Jazz, John, and I have all written at least a bit on the “urban doom loop,” in which the Democrat policies of the past few years have led to a death spiral of disaster from which it will be very difficult to recover.

COVID lockdowns drove workers out of the cities, criminal justice reform and tolerance for riots unleashed hell upon the citizens and business people who live and work in downtowns and surrounding areas, and middle-class and business flight has been depressing tax revenues, making it difficult for cities to reverse course and revive the livability of the city.

Add in a dash or two of homelessness, drug abuse, and teens run amok and viola! Urban doom loop.

Portland is perhaps the most damning example, where tolerance for riots, crime, homelessness, drug use, and street camping had made the urban core look like the third world. Retailers are fleeing, including Nike’s flagship store which at one time helped revitalize a struggling neighborhood.

Things have gotten so bad in Portland and other cities that there has been an explosion in the number of private security guards hired by local businesses.

Now private security guards don’t generally have police powers, so their ability to address the problems are constrained, but they are better than nothing. Unfortunately, as the Times shows, the jobs are stressful beyond belief.

Michael Bock was still on his way into work for his shift as a private security guard when he came upon his first emergency of the day. He drove into downtown Portland, Ore., a little after 6 a.m., and saw a man swinging a hatchet and chasing someone into the street. Bock, 46, pulled over and rolled down his window. “Security!” he yelled. “Can we please settle down?”

“He put his hands on my drugs,” the man with the hatchet shouted. “I’m going to kill him!” He jabbed his weapon at the air as the person he was chasing picked up a rock. Bock watched them circle each other and dialed 911. “A call taker will be with you as soon as possible,” the recording said, and he waited on hold as he steered his car farther into the street, wedging it between the two men, honking his horn and sending them off in opposite directions as a dispatcher answered the line.

“We had two transients in a street fight, but it looks like they’re dispersing,” Bock said.

“All clear?” the dispatcher asked. Bock glanced back toward the street, where one man was about to get on a bicycle with what appeared to be a gash in his arm, and the other was still carrying a hatchet and muttering to himself as he headed down a popular jogging trail.

“I guess so,” Bock said. “For now.”

He hung up and continued driving into one of the many American downtowns where one crisis now spirals into the next, as spiking rates of homelessness, drug overdoses, violent crime and psychosis threaten to overwhelm the public safety infrastructure once considered basic to the country’s major cities. Average police response times have increased by as much as 50 percent over the last several years in dozens of places, including New York City, New Orleans and Nashville. In Portland, a record-breaking number of daily emergencies has strained every part of the system: 911 hold times have quintupled since 2019, the average police response has slowed to nearly an hour, firefighters work overtime to handle more overdoses than actual fires, and each week there are no ambulances left to respond to hundreds of medical emergencies.

Who could have guessed that systematically destroying the public safety infrastructure would have such dire results? Defunding the police, closing down the “school to prison pipeline,” legalizing drugs, and embracing rioters were supposed to create a utopia.

Apparently not.

His job was mostly to help businesses deal with the impacts of public drug use and erratic behavior, and over the last few years he’d come to know dozens of regular offenders by name. There was Stephanie, who sometimes stole diapers for a newborn baby that existed only in her mind; and Christopher, whom Bock had resuscitated after an overdose only to see him smoking fentanyl again an hour later; and Stephen, who had a history of violence and was now standing naked in the middle of Third Avenue, wearing only his left sneaker, gyrating and yelling something about how he was a sumo wrestler.

Bock pulled over and dialed the Police Department’s nonemergency line to report a mental health crisis, but the call was disconnected. He called again and waited through a series of recordings. “When call volume exceeds the number of available phone lines, your call may be disconnected,” the recording said, and the line went dead.

This is Portland, Oregon, what was once one of America’s nicest cities to visit. But decades of liberal policies, and a third of a decade of radical Leftist policies have destroyed what was once a model for how progressive government was supposed to work.

Conservatives knew all along that these policies were the equivalent of eating the seed corn. The policies seem to work for a while, but only because it takes a bit of time for the sinews that hold society together to completely fray. Once they do the results are catastrophic.

The Times’ story studiously avoids laying the blame where it belongs, and focuses on “underinvestment,” but we all know exactly what is happening. A group of ideological radicals were elected into power, supported by liberals who refused to face the harsher realities of how societies function. Simply put, norms and laws are the only barriers to the takeover of our society by those who are unwilling or incapable of participating in it.

Addictive drugs and mental illness are incompatible with civilized behavior–and tolerating their takeover of our urban core helps neither the afflicted nor the society as a whole. The addicted and the ill are miserable, and their occupation of our cities immiserates everybody else.

Our 911 system is getting hammered this morning with a multiple person incident – multiple overdoses in northwest park blocks.
Please do not call 911 except in event of life/death emergency or crime in progress (or chance of apprehending suspect).
For non-emergency please use…

— Commissioner Rene Gonzalez (@CommissionerRG) October 2, 2023

By now it is obvious that tossing the severely mentally ill out onto the streets was a disaster for everybody, and tolerating open drug use had led to nothing but misery. Neutering law enforcement eliminated the last barrier to barbarity becoming the norm in urban cores.

Private security guards aren’t the answer. They aren’t even a Band-Aid. Their spread is an act of desperation.

Liberals tug at our heartstrings, arguing that harsh measures against people already suffering are cruel. And they have a point. We needn’t be cruel to people when they are down.

But we first have to restore order before all else, lest our civilization disintegrate. That requires the end of street camping, intolerance to drug use, incarcerating criminals, and, yes, hospitalizing the mentally ill.

It isn’t compassionate to leave people rotting in the streets. It is morally lazy. If it takes harsher measures to restore order than we would like, then that is what it will take. The alternative is allowing both the cities and the street people to rot.

That is crueler still.