I asked the DA’s office in June for updated data and was told, “In January, law enforcement started marking ‘targeted arrests’ of those engaged in the crimes related to civil unrest that involve arson/burning, property crimes, person crimes, or weapon crimes, and improved their investigative response to these priority cases. Those types of crimes are the cases District Attorney Mike Schmidt has always said he wants to prioritize.”

After I left Schweitzer, I walked up Southwest Broadway. Downtown looked brighter, from last summer certainly, but also last winter, when the place felt abandoned and ghostly. People now clogged the streets, and while some stores were boarded over, most were not.

Things seemed changed, and hopeful. I tweeted as much in a video.

The vehement pushback to my optimism was, depending on how cynical you are, predictable or astonishing. People did not want to hear good news if it conflicted with their preferred narrative that Portland was an anarchist shithole. Like the activists, they had chosen their enemies and were not interested in disturbing that picture with the reality on the ground now.

Well, too bad. Things are improving in Portland, and anyone who wants this not to be the case might ask themselves why.