Oh, the humanity!
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nazi storm trooper preparing to round up, slaughter portland’s homeless
Portland Maine police review shows racial disparities in arrests
PORTLAND, Maine — A report by the University of Southern Maine and Northeastern University found several racial disparities in arrests among the Portland Police Department.
The report, which was requested by the department, took more than a year to complete, according to George Shaler, a senior research associate at USM.
The study analyzed arrest data from the department between 2018 and 2020. The key findings include an increased rate of arrests for Black Mainers.
It found that while Black people account for around five percent of Portland's population, they make up 17 percent of all arrests.
The highest number of arrests occurred in the West Bayside neighborhood. [Where the number of black street people far, far exceeds 5% of the city’s general population — Ed]
It also found that during the reporting period, a third of all arrests were of drug-addled street bums people experiencing homelessness.
Shaler said a correlation with those statistics is that the West Bayside neighborhood is the location of Portland's Oxford Street Shelter. [And a soup kitchen, three other shelters, and two sprawling homeless encampments, but that’s surely coincedental. —Ed]
"Right now we have a crisis of sorts, and some of that is spilling into law enforcement," Shaler said. "I think the city and the police department need to get a handle on this."
While the disparities showed a disproportionate amount of Black people pulled over on the road compared to white people, Shaler pointed out that more white people ended up getting citations.
He said the findings also came up without enough evidence to say there is racial bias among individual officers.
"That doesn't mean they don't exist, but the data we were able to look at did not reveal any bias based in policing," Shaler said.
I volunteered for several years at that West Bayside soup kitchen and came to know the neighborhood and its denizens well. The drunks and dopers are generally well-behaved, but they do act up occasionally and get into violent fights with each other, on the street and in the dining area of the kitchen. The police assigned to the area ride bicycles, and seemed to know all the regulars ( there’s a constant flow in and out of homeless beggars from other states) by name. I saw them in action many, many times, and was always struck by how gently they dealt with these castoffs; they calmed fights, called ambulances for the overdosed, and rarely — rarely — had to arrest anyone, and that only when a crazed addict continued attacking them despite numerous warnings. “No evidence of racial bias”? The only bias in studies like this is the anti-police bias in the academics studying the issue and the headline writers of news organizations.
