In this week’s news section, I wrote about some of the logistical questions still tying up Mayor Sam Adams’ ambitious plans to enforce gun-crime exclusion zones in Portland, months after the Portland City Council unanimously approved them.
But one of the things I didn’t dive into as deeply was the location of the zones themselves. Because after getting a look at the map above—which also shows the data the mayor’s office and Portland Police Bureau used to draw their lines—one word jumped out before any other: “random.” And then I had some questions.
Like: Why these three zones when there are clearly other dense clusters of incidents on the map? The Eastside zone, for instance, seems like a total wobbler when you compare it to parts of North Portland that seem to have way more dots. Also, given those other clusters, why not scoot the eastern boundary of the North zone past MLK?
So I posed those seeming peculiarities to City Attorney David Woboril. Follow me to see his answers—and closeups of the three zones.
He acknowledged that the city could have drawn seven or eight zones, based on “concentrations of trouble.” But he said the city also wanted to start small and be “conservative.” Declaring more hotspots would mean more administrative headaches—while fewer hotspots, the worst of the worst, might help the city fend off any potential court challenges.
“The city can restrict access to public places if there’s a problem,” he says, “and the greater the problem, the greater the likelihood the effort can be upheld.”
That’s one reason why officials stopped at MLK. They also stopped there because they wanted the boundaries to be easy to explain to anyone on the exclusion list, meaning lots of straight lines following major thoroughfares, even if that means including, in some blocks, “okay” areas and leaving out some worse ones.
(Interestingly, that’s bedeviling officials trying to firm up the Eastside’s zone eastern boundary. That line follows the city boundary right now, and the city boundary jags and zags every block or two to capture sewer lines and other infrastructure Multnomah County doesn’t want to be responsible for.)
This seems as nonsensical as the free drug zones and the boundaries appear somewhat arbitrary.
I can’t see all the details on the map, but the northern zone looks like they have managed to capture the historically black neighborhoods of Portland pretty well. Was that the goal? Maybe the Mercury could add to Mr. Woboril’s charts and get the census track data for those areas. Oh, wait, conveniently there is no way to get the racial breakdowns because of the arbitrary boundaries…they don’t match any other data sets. In addition to a comparison to racial data, I’d like to see how it matches up with population density, or better yet, for pedestrian density.
Well, whatever further research you do, don’t get between Woboril and his overhead projector. That man loves his slides and will bore a neighborhood meeting to death with a thousand powerpoint slides just for fun. Maybe we need a pointless city outreach program free zone?
OOOhh! There’s a dot on my house!
You doofus! Are you that young naive or are you living in hipster bubble where you’re completely isolated from how PPB operates? They picked those zones because it gives the most opportunity to stack heavier charges when they randomly pull over black people.
Is it just me, or was this post hard to understand because of the lack of acknowledgment to the English language Mr. Theriault seems to have had while writing? Just goes to show what dimwits these people they call journalists really are. I’m starting to think they get them from a pool of Make-A-Wish foundation kids, stick a pin on their shirts that say “journalist” and let them live out their sad, pathetic dreams at the expense of the rest of us.
OOOhh! There’s too many dots to count on my house!
One thing to watch for—and demand—as these zones move forward: Will the list of who gets excluded, along with relevant demographic data, be made public?
And once a list is in place, how often will the city release reports on trespassing citations, contacts, etc.? The mayor has promised to do that every few months—a promise that’s not to be forgotten.
As for whether this is a tool for racial profiling, I’ve noted months before (http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/not-holdi…) that the largest of the zones neatly swallows most of Portland’s traditional black neighborhoods, and that residents there haven’t been shy about what they think this plan amounts to.
As someone who has lived primarily downtown and in North Portland, my only contribution to this conversation is… I have soooo much more street cred than I realized.
Number Six, this one’s for you: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4982015862…