AMAC Exclusive by Clayton Fuller

Crime in Portland, Oregon has been skyrocketing since city officials decided to defund the police and the county’s radical prosecutor, Mike Schmidt, began refusing to prosecute crimes and even major felonies beginning with last summer’s riots. Now, Schmidt and the other leftists running Portland have lost all control over the city, which has become a center of chaos and mayhem, and they are suddenly racing to reverse the policies and positions they have advanced for the past year.

In June of 2020, Portland officials voted to defund the Portland police budget by $16 million, which included the elimination of a gun-violence reduction unit. At the very time Portland was being overtaken by violent rioters and Antifa activists were laying siege to a federal courthouse, Schmidt sat down with an Antifa militant named AWKWORD — whom Schmidt called one of his “old buddies” — and accused federal law enforcement of “Gestapo like tactics.”

In August 2020, Schmidt refused to prosecute nearly 70% of criminal cases arising from the violent riots. He publicly asserted that the criminal justice system was built on a “white supremacist culture” and that he viewed his position as District Attorney as part of “the symbiotic relationship between people who are advocating for abolition [of prisons] and those of us working within the system.” Schmidt noted that: “[W]hen I ran, I talked about needing to shrink the criminal justice system[.]” He argued: “[W]e have defined what public safety means by what it means predominantly for the white culture. And we are hearing loud and clear from people that are not of that culture and that ethnicity, that they’re not into what we have defined public safety as[.]”

“I mean, if there’s a dystopia going on,” Schmidt said at one point, “that’s the dystopia that’s happening on our streets, it’s being caused by the Trump administration. We need to get them out of here.”

While the Trump administration has left, there is no doubt that Portland has turned into a dystopia of crime. Recent data from the National Fraternal Order of Police shows that Portland’s homicide rate has skyrocketed by an astounding 800% in the first five months of 2021 compared to the year before.

Now, Schmidt has endorsed refunding the police and is begging for the federal law enforcement officials to come to Portland’s aid – the very same people he previously demonized. The city is seeking help both from the FBI and the ATF due to the unprecedented increase in homicides. Schmidt recently noted that the Portland Police Bureau is “spread thin and being forced to triage the cases that they are working.”

In fact, Schmidt now says, “some cases…are just not being worked because the [Portland Police Bureau’s] resources are spread so thin.”  As a result, he has turned to federal law enforcement agencies to fill the gap.

Portland Police Association Executive Director Daryl Turner recently told NBC Nightly News that “we’re dealing with rioting at a level and sustained violence that we’ve never seen before…gun violence like we’ve never seen before…at the most catastrophic staffing levels that we’ve ever seen before.”

The violence is unrelenting, and so are the costs, including overtime for the law enforcement officers who are being asked to take on extra hours to curb the brutal crime wave. Much of that cost, however, will be covered by the federal government. In Portland, Schmidt and Democrat city officials helped tear down the blue wall that protected the city, and now they are hoping that American taxpayers across the nation will bail them out for their failures.

Clay Fuller served as a White House Fellow from 2018-2019 advising senior Trump administration officials on special operations oversight at the Department of Defense and advising the Office of the Vice President on countering the opioid epidemic.  He is an experienced federal, military, and Appalachian prosecutor as well as a reserve military officer with a decade of national security experience.  Follow him on Twitter @Clay4MainStreet and on Facebook at Clay Fuller: Main Street Patriot.

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