The iconic Nike store in Portland, Oregon has been closed since last fall. There has been a sign on the door reading “closed for the next seven days” for months. The reason for the closure was obvious. The store was being looted so often that it wasn’t profitable and the regular presence of criminals inside the building made the environment unsafe for workers or customers. Earlier this month, Nike sent a letter to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler pleading with him to help with the security situation. They proposed two plans that would allow Portland Police to provide security inside the store and the company was willing to foot the bill for their time. But as of now, the city is not dispatching any police to help and they don’t expect to do so for some time to come. (Post Millennial)

On February 9, Nike sent a letter to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and city officials asking for more police at their MLK Community Store, which has been closed for months because of ongoing retail theft, with the shoe brand even proposing to pay law enforcement directly if it would bring them the protection they were requesting.

According to KGW8, Nike proposed two options. The company was open to creating an “intergovernmental agreement” with the city of Portland to directly fund full-time police officers who would be selected to police the store. A second option would be to pay off-duty Portland Police Bureau officers as contracted security.

The two obvious questions to address here are why Nike can’t provide its own security and why Ted Wheeler’s government isn’t offering any help. The answer to the first issue is simple enough. Nike does have security officers, but they are not allowed to physically intervene to prevent people from committing property crimes. They can only step in if someone is physically attacked.

The looters figured that out pretty quickly and just began robbing the store in front of the security guards with impunity. And you never know when one of them might turn out to be violent, so safety remains a concern.

Nike wants actual police officers in the store because they could intervene and arrest the looters in the act. That would send a powerful message to the “looting community,” letting them know that the candy store is closed and normal shopping could resume. Nike is willing to either set up a method for them to pay the police directly or to hire off-duty police.

But the city insists that neither plan will be possible for the time being because they just don’t have enough officers to cover their current shifts across the city. They are already paying overtime just to put enough cops on the streets and there are none to spare to help Nike reopen. The city is trying to hire more police officers, but they do not have enough interested recruits who have passed the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training.

What we’re seeing here is clearly part of the hangover from the “summer of love” in 2020 and beyond. The police in Portland were demonized by liberal protesters and their own government. Portland slashed the police budget in June of 2020 in response to the BLM riots and crime predictably soared. They partially restored the police budget in November of 2021, but it was too little, too late. Now they are going through the long process of trying to reestablish enough trust with the law enforcement community to attract qualified candidates and bring the Portland PD’s staffing levels up to where they need to be. And in the meantime, the Nike store remains shuttered.