Like many cities with a serious housing problem, Portland is increasingly relying on private security to “clean up” the human debris of capitalism.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

During a recent visit to Portland, Oregon, my husband and I watched a private security guard help up an unhoused man from the sidewalk. Three white women looked on at the interaction that took place in the trendy Nob Hill neighborhood on August 7, 2023, right in front of a yoga studio.

But the guard was not responding with compassion. Seconds earlier, the tall and very muscular man sporting a flak jacket emblazoned with the word “security,” had walked right by me toward the unhoused man and savagely knocked him to the ground without provocation or warning. Blood streamed from the victim’s face and onto the sidewalk. He stood up as the guard hovered over him and stumbled toward the damaged glasses that had fallen off his face during the assault. The guard, who was twice the man’s size, picked up and offered him the hat that had also fallen off his head and ushered him away.

It’s increasingly common to see private security guards patrolling the streets of Portland—considered one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Not only are businesses banding together to pay for private armed patrols, but even Portland State University is using such a service on its campus. The city of Portland also recently increased its private security budget for City Hall by more than half a million dollars to hire three armed guards.

The trend is a knee-jerk response to sharply rising homelessness. There are tents belonging to unhoused people sprinkled throughout downtown Portland and Nob Hill. Like much of Portland, many of the unhoused are white, but, as Axios in a report about a homelessness survey pointed out, “the rate of homelessness among people in the Portland area who are Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander grew more rapidly than among people who are white.”

Three summers ago, Portland—one of the nation’s whitest cities—was also an epicenter of the nationwide racial justice uprising in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “There are more Black Lives Matter signs in Portland than Black people,” joked one Black resident to the New York Times. As Donald Trump’s administration sent armed federal agents to Portland to quash the uprising, the city’s residents and officials came to symbolize a heroic resistance to rising authoritarianism.

The brutal savagery of what we witnessed in Nob Hill was in jarring contrast to the signs, stickers, and posters that many Portland businesses continue to display on their windows, declaring that “Black Lives Matter,” or “All Genders are Welcome,” and that promise safety to everyone. Everyone but the unhoused, apparently.

Shocked by the violence of the security guard’s assault, my husband and I confronted the perpetrator. He responded that hours earlier the victim had allegedly assaulted a woman in the neighborhood. In the seconds before he was attacked, however, I had walked within a few feet of the unhoused man as he muttered to himself in what sounded like a mix of English and a foreign language. The man had been minding his own business.

In a detailed three-part investigation for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) in December 2021, Rebecca Ellis examined how businesses have begun paying unknown sums of money to hire private security patrols. According to Ellis, “Private security firms in Oregon are notoriously underregulated, and their employees are required to receive a fraction of the training and oversight as public law enforcement.” She added, “They remain accountable primarily to their clients, not the public.”

Business owners and residents are claiming that rising homelessness is the result of increased drug addiction, forcing them to resort to private security. But researchers point to high rents and a lack of affordable housing—not drug use—as the cause of people living without homes.

As we responded to the assault against the unhoused man with an appropriate level of shock, the three white women who had also watched the incident unfold rushed to the guard’s defense. They seemed to know instinctively by our visible horror that we were visitors to the city, and informed us in no uncertain terms that the guard was simply doing his job. “Leave the poor man alone,” said one of them, sporting what appeared to be scrubs (I wondered, was she a health care worker?). She wasn’t referring to the victim, but rather his assaulter.

Meanwhile, an employee of prAna, the storefront where the attack took place, shooed us away from the still-wet blood spatters that now stained the sidewalk. He used a spray cleaner to wipe away the evidence, seconds after I photographed it. The yoga studio, which also sells high-end clothing, boasts on its website that the Sanskrit word for which it is named, is “the life-giving force, the universal energy that flows within and among us, connecting us with all other living beings.”

Although the unhoused man bled the same way as any of us would, he was not seen as a living being in the moment that the security guard brutally slammed him into the sidewalk. He was an inconvenient object, a nuisance, marring the enjoyment of consumers who simply wanted to practice their mindfulness without having to face the ugly underbelly of racial capitalism.

The consequences of private muscle are as serious and as potentially deadly as state power. In 2021, a private security guard named Logan Gimbel was sentenced to a life term in prison for fatally shooting a resident named Freddy Nelson with an unlicensed firearm. Ellis reported in the second piece of the OPB series that a private security guard working for a company named Echelon had engaged in a brutal assault on a 46-year-old unhoused woman named Katherine Hoffman. The assault sounded similar to what I had seen happen in Nob Hill. When speaking with police, the guard who beat Hoffman with his baton bizarrely claimed it was the baton that did it, not he. “I had it in my hand, I didn’t hit her with it,” he told police. “But it did hit her.”

