Oregon county decriminalizes heroin, meth, cocaine and shoplifting, among others

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thrustbucket

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I don't know how legit the source is for this story but I came across it and thought it would be interesting to share here, since many of us feel we should be decriminalizing many things.

It's crunch-time for many municipalities across the United States, but for one county in Oregon, that means a little more than in most.

The district attorney in Multnomah County, the state's most populous area with over 710,000 residents, announced recently that it can no longer prosecute dozens of crimes thanks to an ever-shrinking budget.

Caught with small amounts of heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine? It's a ticket. So's a hit-and-run accident. Small-time shoplifting? You'll still get arrested, but it's still just a violation.

For these and other lesser crimes, the district attorney will simply refuse to prosecute.

Still, police have been directed to continue operating as normal, making arrests as they see fit, and it'll be up to the county's attorneys to decide what gets prosecuted.

Story continues below...


In spite of the relaxed penalties for numerous crimes, chances are the drunk driver who recently rear-ended the county's sheriff will see the business end of a judge's gavel.

But it might take a while: Schrunk's staff was recently cut by 27 percent, according to statements provided in a media advisory.

"In a perfect world, you commit a crime, you'd be prosecuted for what it is," district attorney Mike Schrunk told The Oregonian. "[We] don't have unlimited funds."

Other crimes which the county will adjust to violation level include trespassing on non-commercial property, "theft or forgery in the second degree," harassment, interfering with a police officer, interfering with public transportation, resisting arrest (non-injury) and criminal mischief in the second degree.

The district attorney's full memorandum was available online (PDF link) at time of publication.

In spite of the budgetary rue, Multnomah County is one of only a few in the nation that is piloting a program that affixes GPS tracking bracelets to youths convicted of gang-related crimes: a practice widely criticized by civil rights groups.
Click to expand...

I have mixed feelings about some of this, especially shoplifting.

This also reminds me of some of the recent threats some police departments have made in the news that if their budgets are cut too much, they will have to start ignoring certain calls.

Will this start a trend?
 
Will this start a trend? Perhaps, though few will decriminalize to such a severe extent.

This is also a way to ease the police burden while also not overpenalizing people by sending them to prison for being addicted to drugs.

People will still get fined, so 'decriminalization' is an inaccurate statement for all but a few cases.

You guys are getting the small government you asked for. Hope you're happy.
 
Welp, it would not surprise me if they started privatizing the ciminal justice system at this point. I bet private prison contractors are already lobbying for contracts. While the penalties are better for minor drug possession, I'm not optimistic about the possible solutions.
 
[quote name='mykevermin']do tell.[/QUOTE]
More privatization of prisons and cuts in other social/public services is what I'm mostly concerned about. Cuts here seem like a precursor to more drastic cuts in other needed services. Hell, they probably already cut funding to education already before they got to this point.
 
undoubtedly they have, virtually all other states have.

this is the result of Republican ideas and policies. we get the small government they wanted: ill equipped to handle offenders, ill equipped to teach children, ill equipped to improve infrastructure, and unwilling to stop ceding power to the power elite corporations.
 
Well is this really small government policy initiatives (is the Oregon Governor a Republican, is this particular county fully of R on the city councils, etc...?) or is it just the byproduct of everyone being broke? On the county level, money typically comes from property and sales taxes, I wonder if this area had a population exodus recently?
It's nearly impossible to actually cut/reduce education funding, not increasing it for a year or two on the other hand...
 
[quote name='nasum']Well is this really small government policy initiatives (is the Oregon Governor a Republican, is this particular county fully of R on the city councils, etc...?) or is it just the byproduct of everyone being broke? On the county level, money typically comes from property and sales taxes, I wonder if this area had a population exodus recently?
It's nearly impossible to actually cut/reduce education funding, not increasing it for a year or two on the other hand...[/QUOTE]

Multnomah county = Portland.

