A woman who was once an Oregon state legislator now rails on the radio every Thursday morning, more often than not about how quickly the police label black males as gang members. While I don’t doubt that there are assumption issues at the police department, prior to a few days ago, every time I heard this woman start in, my reaction was not aimed at the issue but at her. People are armed. People are violent. If that rage is organized in the form of a gang, what’s wrong with saying so? I don’t think the subject of violent crime should be thrown off stage for the sake of a discussion about language.
A friend of mine with whom I’ve been talking politics for more than 20 years now recently came to visit, and that’s the example I shared with him when we started talking about how quickly liberal people enter the realm of the absurd. And not an hour later we were driving along East Burnside and my friend – who has listened to a fair amount of grousing from me over the years about my neighborhood – commented that the area didn’t look that bad to him. And then we turned on to my street, and down at the intersection where I live there was such a spectacular display of lights – red, blue and white – that it appeared Christmas had arrived a few months early.
In stark contrast to the collective preference for YouTube videos over actual local news shown by each of the four major television stations in Portland, each of those stations had a van, a camera crew and a reporter on my block by 9 a.m. on Saturday. By Monday, the Oregonian – our ever-shrinking daily newspaper – had run not one, not two, but three stories on the incident in the Metro section. On Monday afternoon – three days after the incident – I looked down my street toward Glisan and saw an antennae shooting up into the sky, which was attached, I noticed as I walked down the block, to a van emblazoned with the KGW logo. I wandered down and asked the reporter, the same one who had gone door to door on Saturday morning with his camera guy, if any suspects had been caught. Nothing new, he told me. I must have given him a look that asked him why, if there was nothing new, he and his crew were getting ready to broadcast live from my block, because he added, This is an update story. As I was walking away I noticed dozens of switches and levers on a control panel on the side of the van. What fun it would have been to just start pushing and pulling and flipping. By Tuesday morning, when I turned my computer on for the first time since early Friday afternoon, there were dozens of e-mails sent out via the neighborhood listserv – a mixed blessing, to be sure – and it was the content of those messages, along with the headlines written by the Oregonian and the drive-by reporting, if it can be called that, on our local network affiliates, that caused me to reconsider the conversation I’d had three days earlier about ridiculousness.
By the time I pulled up to the corner where I live on Friday night, the entire block was marked off with yellow crime scene tape. It was attached to my fence and a strand of it had been wrapped around one of the columns on my front porch. My friend and I ducked beneath the tape strung across the front walk and came inside and enjoyed the lights of the two police cars parked not 20 feet from the living room window.
What happened on Friday night is that 40 bullets, or 40 rounds of bullets, or 40 rounds of gunfire were exchanged from one side of Glisan Street to the other. Two people were shot at a place called People’s Bar and Grill and taken to the hospital. Many reported seeing young men fleeing the scene on foot and in cars immediately after the sound of gunfire. I’ve heard that there were three men, and I’ve heard there were 20 men and I’ve heard pretty much every numerical combo between the two.
What happened very shortly after daybreak on Saturday morning was that the word “gang” began to feel like little nails hammered into my ear drums. The police issued a statement saying that the city’s gang task force was looking into the incident. “Gang” was the first word in the headlines in the Oregonian. The television people used the word “gang” in almost every sentence of their reports. The use of the word “gang” was the least offensive aspect of the wisdom issued forth by the listserv warriors, who shared endless tales of the “gang bangers” that, according to the mostly unsigned writers of the e-mails, have always hung out at that particular establishment and the “no questions asked” leasing protocol for the apartments above it, about how scary it is around here, about how someone – maybe someone’s child! – could have been seriously injured, about one element and another moving in and out, about weird looks exchanged by someone or another a couple of years ago, about the concerns of “gang-related violence” expressed by a business owner who asked not to be identified, and so on and so forth.
I started pondering the term itself. When someone says “gang” in Portland, it means a group of three or more black or Latino males who are adolescents or older and who are prone to violence. There’s a slightly different nomenclature for Asian gangs. Describing them requires two words rather than one: Asian gangs. For some reason, I started wondering if there are any Native American gangs. I’ve never heard that term, but if they exist I’d be curious to know more. And I’m not sure what a group of white males who dig violence would be called. The police department, perhaps. Or KGW.
I expect the worst from the media outlets and the Internet, but I found the misinformed, generalized, half-assed, accusatory hysteria vocalized up and down my block a lot more disturbing. I do not mean to make light of lots of bullets exchanged in a way that would do the magistrates of the Wild West proud, but I don’t think it’s as alarming as forging a link between that incident and the black woman who lives across the street and has a lot of visitors, or the influx of newly homeless who were supposed to arrive in Portland after Hurricane Katrina (but never did) or “them Mexicans” who came to Oregon, according to local legend, from the barrios of Los Angeles, or the black people who scattered throughout Portland during the rebuilding of Columbia Villa a few years ago. All of this insight – and so much more – by Tuesday afternoon.
Which brings me to the ridiculousness issue. I’ve asked many people how it is that they’re so certain that the shooting was in any way related to or caused by a gang, and the most common answer thus far is that sureness up and down our lane here is based on the fact that the two guys who were injured are, according to the Oregonian, refusing to cooperate, from their hospital beds, with the police. Given the swiftness and certainty with which they were labeled “gang bangers” not just by the media but by the court of the neighborhood, I don’t blame them for not cooperating. Nor do I plan to continue thinking of a former state legislator – who is a black woman – becoming agitated over the use of the word “gang” as an overreaction. I think the correct word is response.
