I'm from Portland. For the record, I don't think this experiment has worked. A PI friend of mine told me that this decriminalization has led to people in Oregon

I'm from Portland. For the record, I don't think this experiment has worked. A PI friend of mine told me that this decriminalization has led to people in Oregon shipping drugs all over the country. It's anecdotal but dealers can just make it seem like they are holding drugs for themselves (which is perfectly legal) so that theory sounds right to me. But there is a lot more here than this article lets on. The murder rate was shattered. But that's because Portland had one of the lowest rates at 30 for almost 700k. Compare that to almost any big city. It starts getting to be a dangerous city at 30 per 100k, and Portland is still far from even being in the top 50 most dangerous cities by murder rate. Also, the previous murder rate was set in the 80s when the population was half what it is today. When the are 180 murders per year that is when we should consider the record "shattered." If you review the Twitter feed of the Portland police you'll see almost all the murders occur at 2 am and in a few districts like old town. Just saying, if the police spent as much time patrolling those districts as they do screeching on Twitter about how they have to shut down all other police work when a car jacker makes the news, maybe the murder rate would go down. Also, when I looked, Portland police had very consistent public information about their police results, and it often looked like that was not the case in other places which claim to be working to reduce crime. For example, for months the Lincoln Nebraska page that reported police work was just completely down. I'm not saying the police are creating a false narrative, but they aren't fighting it, and the Portland police are really upset about those protests in Portland that were some of the biggest and most persistent in the country. I definitely see a huge difference between now and ten years ago in a very very bad way. I never felt uncomfortable in most places in Portland before but now every neighborhood has people in horrible situations, often looking violent. It's hard to know if that's all the pandemic, or decriminalization, or the housing boom. I'm sure it's a combination of it.