Transitions

Second PIT treatment today. Rain, mist, falling petals.

Sue has gone down with a cold; I’m taking Zicam (zinc) and hoping to fend it off.

News of the week: Early last Friday, the Mayor of Portland proposed hiring another 93 police officers and arming them heavily, his idea of how to make us safer. The next day an imposing white man named John Elifritz had a mental health crisis, shouting and gesticulating at people in their cars. Several called the police. Early in the evening Elifritz entered a shelter for unhoused men and began cutting his own neck. Twenty fully-armed police officers in body armor showed up, and within a minute eight of them had fired their guns at Elifritz and he was dead. A group of unhoused men were attending an AA meeting at the shelter, and several of them recorded the self-harm and the killing on their phones. Anti-policing activists in Portland immediately arranged a vigil and a protest, but some of the man’s family and friends were uncomfortable with those who came forward to comfort them. We learned that Elifritz and some of his family belonged to a white supremacist organization. Activists maintain that extrajudicial police killings are unacceptable in every case, and that Portland needs fewer police and more services for people with mental illness. I’m with them. A detailed news story is here.