All along, the most frustrating part of Portland’s downward spiral was how blasé city officials were. Call the police, and they say they’re too busy. Report a homeless camp on an elementary school playground, and it’s still there, months later. Call in an open-air drug market, and nothing happens. Report your twelfth break-in this year, and the city sends thoughts and prayers. If the cops do manage to nab the culprits, the county often puts them right back out on the street.

But Portland is now scrambling to hire as many new police officers as it can, with as close to unanimous approval as one can reasonably expect, though training new hires and shepherding them through the academy will take time. The city is also rolling out new Portland Street Response teams to deal with nonemergency mental-health and behavioral-health calls, which became an increasingly heavy part of the police workload before the cops became too overwhelmed to handle it anymore. …

At least rhetorically, elected officials are taking these problems seriously. “A significant number of people on our streets are very unwell,” the mayor said. “We did this to ourselves, and we did it intentionally with 30 to 40 years of neglect of our mental health infrastructure in our state. It took decades to get where we are, and it’s going to take a long time to dig ourselves out of the hole.”