Bloc Watch
An Anarchist, a Homeless Family, and a Pedophile Hunter Hear a Firework...
Rose City Park may be the perfect nexus of Portland neighborhoods. Nestled between Cully, Mt. Tabor, 82nd, and Hollywood, RCP is the perfect mixture of homeowner NIMBYs, RV and tent campers that the NIMBYs constantly antagonize, renters in houses and medium density apartments of varying levels of shitty upkeep, and a substantial public housing block. Despite being a neighborhood with its own Light Rail (Max) stop it hasn’t seen the same type of expensive luxury apartment and condo complexes other parts of town have. No, instead we got a high rise storage facility and an industrial/logistics park.1
Now imagine that the year is 2020.2 The city is on edge. We’re in the midst of the historic uprising after the police murder of George Floyd, already months into daily protests thru downtown Portland and even at times thru our neighborhood near the Portland Police East Precinct.3 People of all stripes are not only pissed, but taking some sort of action in all facets of life it feels. Trust with the cops is at a low and rightfully so. We seem poised for some wack shit to go down even closer to home.
One night I was watching a movie and out of the corner of my eye I saw a rainbow explosion outside my neighbors RV accompanied by an ear rattling BANG—the telltale sign of a firework.4 My partner-at-the-time was convinced it was a gunshot, but I noticed the colors and said I would go out to investigate.
The rain had just stopped but the street was still a slippery mess of mud and apples long since fallen and rotten in the street. I wore sweats and a hoodie, the early winter version of a Tony Soprano robe. Down the block two people approached running across the busy street. One was a White woman in a Backwoods hoodie with a lip piercing and the other a man in full Black Bloc: zip up hoodie, jeans, combat boots, tactical belt with a Glock and a taser visible, and black bandana covering his face. The man spoke first, “Did you hear that gunshot? Did you see where it was from?”
“Yea I saw it, but it was a firework not a gunshot I think. Saw the lights go off and think they aimed it at this RV.”
My neighbor Benjamin watched us from the doorway of his RV about 30 feet away. His five-year-old, had woken too and so his girlfriend tried putting him back to bed. I introduced myself to the two neighbors from across the street and asked them their names.
“I’m Allison,” the woman in the tie-dye sweater said, like a normal person.
“‘Gabriel’” the guy in Black Bloc said, using air quotes around his ‘name.’ “I’m with the Neighborhood Block Watch.”
“What is Block Watch?”
“Well we heard the gunshots and came right over,” ‘Gabriel’ continued. “Did you know about the stalker in the neighborhood? He’s been harassing my friend, through a brick through her window so I’ve been roaming the neighborhood nightly to make sure he stays out. Here take a flier and if you see this guy email us.”
The man flier was simple—a protonmail email,5 and a couple blurry security cam photos of a man identifying him as a peeping tom and alleged pedophile that slept in a nearby camp.
“Someone told us they saw him masturbating in front of people inside the Plaid Pantry last week,” ‘Gabriel’ said. “Just wanking himself in front of kids and screaming at people if they got close. Week before that he crawled up onto a second story balcony and was looking inside a little girl’s window.”
Benjamin walked over to us to get a poster and took a drag off a spliff he’d just rolled.
“Hi I’m ‘Gabriel’” the man said, again using the air quotes. “Have you seen this guy?”
“Yea I’ve seen him around a bit, heard about him breaking into people’s homes,” Benjamin said accenting each sentence with a breathy nervous chuckle. “Scares me, we have a little one in there. So many people bother us, banging on the RV, we hear everything. But I’m going to protect the boy no matter what, nobody is getting inside our place if I can help it.”
“This type of behavior really just doesn’t belong here,” ‘Gabriel’ said. “We have to do something.”
“Have you called the cops?”
“Uhhh no,” ‘Gabriel’ tells him. “There’s no reason to call the cops. You should just email us here if you see anything.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“We’ll make sure he doesn’t come around here anymore.”
“But what does that mean? Are you just going to beat him up? You think that will stop him from creeping on the kids?”
“But why do you trust the police to solve this?” ‘Gabriel’ offered. “We protect us.”
‘Gabriel’ was clearly getting antsy when he had a hard time reassuring Benjamin. It was a difficult if not obvious line of question. ‘What are you going to do differently?’ It just seems so simple, and while it’s a question that can be used in bad faith in defense of police violence the kernel of this anxiety of what is possible for some random neighbor's response is real. It’s hard to have a good answer for because we really don’t have good ways of dealing with violence. Benjamin stood there silent, and looked at ‘Gabriel,’ his brown eyes the only thing visible above the bandana.
“At some point you have to trust someone,” Allison said, taking a drag from a Camel Crush she’d just lit and popped. “Someone has to do something.”
