Window breaker in the Pearl District.

What a crazy early morning.  Being the occasional night owl that I am, I was taking my dog out to use the bathroom when I saw some guy in dark clothing and a hoodie covering his head, a backpack and a 4 foot long object.  As he walked down the block, he stared straight, never looking around -- he didn't see me staring at him while he was walking, just 200 feet away.

Instinctually, it felt like this picture was all wrong, so I walked towards him, and as I was about to reach around the block, I heard the sound of breaking glass.  Rushing to the corner I saw that he was whacking the windows at Jim Stevens, and I turned around and called 911 immediately.  Even though I had a 911 shortcut on my home screen, it still took me some time to get the darn thing.

 -- An aside.  911 shouldn't require you to wait for their recorded message to play through, before you can say, "911" in order to get through with an emergency.  I'm having a heart attack, and you want me to wait 5 seconds to get through the recording?  That's just wrong. --

Unbeknownst to me at the time, someone had already called 911 and the police were en route to the scene.  I saw a police car with its lights flashing (no sirens) as it turned the corner, three blocks down, and I told the operator that I could see a patrol car, as I started gesticulating my arms directing the officer in the right direction.

I lazily turned around, thinking there's no reason to rush around the corner, just in case there's a gun fight (hey, you don't know what people are carrying these days, now that half of America seems to have gone off the deep end and bought millions of new guns in the last two months).  I could see off in the distance (about 250 feet away) that they had surrounded him in front of the Low Brow.  It didn't seem like he was cooperating, as they had guns drawn on him for what seemed like a minute or two.

They zapped him.  It turned out those were tazers, and, in my opinion, they showed a lot of restraint (kudos to Portland Police) that I wouldn't have had, if this guy had broken into my place or vehicle.  Most people who have had their vehicles or places broken into, know exactly what I mean.

So anyway, having walked the dog many times in the wee hours of the morning, I've learned some things:

• Most incidents occur between 1:30 and 3:30 am, when it isn't raining;
• They've ranged between vandalism, breaking and entering, theft, drunk drivers, and disorderly conduct by drunk people;
• There might be bicycle patrols (for different buildings) and the one guy who rides the Segway going from door to door, but I've never seen them around when I run into crime in the Pearl; they're almost always a half dozen blocks away from anything that might be trouble, and they're usually just looking out for the buildings they're responsible for;
• Those building security cameras are fairly useless, because they have terrible resolution and frame rate, and in the case of my building, a long time ago someone broke it, and the perp's image was not captured.

If I were in charge of coming up with ideas to stop crime in the Pearl, this is what I'd suggest:

• Concentrate patrols between the times bars close and when the first people start showing up at 24 Hour Fitness (like I said, most crime I've seen happened between 1:30 am and 3:30 am);
• Pay people to report crimes; I find it hard to believe that there can be so much crime in the Pearl when I see delivery trucks, taxis, the newspaper delivery cars, the street sweepers and the flower basket watering trucks at all hours of the night and early morning;
• Replace the sodium-vapor orange streetlights with white LEDs, and replace the fixtures so that the lights are pointed downwards instead of out and up, in order to make the streets brighter at the street level while giving eyewitnesses (and security cameras) the ability to accurately see colors of the clothing, skin and vehicles of perps.