Don't take your safety for granted. Especially on weekends.

Don't take your safety for granted. Especially on weekends.Citywide, crime is reportedly down an average of 13 percent, but gang violence is worse than it's been in years. So, if you're gauging the activity level on the few reports in the media, you're not up to speed on the mass of gang-related gunfire, stabbings and fights that is going down in Portland on any given day.
"It's across the city, which is concerning to us," Gang Enforcement Team Lt. Mike Leloff said Friday. Here are a few reasons why the public needs to be concerned, too: One: These reckless youngsters, ages 12, 13 and 14, have little respect for their elders, show no remorse for wrongdoing and follow their own rules in an attempt to prove they're as fierce as older, prison-hardened criminals, widely celebrated in rap music as old gangsters, or "O.G.'s." Two: More gangbangers, male and female, are using assault rifles. But they don't always know how to aim. At one crime scene, police found 26 shell casings, only a few of which had met their target. And gangsters are shooting at one another in front of cops, in public parks, at bus stops and from moving cars. "Young kids don't really have an understanding of what a bullet can do to you; they don't care anymore," says Val Polk, a youth advocate for Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center, an alternative school on North Killingsworth. "There's a lot of tension and wars back and forth with so many different gangs and different pockets of gangs. It's scary and dangerous."
Three: Police are encountering gang members funneled here through California, and the cops don't know who the gangsters are or what they're capable of, says Rob Ingram, director of Mayor Tom Potter's Office of Youth Violence Prevention.