From the Portland Mercury:
Crying Wolf: If Portland Tourism Dies, You Can Thank Downtown Business Interests and the Police
Portland—once thought of as a whimsical doughnut-land filled with jolly weirdos on bikes—now has an absolutely terrible national reputation that’s less of a Portlandia episode, and more like one of Dante’s various levels of hell.
How did we get here? Well, zooming out, you can largely thank the national media (particularly FOX News) who often parroted willfully misleading police reports from last summer’s protests, and depicted events that were often confined to a few blocks as if the entire city was a war zone.
So who’s behind these wildly exaggerated visions of Portland reflected in the national media? Well, for one, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB), who between May 29 and November 15, 2020 declared 30 demonstrations as “riots.” Apparently all it takes to declare “a riot” these days is a very small percentage of a crowd throwing plastic water bottles and shaking fences.
While the disinformation campaign waged by the police has helped drive a lot of anti-Portland sentiment nationally, it’s been downtown business interests (led by Portland Business Alliance lobbyists) who have been pushing this message locally, waging a non-stop crusade to amplify random acts of graffiti and window-breaking and portray it as full blown crisis.
See, it’s the business owners and FOX NEWS that are giving Portland a bad reputation. They are doing it for… reasons.
I mean, why should you believe them when a Majority of downtown Portland merchants say city core is unsafe.
In a survey conducted between Nov. 15 and Dec. 31, 2020, 62% of downtown businesses owners said that the central city was no longer safe, a nearly threefold increase from when the survey was last conducted in 2018.
The merchants surveyed also expressed increased concerns about vandalism and graffiti, a lack of cleanliness and rising homelessness in downtown.
That’s bad, right?
Or how about when Businesses across Portland raising alarm about surge in vandalism, burglaries.
Forbes even published an article titled Death Of A City: The Portland Story?
It lays out the same charges against Portland, homelessness, vagrancy, crime, riots, theft, etc.
Insurance companies are not wanting to cover Portland businesses or are charging very high premiums for coverage.
Data from last summer concluded that Portland business lost $23 million due to the riots. Given that they continued till today, you can at least double that number.
So who are you going to believe, all these business who complain because they are suffering and want the government to fix the problem, or some Leftist opinion writer?
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