Portland re-arms cops, and a Criminal Loses vs. Police K-9 (posted 5/1/23)

April certainly ended with a bang for me.

In case you missed a previous column, I’ve been in TN for the last week with my wife and Wonder Dog, spending time with my octogenarian mom while my sister and her husband were enjoying a well-deserved vacation.

When my wife came down with covid on Monday, she tried to stay rested and separated as much as possible from mom and I.  Still, we had a good week and a great visit, with me driving mom around to various nice areas of town, taking walks and having some good conversations. 

I drove her past the previous two houses she’s lived in, and although she didn’t remember the houses when I described them, she remembered the names of the streets they are on, and she remembered the houses themselves when we drove by.  In the evenings we watched some old family videos that my sister recently had converted from old videotapes into electronic copies.

We watched a lot of past Christmases, some birthdays and celebrations with my daughters when everyone was a lot younger and skinnier, and some family gatherings with my mom and dad’s siblings, most of whom are gone now.

We also saw a lot of videos of my dad, and I was happy to recognize how happy those made mom.  I’d feared that seeing dad – who passed in 2014 – would be tough on her, but it was quite the opposite.  And as with many who have Alzheimer’s, mom’s memory of those days from decades past were much clearer and more accurate than her memories of very recent events.

It was a great time, and since my sister and her husband got back home today, Karen and I will drive back to Florida tomorrow.

On the downside, my mom caught covid, and one of my sister’s dogs had a really frightening seizure last night!

Sadly, I am not making that up.  And yes, I recognize that “momma got sick and the dog had a seizure” sounds like a very bad country music title.

Mom is doing very well so far, with the only real symptoms being a super-stuffed-up head and a bit of fatigue.  Since she had covid last year and recovered pretty quickly, we’re hoping for the same this time.

Edgar the dog seems to be doing well, too.  My sister spoke to a 24-hour vet and my wife looked at info on dog seizures on the internet.  (I know: if you can’t trust pet health info you find on the internet, what can you trust?)  The seizure looked very violent and freaked everyone out, but it only lasted a minute, after which Eddie quickly bounced back. 

My brother-in-law is taking her to their regular vet this morning, and we are hoping for the best.    

So after all that, this will be a shorter than usual column, focusing on two good-news stories.

First in Portland, OR – a town that has produced very few positive stories as of late – the far-left administration of Portland State University showed that (all recent evidence to the contrary) they are not completely ineducable.  

You may remember that just last week, city officials in San Francisco voted to rescind their idiotic, self-defeating ban on dealing with yucky conservative states who don’t favor voting fraud, and abortion in the third trimester.  Well now, PSU’s leaders similarly reversed themselves, dumping a policy passed in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd riots – er, “peaceful protests with just a dusting of arson and other felonies” – that disarmed campus police.

 A campus cop spokesman at the time said, “We can do an effective job without weapons.  I know [campus police are] talented to do their jobs without the use of a weapon.”

I’m not making that up.  I guess the idea was to meet any violent criminals who posed a danger to the students with a potent combination of harsh language and scowls of disapproval.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the MSM reporting on this story were shocked – shocked, I tells ya! – at what happened next: “But then crime increased three years in a row across Portland. The city smashed its previous homicide record in 2021 and again last year. Many businesses have fled the city due to repeated burglaries and vandalism.”

I love the way that quote starts: with a “but.” 

Anybody with any common sense and a basic grasp of how conjunctions work would know that that sentence needs to start with the “cause-and-effect” relationship indicated by a “so” or a “thus” – “We disarmed the cops, SO crime rates exploded.” – not a “but,” or a “however,” or even a “who’d a thunk it?”

My favorite part is that the poor spokes-dope who bragged in 2020 about how cops didn’t need to carry weapons to do their job was the same one who had to announce the humiliating about-face:  “Recently, our officers encountered individuals on campus with weapons.  This has made me make the hard decision to have more armed patrols on campus.”

Listen.  Do you hear that?   It’s the sound of millions of normal Americans slapping their foreheads with their palms.

I guess PSU expected that their cops were only going to be called to dorm-room bull sessions on philosophical questions that got a little too heated, or maybe some pillow fights in sorority houses.  Instead, criminals did what criminals do… and that caught the big brains at PSU totally by surprise.

Great job, Sherlock!

Speaking of happy endings to crime stories, I don’t know if you caught the tale of Matvey Klimenko, 38, a resident of Jacksonville, Florida.  On April 12^th, Klimenko armed himself with a knife and broke into his ex-girlfriend’s house and threatened to kill her.

“Hey Martin,” you’re not saying, because you know better, “Klimenko was probably a hard-working taxpayer with a clean record and a long history of treating women respectfully, wasn’t he?”

Prepare to be shocked: ol’ Matvey K seemed to have gone pro in the lucrative field of being a career criminal and recidivist piece of s**t.  He had a long rap sheet, including multiple domestic violence charges.  Several women – including his mom and sister! — had filed restraining orders against him.

In fact, cops say that he had previously “harassed and stalked his ex-girlfriend, threatened to kill her and held her at both gun and knife point.”  When she moved to get away from him, he managed to find her at her new address.

She was able to barricade herself in a bathroom and call the cops.  And because Jacksonville isn’t in CA, IL or NY, he was not immediately released on his own recognizance and given a key to the city and an apology for the inconvenience.

Instead, a SWAT team and hostage negotiator showed up, and spent several hours trying to reason with Klimenko.  He managed to flee from the house, and when officers spotted him, they pursued him, firing less-than-lethal rounds at him.  (I would prefer they use more-than-lethal rounds, but I would also settle for just-enough-to-be-lethal rounds.)

They also used a tactic that is dear to my heart: they released a police dog on him.  K9 officer Zeke went after him like a fur missile, cornering him between two houses, and going for his legs.  Klimenko managed to get hold of Zeke’s vest with one hand, and raised his knife in the other.

That’s when Zeke’s handler yelled, “Don’t let him stab him, don’t let him stab him!”  (You can see the whole thing on a video released by the Jax PD.)  

After a few commands to drop the knife, SWAT team members shot the evil thug in my favorite way for criminals to get shot:

Repeatedly!

To re-cap: Klimenko crushed it at the “room temperature challenge,” his ex has been sleeping well for the first time in a long time, and Florida is a safer place today.

Oh, and who’s a good boy?

ZEKE! 

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Portland State Police Chief Barney Fife, 2024!