wrong…
No surprises.
Then, around 12 hours later, at 10:48 p.m., someone at the O had second thoughts about the too-clever headline, and tweaked it…
…which made the story even more confusing since the “one of them” was never identified.
Among other things the story didn’t give details about how Dahlgren managed to filch the money, what he did with it, and why he did it, considering that he was making $80K a year from the city.3 And was credited with a major role in cleaning up the notorious Springwater Corridor inside Gresham.
No trial; no details…and forget about that messy “beyond a reasonable doubt” stuff.
Back in October, ‘23, Sparling’s takedown of Dahlgren was a classic Oregonian treatment well known to targets of the slumping newspaper’s ire: tons of negative inferences and blind sources. And no interview with the villain. The only quote by Dahlgren was lifted from a statement on May, ‘23, to the Multnomah county commission…
“We have failed the homeless. We used to empower them and help them reach their fullest potential; we now enable them to the point of the dependency,” Dahlgren testified during a Multnomah County Board of Commissioners meeting on May 18, blaming the county’s service providers for “adopting radical social justice causes.”
Sparling wasn’t done with Dahlgren: On Nov. 2, ‘23, he took another bite in what seemed to be a mini-crusade. It ran under a strangely prophetic headline: Kevin Dahlgren railed against Oregon homeless policies. Now he’s accused of defrauding taxpayers.
What was conspicuously missing in any of Sparling’s stories was a chronology: what happened when. That was left to readers with spreadsheet skills.
It left some wondering: If Dahlgren going public in the spring of ‘23—including becoming a national source for reporting on Portland’s massive problem with the feral—might have had anything to do with prompting that year-long investigation. And the attention of a “social justice DA”?
Nah. Nobody’s interested in that.
Readers of PortlandDissent are familiar with Dahlgren. His post back in April, ‘23, “A Visit to Hell,” holds the record for the ‘stack’s most views, with 37 “likes,” and 18 comments (which continued for almost a year after publication).
In it, Dahlgren discussed the arrival of fentanyl and the government’s response to the terrifying new drug…
…the official response, from the city to the federal level, has been to stick with the logic of harm reduction—the idea that the goal should be to reduce the damage done by drug use rather than treat and cure addiction.
In reality, this response means making more posters and manufacturing more straws, and more foil. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on the arm of someone with cancer and thinking you are treating them. It ignores the real problem and will never cure them.
Could we stipulate that this was not music over at the Joint Office of Homeless Services (whose future head guy, Dan Field, would be paid a $-quarter-million-a-year)? Or to county chair Jessica Vega Pederson, the protege of the ferocious longtime chair, Deborah Kafoury (of the politics and “shopping while black” lawsuit clan), who had been on a low-publicity spree buying derelict old buildings and used car lots for top dollar? Or Ted Wheeler, the city’s feckless mayor, getting blamed for the disorder even though the county held the whip hand?
Nor was Dahlgren’s second Dissent piece, Decriminalizing Drugs Is a Death Sentence 4 a sop to Homelessness Inc.™
Voters were also misled about the reasons for the decriminalization of drugs. It had less to do with helping addicts and more to do with promoting the beliefs lumped under the ideas about “social justice.”
If we know anything about the progressive machine, its apparatchiks are very, very thin-skinned.5 And they’ll attack like badgers disturbed from sleep.
Dedicated readers will also recall that we filed a couple of pieces when Dahlgren was first charged. Given the reporting at the time, and the fingerprints of our DA, plus the word circulating that Dahlgren had ruffled too many social worker feathers out in Gresham (after all, there was that business of the Springwater Corridor)—well, we were skeptical.
Anyone who has ever hung around the courts is familiar with an indictment document—just enough on paper to mess with the prospective jury pool, details obscured (leaving ample room to prosecutors to leak juicy details), although they’ll come out on discovery and trial. (If they don’t, the defendant walks, which keeps DAs halfway honest.)
Also well-known to cognoscenti: The adage that “grand juries would indict a ham sandwich,” since they are totally under the control of the DA. And the wallpapering of Counts is a great way to make a thin case look rock-solid (see: Trump, Donald, 91 indictments of), and gives a prosecutor room to maneuver when it comes time to plead out.
We mused that the sheriff’s office quickly released Dahlgren’s mug shot to the legacy media—although that’s now against Oregon law. And we noted WillyWeek’s Sophie Peel and her cheap shot…
…which, needless to say, she never followed up.
We also observed that pirate media, with PDX.Real in the lead, was making the legacy media types nervous by questioning the DA’s party line. Which, in a perverse way, may have caused DA Schmidt to dig in and push for what would have been a show trial…
Overall, we suspected that there was a lot going on sub rosa. This being Portland, it was well hidden behind a vaporous cloud of niceness.
