One man is dead and at least five others, including a teenager, are hospitalized after a mass shooting in Northeast Portland early Sunday — another weekend, another body count in a city that has gutted police staffing and watched progressive prosecutors walk away from charges.
The shooting happened around 3:30 a.m. Sunday in the Cully neighborhood on Northeast Alberta Street, the Oregonian reported. By the time officers arrived, the shooter or shooters had already fled. Two victims were found at the scene with gunshot wounds; four more injured drove themselves to the hospital in private vehicles. One man later died. Police have released no suspect information and no details on the surviving victims' conditions.
This is what public safety collapse looks like. Portland has spent years trimming police budgets and electing district attorneys who treat prosecution as optional. The result: shooters operate with impunity, and working Portlanders pay the tab.
Eight hundred miles east, a different city, the same disease. Boston police arrested two men Thursday for a knifepoint robbery in Dorchester. Deivi Yoander Sanchez Aguasvivas, 24, and Luis Miguel Ramirez-Astacio, 26, allegedly rode up on a blue moped, jumped a walking victim, and stole her chain and wallet at knifepoint, Boston.com reported. Aguasvivas was arraigned Friday and ordered held without bail pending a dangerousness hearing — at least someone is being held.
But Ramirez-Astacio tells the real story. Police said he had an outstanding warrant from Suffolk Superior Court on two counts of assault to rob, two counts of assault and battery, five counts of unarmed robbery, one count of unarmed assault to rob, and one count of assault and battery on an elderly or disabled victim. Eleven charges — including violence against the elderly — and he was still on the street. Still on a moped. Still robbing people at knifepoint. The system had every reason to lock him up. It didn't.
The Oregonian covered the Portland shooting as a standalone crime brief — no mention of police staffing levels, no context about prosecutorial policy, no explanation for why officers arrived to find a scene already cold. Boston.com noted Ramirez-Astacio's outstanding warrant but didn't dwell on it: a man with eleven pending violent charges, free to terrorize Dorchester, treated as a detail rather than the headline.
The thread connecting these cities isn't complicated. When district attorneys decline to charge, when courts release defendants with pages of priors, when police are too stretched to arrive before shooters vanish — ordinary Americans absorb the damage. The teenager shot in Portland. The woman robbed at knifepoint in Boston. The elderly and disabled Ramirez-Astacio's warrant says he already assaulted.
The public safety collapse isn't a theory. It's a body on Alberta Street and a repeat offender on a blue moped. How many more weekends before someone answers for it?
