OPINION | EDITORIAL: Red House over yonder

Wait a minute, something’s wrong here

It seems as though autonomous zones are so early 2020. In late 2020, they seem to be going out of style. These old-fashioned and frumpy police-free zones seem to quickly fill up with people who enjoy police-free zones, including criminals. Imagine.

After a few killings, the neighbors consider these zones poor form. And ask that the local government do something about them. That is, shut them down and bring back the police to serve and protect.

For the latest example, take Portland, Ore.--please. (Youngman, H.) For months, protesters in Portland followed the lead of their neighbors in Seattle and protested what they considered unfair treatment by creating an autonomous zone.

In Portland's case, several months back protesters surrounded a red home on Mississippi Avenue in North Portland. The people called it the protest at the "Red House on Mississippi."

The protest was at first an effort to keep a family from being evicted from a house they'd been in for decades. But the bank foreclosed, a judge in good standing said the institution was within its rights, and the Black family living there was told to move.

Soon enough, barricades to keep law enforcement out of the home--and out of other places in the Red House neighborhood--began going up. One dispatch from the Great Northwest had a journalist describe the scene as something that could have happened in Paris. What year--2020 or 1789?--the journalist didn't say.

This week, the mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, finally became tired enough of the protest to order it disbanded: "There will be no autonomous zones in Portland," he declared.

Why? Because over the last few months, neighbors of the Red House have reported "significant livability, public safety and public health concerns," according to the Portland Police Bureau. Between September and November, "at least 81 calls for service were placed for issues related to this property."

Portland civil authorities added: "Calls for service included, but were not limited to, fights, disturbances, shots fired, burglary, thefts, vandalism, noise violations, trespassing, threats, including by armed individuals, and for illegally blocking traffic, sidewalks and access to homes."

That tends to happen when the police are shooed away.

Nobody likes to hear about a family losing a long-held home. (Word has it that the family had paid off the house at one point, but had to take out another mortgage to pay for defense lawyers after a family member was arrested in 2002. Then the house went into foreclosure and was eventually sold in 2018.)

But foreclosures and evictions are done under the watchful eye of the courts and judges to make sure everything is on the up-and-up, so that Big Finance doesn't walk all over the little guy.

There are thousands of homes that go into foreclosure every year, and every one of them is a pity. MarketWatch.com said there were about 300,000 foreclosure filings in the first half of 2019 alone.

Are protesters going to surround each of these houses, create autonomous zones, and turn one house in foreclosure into a police-free crime-filled district? How does that help the neighborhood? How does that help the unfortunate family in foreclosure?

The mayor of Portland says there are other ways to protest against inequality. And these protesters must disband. We'd add that there are better ways to protest, period. Autonomous zones don't create anything, except maybe chaos.

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