Portland Homicides Reach Highest Level In 3 Decades After Gun Violence Task Force Disbanded

As Antifa and other far-left activists have mounted a national campaign to “abolish the police” – going so far in places like Portland and Seattle as to literally fight the police while declaring so-called autonomous zones – the city that’s become ground zero for the anti-police movement has seen murder rates soar.

Fox News reports based on local crime statistics that murders are surging in Portland, Oregon. “As of Christmas Eve, this year’s shootings had surpassed last year’s by more than 116%, with 393 shootings reported in all of 2019.”

2020 numbers dwarf the prior year’s, having reached over 850 shootings. Among these are more single-year homicides than in any year over the prior nearly three decades. 

The city is so desperate that police chief Chuck Lovell is urging the public’s help in doing “everything we can together” to “break the cycle of violence.”

“Gun violence has plagued our city at twice the rate of last year,” he underscored in a public statement. “On average, someone is shot in Portland roughly every two days.”

And almost unbelievably (or actually perhaps very believable given it’s Portland), a frontline special police task force was earlier disbanded because activists claimed it was inherently racist. As homicides and shootings soared, here’s the “action” that far-left activists and woke city officials took, according to local media:

PPB’s [Portland Police Bureau] gun violence reduction team was disbanded in the summer following the criticism of advocates who said that the gun violence reduction team was stopping people of color disproportionately to others.

Chief Lovell talks about increased gun violence. pic.twitter.com/EQSCSd0IGp

— Chief Chuck Lovell (@ChiefCLovell) December 16, 2020

The dissolution of the 34-person police unit happened in July, and since then shootings across the city have skyrocketed. It was done also in the name of Portland’s “police reform efforts” in the wake of widespread George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests and unrest earlier in the summer.

A recent headline covering Sunday night violence, for example, has become typical of most weekends in Portland, which is beginning to resemble Chicago levels of violence. Police described “The number of bullets that must have been flying around our neighborhoods, city streets, sidewalks – it’s awful.” The recent headline reads, “Portland police respond to 4 overnight shootings, 2 injured” in which—

The Portland Police Bureau is investigating four different shootings after two victims walked into local hospitals with gunshot wounds overnight and two more reports were made about gunfire.

The shootings happened in different parts of the city on the east side… the third shooting of the night was reported just after 11 p.m. on SE 72nd Ave where officers found “at least nine bullet strikes to a residence and multiple casings.” According to police, bullets went through the living room of an occupied home and into multiple bedrooms. Luckily, no one inside the home was injured in the shooting.

Minutes after the third shooting was reported in Southeast Portland, a fourth was reported in Northeast Portland in the Cully neighborhood.

THREAD: @PortlandPolice have responded to over 1,200 shootings the last 2 years. Through Aug of this year, nearly a quarter were in 3 neighborhoods in East Portland. The director of Office of Gun Violence Prevention says gun violence needs to be viewed through public health lens. pic.twitter.com/Legr9hVAFd

— Wright Gazaway (@WrightKATU) December 23, 2020

Chief Lovell this week noted that though the city has taken appropriate extreme measures to curtail the spread of the coronavirus, “Violence is also a disease that kills and our community is suffering the consequences.”

The clearly corelated trend of disbanding police anti-crime units in various cities across the nation leading to spikes in violent crime should be obvious to most Americans, but it is apparently being lost on those city officials allowing themselves to be willing pawns of the woke mob.