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds...051&dl=en&hl=en&q=multnomah+county+population

No exodus.

If you think it's impossible to cut education funding, you're not paying attention to the world around you. Same goes for you not seeing the nation suffering the long-term consequences of Republican 'slash and burn' policies that have eroded income for individuals (and therefore spending that would become that tax revenue). state budgets are in the shitter mainly because of investments that still have not recovered from the stock market nosedive of 2007-2008, and allocations of funds being based on the continued increase of the market.

Now, that's probably not what's harming the police budget (surely that's guaranteed), but it certainly is *killing* the higher education budget.
 
Police budgets are getting harmed as well. They're based on the tax base in the city/county so they're hit by the policies, recession etc.

Some agencies I'm working with have had layoffs, forced early retirements etc. and are thus down several officers on top of already being below capacity from prior hiring freezes etc.
 
I would imagine there would be a lynch mob of soccer moms outside of City Hall if an actual cut were proposed.

I don't know that there was an actual slash and burn between 2000 and 2008, it was more a shuffling of the cards where a few new defense initiatives were funded (mainly Homeland Security which sounds a bit too much like National Socialist Propoganda to my ears) and some (ok, many) social programs were defunded from the federal level. This hardly strikes me as a county problem though since the funding comes from within, with very little federal aid.
 
Yah, I was going to point out this includes Portland, and there is nothing in the local news that has mentioned this as a real event. I think it's rather unlikely that they would no longer prosecute drug crimes. I live in Oregon, and this would have made much bigger news if it was credible I think.
 
[quote name='thrustbucket']I have mixed feelings about some of this, especially shoplifting.[/QUOTE]

Fraud and interfering with Police business for me...mostly because I don't understand exactly what those refer to.

I work retail. Prosecuting shoplifters only works some of the time and that is primarily when you can threaten the lifter with getting their benefits stripped. It would be much better if retailers were allowed to post a 'wall of shame' with the lifter's picture and a tally of how much they've stolen.
 
1. The Jail Blazers came a decade too early

2. I'm cool with non-violent crimes getting decriminalized. Hit-and-run and shoplifting don't really fall into that, but the drug decriminalization is fine by me.
 
State and county budgets are getting slashed all over the place in Oregon. And even before the present fiscal crisis people weren't exactly tripping over themselves to vote in favor of tax increases for police/DA funding.

The title's also a little misleading. While most of this stuff is technically "decriminalized" in a practical sense, it just means the DA is going to treat them as violations -- i.e., pay the fine and go. If it makes you feel any better, most of this stuff barely rates above turnstyle jumping: low-end drug possession, hit and run driving while insured, first- or second-offense shoplifting of property worth less than $250, etc.

Besides, it's not like this is entirely unprecedented.
 
[quote name='dohdough']Welp, it would not surprise me if they started privatizing the ciminal justice system at this point. I bet private prison contractors are already lobbying for contracts. While the penalties are better for minor drug possession, I'm not optimistic about the possible solutions.[/QUOTE]

I have no doubt it will come to that. "Yes your honor, I built this jail and I pay the guards over here and for a nominal fee we will take your prisoners for you and deal with them".

But the problem is the more prisoners they have the more money they make and brings up the thought of how many will be artifically kept longer than their original sentence? Paticullary in juvenile prisons. No one really cares what happens to prisoners or pay them much attention or thought really. So putting them in the hands of private citizens who are keeping them purely for a profit like a business brings a lot of possibilities to mind.

There are already privitized prisons in america. As state and county budgets shrink I think we will see a increase in these. But as state/county budgets go down and money shrinks there will be more crime and thus leading to more privitized jails so its kind of a all consumming beast that feeds on itself.

Especially since this country is slowly becoming like the simpsons episode where homer becomes the chief of the garbage men and his slogan is "cant someone else do it?". Thats slowly becoming our motto.
 
"But as state/county budgets go down and money shrinks there will be more crime"

Please explain this correlation.
 
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