The problems in Portland just don’t seem to end. Yesterday KGW 8 reported on a retirement community in northeast Portland where a row of campers and RVs have moved in and started preying on neighbors.

“It’s pure hell,” said Bambi Alvey, who has lived in the retirement community for 10 years. “I wake up every morning looking out my window at the homeless people looking through my window back at me.”…

“Every morning I go out, I look at my window to see what they have stolen out of my yard,” added Yvonne McKown who has been living there for eight years…

One neighbor said one of the campers threatened to burn their homes down if they called the police.

“I’m about at my breaking point. I’ve had enough of it, and I’ve been thinking about moving,” said McKown…

“At some point your compassion just runs out. You don’t have any anymore,” said [Jerome] Hulett.

What you’re supposed to do when you have a problem like this is call the police. But neighbors who’ve tried that say the police don’t do anything.

How bad is the problem? When KGW showed up this week to do interviews for this story, their reporters got robbed.

Today while on assignment at a homeless camp in NE Portland on Sandy Blvd our news car was broken into. Most of our gear and all our personal bags were stolen. pic.twitter.com/1Ccm3OYBHD

— Blair Best (@blairgbest) September 28, 2022

Police were called and showed up about 20 minutes later. By that point the thieves were long gone. Why does it take police so long to respond to calls like this (when they respond at all)? That’s because Portland continues to struggle to rebuild its police force after 2020 when efforts to defund the police and nightly riots resulted in many officers leaving the city. Recently Portland managed to hire 20 officers but Willamette Week reports it’s still 48th out of 50 large US cities in terms of the number of officers per capita.

With 791 cops, Portland now has 1.2 for every 1,000 people in the city…

Among the 50 largest cities in the United States, Portland ranks near the bottom in police per capita…

The national average is 2.4 officers per 1,000, according to the FBI, which tracks law enforcement staffing across the country. The median among the top 50 largest cities is 1.8.

WW reached out to the 10 cities at the bottom of the list for more granular detail to break a three-way tie for third-to-last place. Even with the infusion of recruits, Portland ranks 48th, ahead of only San Jose and Bakersfield.

The city says that clearing out this particular RV camp is on their radar but there’s no telling what that means. The camp has been there for weeks and this isn’t the first time it has settled in this location. One of the camp’s resident’s said this is the second time she’s lived there.

Here’s the full report from KGW. I feel sorry for the elderly residents who have to put up with this and who can’t get any help from the city or the police who don’t have time to worry about things like quality of life crimes. At some point your compassion really does just run out and all you want is a restoration of some kind of order.

Update: KGW has another story today that is in northwest Portland, not far from the neighborhood mentioned above. In this case, homeless people have been running a chop shop on someone’s empty lot. This has been going on for years and, as you’ll see, the city says it’s the landowner’s problem. (Is it just me or does the guy from the city look like Chandler Bing?)