When visiting our previous house on Gantenbein, in N. Portland, a goodly percentage of visitors would remark upon our security or safety. There were lots of suggestions of us getting an alarm. There was lots of uncomfortable giggling about the drug deals going down in front of the house. Yet I never felt that my safety was in danger.

There’s a difference, you see, between the types of crimes I witnessed at my old place versus what has happened in the first few weeks of living in our austere Victorian giant in a very established neighborhood in SE Portland.

On Gantenbein, most crimes fell into two categories:
1) Directed. This especially applied to violent crimes. I was never concerned about getting shot, particularly, though shootings did happen in our neighborhood. Thing is, they weren’t random. The perps were aiming.
2) Crimes of extreme convenience. Yeah, if you left your $1000 bike on the sidewalk, it might disappear. Put the same bike behind a fence and it stays there. At least for us, for the time we were there. For example, I did have a keg stolen from the back of my house, where it sat, visible from the street, after a party. But we also had a Schwinn in our backyard, unlocked, for a good year or so.
3) Drugged-out jerks. Fortunately, we escaped this. But our next-door neighbors were burglarized, their house ripped up, mere days before we moved to SE.

What the Buckman neighborhood has brought us is a kind of crime that pisses me off more than any: vandalism and crimes of no use to the criminal except to make you really mad.

David parks his BMW motorcycle outside by the curb. In the first week we lived in our house, a group of punks knocked it and our neighbor’s scooter (parked next to it) over. For the hell of it, as far as we can tell. Our neighbor said she heard the crash and ran to the door to the sounds of a group of rowdy idiots laughing down the street. It did so much damage to her scooter that it’s still in the shop. David’s turn signal and windshield were both broken to the point of requiring replacement.

A few days ago, some jerk yanked on the sparkplugs of David’s motorcycle, managing to rip a wire in half that is going to cost $85 bucks to replace, not to mention the pain-in-the-ass factor. If the perpetrator had actually stolen any sparkplugs, I might assume it was a drug-paraphenalia-related crime, but they didn’t.

Now David parks his motorcycle in the garage, but really, what gene or conditioning or gender or upbringing brings out vandalism in people? What force drives this? It’s so foreign and despicable to me.