PORTLAND, Ore. — When the owner of a diner in downtown Portland picked up the phone early Thursday morning, what she heard wasn't a surprise.
"About five o’clock in the morning, we started getting calls from guys coming in to work that the window had been broken; the door had been broken," said Christine Burmeister.
Burmeister is the owner of Daily Feast, a diner on the corner of 11th Avenue and Taylor Street in downtown Portland. Unfortunately, she's faced smashed windows and break-ins before.
"This is not the first time this has happened," she said.
Burmeister also owns another restaurant in the building, Taylor Street Kitchen, which has seen the same kind of vandalism. She said her restaurants have been vandalized about six or seven times since they opened: Daily Feast in 2016 and Taylor Street Kitchen in Nov. 2021.
Burmeister said on Thursday, someone smashed the door and a window, and broke into the Daily Feast. Then, they grabbed a fire extinguisher to smash the window of a salon next door before walking away with an iPad.
Burmeister said she believes the suspect was having a mental health crisis.
"I'm certainly not angry at the guy who broke in," she said. "It's him or somebody else. You leave people on the street and you treat them like garbage — and they act like garbage. People are desperate; they have nothing to lose."
Burmeister wishes local leaders would do more to address the issues she sees every day downtown.
"It's truly ridiculous how wonderful Portland could be if we simply had somebody who was like, 'Okay, enough of this. We’ve got the money; we're going to make it happen,'" she said.
A spokesperson from Mayor Ted Wheeler's office responded, saying the mayor empathizes with Burmeister and that the criminal activity in this area is "unacceptable." They noted that the city of Portland has removed campsites and brought in outreach workers, with the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) having conducted targeted missions in the area. The spokesperson added that drug treatment is up to Multnomah County and the state.
Burmeister said that at this point, she doesn't plan to press charges. She just wants to see mental health, drug addiction and homelessness taken seriously.
"The bottom line is that we have to acknowledge first and foremost that the people who are out on the street are human beings," Burmeister said. "I'd like to see these desperate people taken care of like human beings."