Benjamin’s family is one that I had gotten really close with during their years living next to us. They got robbed several times by one of our neighbors. They constantly faced the brunt of loud and dangerous people zooming past them on the street in trucks or banging on the side of their home. But more than anything, my experience getting close to them was the months long protracted battle with the police and parking enforcement6 sending green slip sweep ‘eviction’ notices, and me stepping out to try and give the police the run around with their status so they:
1. Didn’t sweep their camper
2. Didn’t give them a fucked up charge
3. Didn’t let them know about their kid they were worried the police would try getting CPS involved with.
Whether that was a realistic threat or not, this was a family that did not trust the police. Their first instinct was to rely on their community and each other to protect one another. Fiercely loyal hippies that cared deeply about their kid. Their son, who dressed in Spiderman costume everyday from Halloween to Christmas,7 was our only trick-or-treater from the neighborhood every year.
Yet with ‘Gabriel’ their instinct was to trust the legal process and specifically not the self-proclaimed “block watch.” I think it might go without saying that Black Bloc certainly had its place in the protest movement of 2020 with a need to be anonymous in the face of a police force’s brutal repressive response, but does little good in the way of building trust and relationships with the people around you. In fact it’s purpose is sort of to avoid the type of relationship building required for ongoing community organizing. Who knows why he chose to bring this persona outside of the protests, to avoid using a cringe dumpster fire cliché: 2020 really did melt our brains a bit.
I kept talking to ‘Gabriel’ while they split the menthol. When Benjamin went back into his RV, ‘Gabriel’ eventually revealed that he actually didn’t live in the neighborhood at all and was actually there because Allison had this creepy stalker throw a rock and break her front window a week before. She thought it was the same alleged pedophile guy they were hunting, but they weren’t sure.
A few weeks later the Oregonian wrote an article about the “Block Watch” neighborhood response to the pedo and sort of went for the angle of “we don’t have enough police anymore” to respond to actual crimes since everyone hated them and they were so understaffed with all at the protests. And it was true that nobody was there to respond to the pedo when he started publicly masturbating outside the Plaid Pantry. The Plaid Pantry clerk even told us he had it on CCTV camera and sent it to the cops.
I ran into Allison and ‘Gabriel’ again, only this time a middle aged Black man in a brown Adidas tracksuit had joined their posse. ‘Gabriel’ had declared victory, saying that the “community had won the fight.” The pedo had been chased out. Nobody had seen him for a few weeks at this point. They flyered the homeless camp where many of the residents immediately recognized the guy and went on about how they could not stand him and how he acted like a creep around them too. A few of the people living in the camp even knew the places he liked to stay and keep his stuff. Not a few days later Block Watch heard reports that the guy had been taken care of. That “he knew not to come around the neighborhood anymore.” That’s all the details I got.8 And “Gabriel” said Block Watch was sticking together.
“There is so much going on here, so much we can change,” he said.
That’s hard to argue. If you looked at Nextdoor everyone complained about the Meth/Fentanyl trap house a block down that “nobody has acted on for years,”9 or that some other neighbor was running a chop shop which had his “friends” coming in and out of with UHauls’s to take away parts. Then there was the general NIMBY outcry against the encampment on the street between the Catholic Printing Press and Normandale Park. The same one that had actually gotten the “alleged” pedo to leave the neighborhood. Then there was the fascist who would go on to shoot five Black Lives Matter protesters, killing one woman at the same park a year later. It was clear RCP had its share of problems and that they were far from united on a response. How this group was going to attempt to address it or how they engaged with our neighbors over the amorphous issue of the month was unclear.
As far as I know the police never really came. The Oregonian reporter never followed up. And despite our last conversation about Block Watch sticking around to patrol the streets, I never did see ‘Gabriel’ again.
A few months later while walking my dog to the park I noticed the guy in the track suit playing with a Pomeranian in front of a duplex one block from my house. A woman was grilling beef strips on a circular coal grill in their front yard. It was bitterly cold and raining, still well before “grillin’ n chillin’ season. The guy and the Pomeranian had a tennis ball, so I took my dog across the street so she wouldn’t pull me into the midst of their game of fetch. We didn’t talk or anything, just gave each other the classic “guy nod.” In the front window of his duplex he still had a 8.5x11 printer paper poster. A simple black text on a white background that read: Block Watch.
Try and move that developer fucks.
I know, really hard, really annoying.
More specifically a Mortar for those of you who order these things out of a hollowed out shoe catalog in a souvenir shop in Chinatown.
There were also at least two other groups with Gmail accounts asking to get info from neighbors about the man.
I once got into a screaming match with a Portland Bureau of Transportation Officer who said that their camper was making it difficult for cars to turn and that if they had a kid living in their RV they “we’re irresponsible” so by kicking them out they were actually helping them.
My little brother also did this one year when he was six.
Security culture and all.
The inaction on this being a “years long problem” sort of flies in the face of the Oregonian reporting on the protests causing the police inaction, but i digress…