A Portland mother is aghast that officials in Maine’s largest immigrant city are now accusing concerned parents of overreacting to an attack last week on a young child.
“Strange” was Avery Yale Kamila’s reaction to a “press release” the city issued downplaying a King Middle School student’s getting grabbed by a stranger while walking to school on Thursday.
The so-called press release was issued after The Maine Wire published a story citing Avery’s concern about the incident.
“City Hall does not want a community conversation about the safety of children, which is what I’m trying to get going,” Kamila said.
The incident Thursday involved a man grabbing a 14-year-old girl by the wrist while she was on her way to King Middle.
A teacher nearby “intervened, and the man left the area heading east on Park Avenue,” cops said. “The student was not injured.”
“Not injured” is a nice cover when the result is no physical injury. Code for “nothing to see here folks.”
“Officers located and interviewed” the suspect, police said. “After investigating the circumstances, it was determined that the incident was not nefarious in nature.”
“Not nefarious.”
After downplaying the incident as, aw heck, nothing but an innocent wrist-grabbing, cops avoided further investigation of the incident by blaming the girl’s parents for “not wanting to press charges.”
And police even went a step further in their don’t-look-at-us approach, defensively appending their laughable press release with a “list of back-to-school safety tips for children walking.”
So now cops in woke Portland are so afraid of being labeled “anti-immigrant” they’re blaming not just allegedly over-reactive parents but innocent kids doing nothing more than walking to school.
Kamila said “the safety tips offer nothing for students who have to walk through a human-trafficking corridor.”
She said kids walking to school have been “repeatedly harassed, threatened, solicited for sex and chased by unhoused individuals loitering on the streets.”
The attack Thursday on a student came just weeks after another student was victimized by a perv in Deering Oaks Park exposing himself to children near the school.
“Nothing nefarious.”
Kamila, a food writer ranked by polling firm YouGov as one of the most popular columnists in the U.S., has become the de facto spokeswoman for concerned parents partly because some of them are immigrants afraid that if they go to the cops they’ll be deported.
“So much for City Hall’s claims to be promoting equity,” she said, noting that the city’s official version of the school attacks is coming from unelected staff, many of whom live outside Portland, not from elected city councilors afraid to attach their names to the city’s growing violence stemming from homeless criminals.