The mercenary reliance on private security is embedded in a belief that Portland’s police have been “defunded.” But detailed analyses such as this one reveal that it is not true that the police force has been stripped of funding. As was the case in many American cities, Portland’s city council representatives initially paid lip service to racial justice protesters in the summer of 2020 by voting to make modest cuts to police budgets, only to restore them merely months later.

There is indeed a serious problem of homelessness in Portland and the business owners who have resorted to private security claim they simply want to “clean up” the problems that the city refuses to. A political battle is ensuing over allowing homelessness to flourish rather than cracking down on the unhoused.

But there is a glaring omission in the police-versus-private-security and violence-versus-the-unhoused fights, and that is the fact that Oregon is simply an unaffordable place to live. One economist told OPB’s April Ehrlich, “We have the worst affordability… Low vacancies and high prices… [are] indicative of a housing shortage.” According to Ehrlich, “Oregon is among states with the lowest supply of rentals that are affordable to people at or below poverty levels.”

When housing is in short supply and rents are out of reach, it’s inevitable that the number of people without homes will rise. Hiring private security firms to supplement policing does little to address this systemic cause of homelessness. Just as the yoga studio’s employee cleaned away the blood of the unhoused man from the sidewalk, the use of private security is intended to sweep away the human detritus of economic injustice.

About 30 minutes after the assault that I witnessed took place, the Portland police showed up, blocking the intersection outside the yoga storefront with a large patrol car. Were they on the scene to arrest the security guard, I wondered?

No. We spotted the guard walking freely on the sidewalk and then disappearing into a nearby store, which was presumably one of his employers. Meanwhile, the police officers had placed the unhoused assault victim in the back of their patrol car. We offered the cops our testimony, but they appeared uninterested. Ultimately, it was clear to us that the guard and the police were both paid to lock up the unhoused man (who clearly needed mental health treatment), in service of their wealthy white patrons—Nob Hill’s business owners and residents.

Unless city, state, or federal governments directly address the fact that the rent is too damn high and wages are too damn low, people will continue to lose access to housing and services and find themselves on the receiving end of blows and batons from either private guards or the police, as business owners and wealthier residents look on with approval.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

COMMENTARY FROM A BADASS WOMAN 

I seems like Mother Nature had plans for us and it didn't include posting to websites and social media.  The situation, while consuming several days of our time, fortunately ended very well for us.  No wind damage, no flooding.

But, of course that has not been the case for many thousands of other people and the storm continues to cause problems for many more.

It seems there isn't a day that goes by that doesn't include weather disasters and/or gun violence or both.  How much more bodily harm and destruction and how many more deaths must occur before Congress comes together and agrees on ways to stop it?  Disaster is knocking on our door.  We can either take action to bar it or we can sit and wait to be destroyed. Hey guys, thoughts and prayers don't cut it anymore.

Even if you agree something must be done, if you do nothing, you are contributing to the problem.  There is strength in numbers which cannot be denied.  But time for action is running out.  Let's stop p------ Mother Nature off and get gun controls!  NOW!

Neither the corporate media nor our politicians who are beholden to corporate lobbyists honestly address the common root causes of (and solutions to) worker exploitation and climate change.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

