News/Commentary

‘Our city is in peril’: Portland shop shuts down due to ‘unrelenting’ crime, leaves scorching note on door

November 27, 2022 | | Print Article

A Portland raincoat shop owner has permanently shuttered her store because of all the incessant crime in the far-left utopia.

Moreover, Marcy Landolfo has shuttered her Rains PDX shop in the most conspicuous way possible — with a large note on the store’s front door.

“Rains PDX was a locally-owned small business. But, due to the constant, and unrelenting, criminal behavior, coupled with escalating safety issues for our employees, we have decided to permanently close,” the note reads.

“Our city is in peril. Small businesses (and large) cannot sustain doing business, in our city’s current state. We have no protection, or recourse, against the criminal behavior that goes unpunished. Do not be fooled into thinking that insurance companies cover losses. We have sustained 15 break-ins… We have not received any financial reimbursement since the 3rd,” it continues.

The note concludes, “Portland has always been known for its thriving and abundant local, independently owned, small businesses. If small businesses are forced out, then our city will have lost a lot of what makes it a unique and desirable place to live. Please do your part to support small businesses, this holiday season, and beyond. Please be vigilant in voting to make our city safe again.”

Look:

According to local station KATU, Rains PDX shop has been burglarized 15 times in the past year and a half alone.

“It’s just too much with the losses that are not covered by insurance, the damages, everything. It’s just not sustainable,” Landolfo told the station.

“The problem is, as small businesses, we cannot sustain those types of losses and stay in business. I won’t even go into the numbers of how much has been out of pocket,” she added.

She meant how much she’s spent out-of-pocket to fix the damages incurred from the endless burglaries.

Asked why she’s just now closing shop, she said it’s because it’s just not worth it to put up expensive winter products for sale, only to see them get swiped.

“The products that are being targeted are the very expensive winter products and I just felt like the minute I get those in the store they’re going to get stolen,” she said.

Rains PDX was last burglarized in October. At the time, KATU reached out to Mayor Ted Wheeler, and he told them that he was working to increase funding to a business repair program called Prosper Portland. However, Landolfo says the program isn’t enough.

“Paying for glass that’s great, but that is so surface and does nothing for the root cause of the problem, so it’s never going to change,” she said.

She’s got a point. The problem is that Portland is a lawless city brimming with far-left extremists and weak-kneed prosecutors but too few police officers. So few, in fact, that local small business owner Loretta Guzman commented to Fox News earlier this month that “it’s like they almost disappeared”:

“A lot of people feel really unsafe. They’re angry, they’re sad, they’re mad. They feel helpless. They feel they don’t have a voice. They have questions like, ‘Where are the police? How come they can’t come?’ We used to see them all the time,” she added.

Guzman owns Bison Coffeehouse, a coffee shop that recently tried to allay the public’s fears by hosting a “Coffee with a Cop” event.

However, the event fell by the wayside when a group of left-wing extremists showed up days beforehand and trashed the place.

“Around 2:51a.m., officers responded to a report of vandalism at the Bison Coffeehouse in the 3900 Block of Northeast Cully Boulevard. When they arrived, they found windows had been broken, property damaged, and white debris from a discharged fire extinguisher throughout the interior,” local station KPTV reported last month.

As previously reported, Portland has in recent years become one of the nation’s most anti-police cities. And within this timeframe, the city’s violent crime rate has likewise surged to unprecedented highs.

“Violent crime surged 38% in Portland between 2020 and 2021, according to FBI data, outpacing the rest of the country. Property crimes like car theft and vandalism also increased from 2020 to 2021,” according to Fox News.

“The average response time for a high-priority call was 20.4 minutes in October … the slowest it has been in at least six years. PPB defines high-priority calls as those in which people or high-value property are in immediate danger,” the outlet reported earlier this month.

Dovetailing back to Landolfo’s note, take heed of how she urged people to “be vigilant in voting to make our city safe again.”

To their credit, some Portland residents have been doing exactly that. Indeed, during the midterm elections earlier this month, they ousted the city’s anti-police, pro-criminal commissioner, Jo Ann Hardesty:

According to The Oregonian, she lost specifically to political newcomer Rene Gonzalez, a pro-police candidate who wants to re-fund the cops.

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Vivek Saxena
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