What happens when cities cede control of the streets to violent anarchists? Eventually the chaos leads to even greater violence, and that is what appears to have happened in Portland, Oregon over the weekend. According to CNN and the local Fox station, a group of armed protesters got into an argument with an armed homeowner, and a mass shooting erupted that left at least one person dead:

The Saturday night shooting in Portland, Oregon, that left one woman dead and five people injured started with a confrontation between an armed homeowner and armed protesters, according to a Portland Police Bureau news release issued Sunday.

Officers responded to a shooting call near Northeast 55th Avenue and Hassalo Street in the city’s Rose City Park neighborhood around 8 p.m. Saturday and found the woman dead, police said.

“The scene was extremely chaotic, and a number of witnesses were uncooperative with responding officers,” the police news release said. “Most people on scene left without talking to police. Detectives believe a large number of people either witnessed what happened or recorded the incident as it unfolded. This is a very complicated incident, and investigators are trying to put this puzzle together without having all the pieces.”

The New York Times reports that police still aren’t sure what happened or who started the shooting. One witness who did go on the record say the homeowner started the argument and the shooting, but seemed to contradict police about who was armed:

One of the victims, Dajah Beck, who turns 39 on Monday and who was contacted through her attorney, said she was shot twice. One bullet went through her side, and the other grazed her knee. Ms. Beck said she was part of a volunteer motorcade group that was working to set up a safety plan and reroute traffic ahead of the march. “We’re not part of the protest,” she said, adding that no one in the motorcade group was armed.

As Ms. Beck and the group were working, with one woman riding in the back of a truck because she walked slower and with the aid of a cane, a man approached a small group of women, screaming that they were “violent terrorists” and repeatedly calling them a misogynist vulgarity. The man said they were the people responsible for violence in the city, Beck recounted, adding that he said: “If I see you come past my house, I’ll shoot you.”

People in the group tried to calm him down. But as Ms. Beck looked away from him toward one of her friends, “that’s when he started shooting,” she said. She fell to the ground after she was shot and crawled behind a truck tire for cover. Moments later, she said, “the first thing that I saw was my two friends on the ground covered in blood.” One of them was the woman who died. Ms. Beck said that at that point, the shooter had been subdued and people were on top of him.

If that was the way it unfolded, then police would have a pretty good open-and-shut case against the homeowner — or at least enough for an arrest. So why isn’t he in custody? The police seem at least somewhat skeptical about this explanation at the moment. They certainly seem skeptical about Beck’s claim that no one at the scene was armed, regardless of what Beck says.

The local Fox affiliate confirmed these reports yesterday, but also covered the bizarre scene at the Portland police press conference. As soon as it began, a masked protester hijacked it, claiming to have been “abducted by white supremacists,” while Mayor Ted Wheeler lamented “gun violence”:

Guns are only a secondary issue here; the real problem is the abandonment of civic order by the institutions in Portland and Oregon that exist to provide it. The brief press conference yesterday demonstrates this perfectly. Rather than arrest the protester and provide adequate security for the presser, Portland police retreated back into the station and held a “virtual” presser instead. When police can’t even control their own press briefings, how are they going to keep the peace in a major metropolitan area?

That failure to keep the peace and get Portland’s streets under control is what leads to this kind of violent confrontation. It’s amazing that this hasn’t happened before now, as Portland has allowed its citizens to live under threat of violent anarchists for almost two years. The Antifa demonstration planned for the weekend used two police shootings in Minneapolis as their ostensible reason for protest, just as their long campaign kicked off with the George Floyd homicide in Minneapolis in May 2020. These aren’t political demonstrations; they have become street warfare against Portland’s businesses, its citizens, and its police.

The retreat by feckless leadership in Portland and Oregon has only encouraged the rioters. They are leaving a very dangerous vacuum in the city that will eventually get filled by violent reactions to these riots. Chaos breeds chaos, and that process accelerates once it becomes clear that law enforcement has become non-responsive to public order. That moment may have already come, and until Wheeler and Oregon governor Kate Brown take firm action to impose law and order on the city’s streets, the situation will degrade rapidly from here on out.