Yes and it is a bright-red city and county that is entirely Republican controlled and that went for Trump over Biden 62% to 36%. So maybe it is more complicated than Democrat vs Republican and urban versus rural.Josh wrote: ↑Tue Jan 16, 2024 5:03 pm Grants Pass has a major homeless problem (and drug problem and violence problem) - indeed, that's why there's currently a case pending before the Supreme Court of Grants Pass asking to be allowed to please enforce the law even if the criminal is a homeless person, which the 9th circuit has basically said they can't do.
Of course a big part of their problem is that Grants Pass and Josephine County has defunded their police and sheriff for years rather than raise taxes. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/po ... s-policing
My town is majority Democrat and governed by the same restrictions from the 9th Circuit as is facing Grants Pass and has about the same population. Yet has a tiny fraction of the crime and dysfunction. We also fund our police and schools.Josephine County, Oregon, also found itself in dire fiscal circumstances, but the radical divestment in policing that residents opted for was as much an ideological choice, according to Anderson, as a product of economic conditions—a decline in the timber industry and a shortfall in federal funding that, for a time, compensated for that decline. In the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, budget shortfalls required the elected sheriff to cut into the bone of his department’s budget. By 2014, the 911 dispatcher had no one to send to a woman reporting that her violent ex-boyfriend was trying to break into her home; the sheriff’s office could advise domestic violence victims with restraining orders only that they might “consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement.”
Yet between 2004 and 2016, drawing on anti-tax sentiment born of deep poverty mingled with libertarian ideology, Josephine voters rejected tax proposals to support law enforcement nine times. And that gives readers a look at what defunding can look like: a sheriff’s department falling from 85 to 28; detectives laid off; and minimal police response to domestic violence and property crimes, as well as to the auto thefts in a rural county where cars are critical to everyday life and to the armed robberies of the producers flourishing after Oregon’s legalization of recreational marijuana. The district attorney’s office faced massive cuts as well. Residents further reduced police capacity by giving only grudging cooperation when investigators arrived, perhaps in homicide cases, but not even reliably in those.