As temperatures soar in the United States this summer, some among us are lucky enough to be able to remain in air-conditioned interior spaces, ordering food, groceries, clothing, and other products to be delivered to us. The rest, toiling in the extreme heat to pull products off hot warehouse shelves and drop them off curbside in scorching delivery trucks, are risking health and even life. July 2023 marked the planet’s hottest month on record. In San Bernardino, California, where retail giant Amazon has a massive warehouse and fulfillment center, daily temperatures reached triple digits for the majority of days in July and have been dangerously hot all summer. Workers with the Inland Empire Amazon Workers United (IEAWU) protested the dangerous conditions and complained to CAL-OSHA, the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health. One worker, Daniel Rivera, told Fox11, “Amazon’s main focus is production. Safety is not the priority until it’s too late.” What we are witnessing with such increasingly common instances is capitalism-induced climate change intersecting with capitalism-induced labor exploitation. It’s a deadly combination and one that is being discussed in ways that obscure its causes and solutions. Take the corporate media, whose coverage has focused on the pro-business buzzword of “productivity.” CBS worried in an August 1, 2023 story, “How Hot Weather Affects Worker Productivity—and What That Means for the Economy.” The New York Times similarly lamented in a July 31, 2023 headline, that “Heat Is Costing the U.S. Economy Billions in Lost Productivity.” The cost to the economy (a euphemism for stock values and profit margins) is the bottom line—not the safety and health of human beings. Therefore, it matters a great deal that, as per the Times, “more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure.” The Times story quoted R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist, who was concerned that workers’ “performance declines dramatically when exposed to heat,” and therefore “hotter temperatures appear to muck up the gears of the economy.” How inconvenient the corporate-induced climate crisis has been to the performance standards of corporate-driven worker exploitation! We oughtn’t to be surprised that in an economy designed to see workers as units of production for a profit-driven top-down system of exploitation, corporate media coverage would spout such callous narratives based on internalized capitalist values. President Joe Biden’s administration, on the surface at least, appears to be centering worker safety and well-being. In late July the president asked the Department of Labor to “issue the first-ever Hazard Alert for heat,” and to increase enforcement of heat-related worker protections. “The Hazard Alert will reaffirm that workers have heat-related protections under federal law,” announced the White House. The Biden administration pointed out proudly that it “has continued to deliver on the most ambitious climate agenda in American history,” and that, in contrast, “many Republicans in Congress continue to deny the very existence of climate change.” Yet, in its first two years, the Biden administration actually approved more oil and gas drilling permits than in the first two years of the previous Republican administration of Donald Trump. A 21-year-old climate activist, Elise Joshi, confronted White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in late July 2023, saying, “A million young people wrote to the administration pleading [for it] not to approve a disastrous oil-drilling project in Alaska and we were ignored.” The video of Joshi’s brave action has gone viral. If Biden truly cares about the health and safety of working people in a warming climate, and about the future of young people like Joshi, he has the power to do much more than merely enforce safety standards—which is a band-aid solution and won’t do anything to stop global warming. The Center for Biological Diversity has devoted an entire website, BidensClimatePowers.org, explaining what the president could do immediately, without needing congressional approval. The recommendations include refusing permits for fossil fuel projects, as Joshi pleaded for him to do. Neither the corporate media nor our politicians who are beholden to corporate lobbyists honestly address the intersection of worker exploitation and climate change. They neither pinpoint the common cause—corporate greed—nor do they identify the common solution—ending corporate greed. The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were a practice run for what is currently transpiring with the climate catastrophe enveloping the planet. Even those who had the luxury of working from home during the lockdowns were measured by their productivity. At first corporate America celebrated because people worked harder from home than from their workplace, freed from time-consuming commutes and the distractions of in-person camaraderie. Now, as many workers are realizing they don’t want to be cogs in someone else’s wheel, Fortune.com blared the headline, “American Worker Productivity Is Declining at the Fastest Rate in 75 Years—and It Could See CEOs Go to War Against WFH [Work From Home].” Meanwhile, those whose labor our society relies on were labeled “essential” and sent off to work, braving a killer virus, often without adequate safety measures in place. Even working in a grocery store during the lockdowns cost people their lives. A third of all workers in the U.S. were deemed essential. Unsurprisingly, they were disproportionately low-income and people of color. We can expect the same to transpire in a warming climate as people like Daniel Rivera, the Amazon warehouse worker in San Bernardino, toil in the burning heat in order to keep the wheels of productivity turning. Just as corporations care little for worker lives, the climate crisis is the predictable outcome of an economy designed to maximize shareholder profit, not ensure a viable planet for future generations. Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson connected the dots in his novel New York 2140. “We’ve been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who make the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth,” said Robinson. We cannot rely on fiction writers painting dystopian futures to be the only ones identifying the common root causes of climate change and labor abuse. The current design of our economic system privileges the well-being of only 1 percent of all humans. Whether it’s a deadly virus or the deadly climate, unless we clearly identify the systemic problems and redesign our economic system to center the well-being of all human beings, the future will not be livable, rendering discussions of “productivity” moot in the deadliest possible way. Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.  This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

COMMENTARY  FROM  A  BADASS  WOMAN

Recently a reader of womensvoicesmedia.org emailed suggesting we might consider posting a guide about online safety for LGBTQ+ people.  The guide he suggested turns out to be quite good. 

The information it contains is not only beneficial for the LGBTQ+ community but for anyone experiencing online bullying and/or harassment.   Author of this guide, Sarah Turner provides very clear and concise details on what you can do to protect yourself in a number of different situations and on the most popular social media sites.

The guide is a fairly long read but the value of the information makes it well worth your time.

Read "Most LGBTQ are Cyberbullied. Here's How to Stay Safe Online"

https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/lgbtq-guide-online-safety/

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EDITORS NOTE:  The Resource Library on womensvoicesmedia.org provides you with information and help on this and many other issues, concerns, and interests by, for and about women.