Crime Story

The real criminals, in conservatives’ view, are people who don’t share their panic

Maybe you’ve seen this absolutely insane story from Portland, about a middle-aged white commuter/”financier” in a Mercedes SUV who shot a guy in a road rage incident downtown, then shot a witness, then took off before (I assume) talking to his lawyer and bringing himself in, claiming that he had felt “threatened.”

The punchline in the Oregonian story:

The attack came as Portland tourism officials warn that open drug dealing and drug use has. has put the city’ visitor industry in jeopardy.

Those of us who have been around the block find this amusing because we are familiar with the “open drug dealing and drug use” lament — as well as the “shoplifting at Walgreens” and “bums shit in the street” variations — and we know that rich honkeys doing road rage murder is not what the promulgators of CRIME OUT OF CONTROL stories are usually envisioning, except perhaps as part of their own personal Falling Down fantasies.

But conservatives nonetheless will throw anything into that bonfire to get it to blaze higher; at rightwing makework project The Post-Millennial, for example, the chosen factotum bookends her account of this story with “There's no question that violent crime has desecrated the city of Portland; however, a shocking road rage incident that resulted in the murder of a driver and the shooting of a tourist has left the community stunned” and “Portland is well-known for being a murder hotspot, with 101 homicides recorded at an all-time high in 2022.”

This is pretty much like the House Republicans being too back-stabby and self-centered to elect a Speaker, then blaming the Democrats for it — an obvious but popular absurdity, the reason for which is worth considering.

This story comes on the heels of a really terrific article at Judd Legum’s Popular Information about how, though government numbers show violent crime going down across the country, news outlets continue to talk as if it’s spiraling out of control. Part of that has to do with the post-Murdoch tabloid tradition of getting attention by claiming crime waves. But much of it is just the modern practice of the prestige press to repeat conservative talking points, despite all evidence, lest they be accused of ignoring (or, worse still, attempting to refute) the frenzy into which conservatives have whipped their readers.

I am not vulnerable to that, so it’s my custom in these HOMICIDES AT ALL-TIME HIGH cases to run the math and say, “hmmm, so the population of Portland is 641,162, meaning 0.01% of the population was homicide victims — similar to the rate in, say, Ron DeSantis’ hometown of Jacksonville, Florida.”

That’s usually when the screaming starts — with accusations that I don’t care about murder victims (a lot of whom are black! WHO’S THE REAL RACIST LIBTARD) and grim warnings that one day I will be murdered and then let’s see how I like it.

Regular readers know that I have been living in big bad cities since New York in 1977 and may surmise that I am not insensible to the danger of crime in such places. (Morons like to claim all urban liberals reside in gated communities and thus have no idea how the unprotected masses live.)

But I have to say — and I apologize for my indelicacy here — that when you choose to live in cities, particularly if you can’t afford the heavily patrolled enclaves (like where the Portland shooter lives), there’s no way around it, you’re taking a risk. A lot of people find the risk worth it for a variety of reasons, such as access to employment, culture, and other people who know how to read.

Some would rather not accept that risk, and God bless them. But they still obsess on the allegedly intolerable crime in the cities where we godless liberals live, and rage at city-dwellers about it.

You might wonder: why do they even care? Sometimes this obsession is associated with a paranoia that urban criminals (you know how they picture them) will, assisted by liberals, find a way to overcome the large barriers built to contain them and invade their suburban redoubts and rape and rob and murder them. That’s a lot of what the whole 15-minute city panic is about.

But as I’ve said about other things that enrage conservatives about liberals, a big part of it is simply outrage that some people want something different than they want. And I think I know why this is intolerable to them: They do indeed imagine a “criminal” invasion of their own territory — not by actual footpads and cut-purses, but by city ways that may attract and ensnare their children and their younger neighbors.

We keep hearing from conservatives about how people are moving from the big blue cities to red states — but at the same time (sometimes in the same breath) they also complain about how those newcomers vote for the same blue-state policies and candidates they left behind.

To me this is easy to figure: Blue cities are expensive because so many people want to live in them, and when their residents can’t afford them (alas!) they are forced to go to less popular and cheaper red states — but, unlike the wingnuts the New York Times like to showcase, they don’t adopt the rightwing values of their new neighbors.

This is part of what I meant when I wrote about conservatives’ fear of the Contagion of the Cities: An increasing number of people have lived in such places and have seen neighbors of different kinds coexisting in a busy, productive place ornamented by education and culture, and have decided they like it. But such a vision is anathema to conservatives, who know their creed thrives on division, ignorance, and fear. So they howl that the cities are not only too dangerous to live in, but full-on dystopias, and even when their fellow rageaholics go into those places and exercise their Second Amendment rights, like the Bernie Goetz and Daniel Penny episodes it’s just more proof that cities must be denounced, sealed off, and prevented from making their kids feel as if there could be any other way of life possible but what they’ve decreed for them.