NE is shitty in a few certain parts, but not as bad as you describe. you can go to a few places around portland that are as bad as NE...like st johns, or downtown near chinatown.
and correct me if i am wrong, but not many people in portland are shooting people up. the worst story on the news most nights is that some homeless guy got mugged.
in any case, i live a happy little life on the far west side of portland metro, but this story made me worry...
I watch a lot of the news around here (terrible news casting btw) and compared to the news in the Bay Area where I originated it is worse up here. Every week it is a shooting in Gresham, or officer down somewhere off of 99w. December was was like 3 gang shootings and a Mosque bombing. I would say officer involved shootings where some dumb shit is wielding a knife or attacking the cop is probably 3 times as common up here.
The homeless problem aside (because the bums here aren't like the Hippy bums I'm used to in Santa Cruz and San Francisco) I still think that the crime in this city is consistently more aggressive than I've seen in California. I came up here and saw people with Viking BBQ's on their back porches, bikes not locked up, and the like and figured the amount of violent crimes would be less than I'd experienced in the Bay Area.
Not the case.
I'm not going to say that the entire east side is "ghetto" but what most of it is, is 1960's/70's cookie cutter single story homes. Lot of them with peeling paint and dead lawns. A lot of low income housing as well. Anywhere in the country you find these things AND a Martin Luther King Blvd... I dunno... Not a place I'd send my girlfriend alone to, not without mace and a knife.
North East, just west of the Airport is a little nicer, but it really depends on what block you are on. Where the NE Lombard house was is pretty iffy. The house on the west side is up in the hills, that's where the grow was, and I'd expect there are MANY houses in those hills who manage not to get caught up.
Oh, and this kid got hauled in for distributing. He hooked up his buddy. He also had $1,000 cash in his room (I had a bank account when I was 14...). This was not some personal stash grow. They got sloppy. They got caught. They weren't obeying the rules.
The teenager was booked into the Juvenile Detention Home on a charge of delivery of marijuana.
OMMP requires that you register the location of your legal grow with the number of plants you intend to maintain. If you do not do this you are not afforded the protection of being a medicinal grower. It is my understanding the address was not registered.
One of the many issues with the Med system up here if you ask me is the registration thing. I think that is why the whole collective thing is so popular. Get a few people together to all name a single location as the grow address and that helps protect the other people from registering their homes as medical grow houses.