I'm sick of looking at David, the "Welches" con man, on my blog. It's time to phase out his picture. For the record, the warning box we have been running on our left sidebar since around July 24 is over there on the right side of this post. Out of fatigue, we're taking it down. When this post rolls off our front page in a week, David will be banished to our archives.

You won't have to go to our archives to see him, though. He's still out there on the streets bilking people. He was last spotted near Powell's Bookstore one evening earlier this month. Same story as ever.

It's been an interesting experience writing about this chowderhead. When mainstream media outlets picked up on him, the Portland cops went out and chased him off the bus mall. But he didn't go far. Reports of his relentless practice of theft by deception continued to come in from all over -- Interstate Avenue, MLK, over by the Doug Fir. Mostly, but not exclusively, outside busy bars on weekend nights. Nobody in authority seemed at all interested once the TV cameras went elsewhere.

David's ability to continue to ply his trade with impunity is a good example of the lack of a real strategy for preserving our "livable" city. He can plague the local population and the city's tourists indefinitely, because law enforcement is unwilling to prosecute him. In a way, you can't blame them. They've locked David up before, but there's no jail cell to put him in, and so he was released early. The same thing would doubtlessly happen if they arrested him again.

The mental health "system" apparently can't help this fellow, either. He's reportedly been through rehab at least once, but if so, it obviously didn't cure his ills. And so conning on the street is the default outcome.

We're spending all kinds of money spiffing up the transit mall and building goofball streetcars, but our streets are turned over to roving drug addicts who want to separate you from your money. We build shiny light rail, but then we surrender a mile or two of its eastern end to the gang bangers. Those fancy projects are not helping our livability much at all. A city has a human infrastructure, and ours is falling apart as surely as our physical one.

The bottom line is that there are all manner of nut cases walking the streets of Portland. They're killing themselves and harming others. And as a society, we don't really care. So be careful out there, and don't ever, ever give money to a stranger.