It’s a fact that justice is expensive, especially for those facing the resources of a District Attorney. Competent criminal defense attorneys don’t work for free; investigators, paralegals, secretaries also like getting a paycheck.
Meanwhile, Dahlgren is cut off from the chance to earn a living. He isn’t a rich guy. He’s running on fumes—just as most of us would if the state decided to put the hammer down.
He needs help to mount a defense. Here’s where you can contribute:
We still believe that.
I’ve met Dahlgren a few times and talked with him on the phone occasionally before his day in court. On one occasion, I asked him to sum up his experiences on the street. Here’s what he wrote:
“We have reconnected hundreds of homeless people directly and indirectly to their families and friends. We have helped hundreds with feeding them, clothing them, getting them into housing. Our work has helped make real change.”
In one case, they put down their cameras to save an overdosing addict’s life…
“We needed to get to know the homeless, interview them, and dig deep to understand how they ended up on the street and why they are still there. This required intensive outreach daily. We met, interviewed, and photographed over half of our community's homeless population, or over three thousand people.”
This leaves one with a few conclusions not mentioned by Dahlgren’s and his partner Tara Faul’s rivals in local legacy media…
Any trial would have been eye-opening about, if nothing else, a purge after a change in leadership in Gresham, rivalries within the corps of Homeless Inc’s™ satraps in the city, and the way money was thrown around by other homeless workers…
And that the charges essentially bankrupted Dahlgren—it cost him some paying reporting jobs—and that the “guilty until proven innocent” reality of the legal system made his plea bargain inevitable. This is a feature, not a bug, of the legal system and something that reporter Sparling should know well…
And that Dahlgren’s reporting, along with Faul’s, made an awful lot of competitors (deskbound, far preferring the lofty heights of policy and Homelessness Inc™ PR) uncomfortable…maybe envious…
And that the plea-bargain will give Homelessness Inc.™ and its stenographers a handy out: “Can’t trust a convicted felon,” should Dahlgren embarrass anyone in the homeless industry…
And that reform DA Vasquez should be ashamed that he didn’t nol pros the case, and instead went for the cheap kill and jail time—an irony given the legacy of more serious felons walking…
In a couple of days, Kevin Dahlgren will walk out of jail, but he won’t be out of the woods. As Sparling reported:
Circuit Judge David Rees ruled that Dahlgren can withdraw his guilty plea to first-degree theft in 90 days if he pays back the money and abides by the terms of his probation, which will last five years.
They’re all heart.
Think our local journos will pass the hat?
If we’re lucky, Dahlgren will pick himself up, and get back to reporting truth on the street and keep Homelessness Inc.’s™ feet to the fire.
What is troubling to me is that Oregon is a place where - literally - tens of millions of taxpayer disappear into endless "non-profits" who we then discovered are either run by a couple people getting big salaries. or have failed to file IRS 990 forms - in other words are untraceable.
As someone who prosecuted people in half a dozen counties in Oregon since 1981, I know what a defendant like Kevin would face in Multnomah County, where juries have routinely found verdicts against cops and for alleged killers. I was a defense attorney once, and I always had to warn clients there was always a risk the jury could convict them.
Given the craven political behavior of then-DA Mike Schmidt, it still has all the appearances of a highly political hit job. I have spent my entire adult life trying to make sure nobody ever accused in any case I was involved with as a prosecutor was motivated by enmity towards the defendant, but I'd be a fool to say it never happens.
The Homless Industrial Complex and their millions of tax dollars controls local government. If you question their enabling you will be punished. This is a sobering example.
I gave money to Kevin and would again.
What is troubling to me is that Oregon is a place where - literally - tens of millions of taxpayer disappear into endless "non-profits" who we then discovered are either run by a couple people getting big salaries. or have failed to file IRS 990 forms - in other words are untraceable.
As someone who prosecuted people in half a dozen counties in Oregon since 1981, I know what a defendant like Kevin would face in Multnomah County, where juries have routinely found verdicts against cops and for alleged killers. I was a defense attorney once, and I always had to warn clients there was always a risk the jury could convict them.
Given the craven political behavior of then-DA Mike Schmidt, it still has all the appearances of a highly political hit job. I have spent my entire adult life trying to make sure nobody ever accused in any case I was involved with as a prosecutor was motivated by enmity towards the defendant, but I'd be a fool to say it never happens.
The Homless Industrial Complex and their millions of tax dollars controls local government. If you question their enabling you will be punished. This is a sobering example.