Last September, when Nike shuttered its nearly 40-year-old flagship store in Portland, Oregon, after a wave of retail theft and property damages, I contacted Gregg Schumacher, a local business owner and a vocal critic of the radical left politicians who control his town.
Mr. Schumacher is the founder of Restore Law & Order, a non-partisan legal initiative, which seeks to recruit business owners throughout the country, who suffered losses in revenue and lower property values due to retail crime, to serve as plaintiffs in civil suits against elected government officials who fail to enforce the laws.
He was the former president and owner of Portland-based Schumacher Furs, the oldest fur company in the country, until his 107-year-old family-owned business closed in 2007, after a two-year violent campaign by animal rights extremists to destroy his company, despite pleas for help to local authorities.
Over a decade later, in the spring and summer of 2020, the city of Portland witnessed some of the worst riots and crime sprees in the nation, as elected officials imposed strict COVID lockdown rules and passed ordinances that curtailed law enforcement in response to the BLM movement, allowing left-wing radical groups and criminal gangs to overrun the streets, threatening the survival of local businesses.
Many businesses in Portland have closed or relocated over the past four years, due to massive financial losses caused by the crime wave and the lingering effects of the pandemic.
The former fur retailer founded Restore Law & Order last year, to help other business owners avoid facing what he dealt with seventeen years ago when the city authorities abandoned him to his fate.
Mr. Schumacher said that the criminals themselves were less to blame for Portland’s recent downturn than the city’s elected officials.
He said that his organization will hold individual politicians personally accountable for failing to protect their constituents with class-action lawsuits and will financially pressure them out of office through litigation.
“I want to replace these politicians with people that will do the right thing,” he said.
He added that the looming threat of class-action lawsuits from businesses and concerned citizens will also deter “future lawless government candidates from running for political office, since that they could encounter the same legal, financial, and reputational damages as their predecessors.”
Mr. Schumacher said that over the past decade, Portland’s increasingly woke political class have become more beholden to international globalist NGOs and their ultra-wealthy supporters on the radical left, rather than to the traditional local business elites and local constituents.
He added that most business groups in Oregon still fail to understand that they are wasting their money on attempts to sway far-left politicians, who continue to neglect their interests.
“What they’re doing is they’re trying to convince the existing politicians to change their minds, it’s not working, it will never work, and I think I’m the only one with my idea,” he continued.
Mr. Schumacher described that when Nike CEO Phil Knight offered Portland’s government financial incentives to clean up the crime around his retail flagship store in order to save it, he was flatly turned down by the city authorities.
“If Nike Corporation can’t convince the local government to enforce the laws, do you think any anyone else can?” he asked.
Mr. Schumacher said that Restore Law & Order will file its first lawsuit in Oregon within the next two months, while plans are underway to eventually expand its operations nationwide.