Last September, when Nike shuttered its nearly 40-year-old flagship store in Portland, Ore., after a wave of retail theft and property damage, 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 and Order, Inc., a nonpartisan legal initiative that has been in existence since June 2023. Its goal is to recruit business owners and individuals in Portland and across Oregon to initiate multi-plaintiff lawsuits so they can recover their losses from financial damages and devalued property from left-wing elected officials who failed to enforce the laws.
Many businesses in Portland have closed or relocated over the past four years due to massive financial losses caused by the crime wave, rising homelessness, illegal protests, riots, and the lingering effects of the pandemic.
Mr. Schumacher blames most of Portland’s decline on its elected officials rather than the criminals. He has accused the city’s leadership of violating their oaths of office by failing to uphold their constitutional duty to protect their constituents.
He hopes that Restore Law and Order’s campaign will set a nationwide precedent for future candidates to uphold their oaths of office, or they will face the “same legal, financial, and reputational damages as their predecessors.”
Mr. Schumacher was the former president and owner of Portland-based Schumacher Furs, the oldest fur company in the country, until his 124-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.
“The criminals attacked my family, employees, and customers on a daily basis,” Mr. Schumacher explained and said that “after every incident, we called law enforcement, but they would not respond to us.”
“We gathered over 540 hours of just crimes happening on audio-video. The entire illegal protest/terrorism was recorded for 1,240 hours. The government failed to do their job then, and they have failed up to the present,” he said.
Over a decade later, Portland witnessed some of the worst rioting and crime sprees in the nation after state and local officials pushed strict COVID lockdown rules and ordinances that curtailed law enforcement in response to the BLM movement, allowing left-wing radical groups and criminal gangs to overrun the streets and threaten the survival of local businesses.
Mr. Schumacher set up Restore Law and Order to help Portland business owners avoid facing what he experienced seventeen years ago when the city authorities abandoned him to his fate.
The former fur retailer said that his group had gathered evidence of all crimes against businesses across America over the past four years and had collected enough to file claims against countless elected officials nationwide for damages.
He accused Portland’s increasingly “woke” political class of being more beholden to international globalist NGOs and their ultra-wealthy supporters on the radical left than to local business leaders and residents.
Mr. Schumacher further commented that most American business groups were wasting their money trying to sway far-left politicians or change their ideology.
“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 if they were going to enforce the law, they would’ve done it by now,” he noted.
He believes that voting these bad politicians out of office is “almost impossible, due to election fraud and interference, as well as the far-left ideology of voters in sanctuary cities and states who keep them in power.”
Mr. Schumacher concludes that the only way to change the system and hold bad political leaders accountable is to drive them from office with financial and legal damages and “replace them with people who will do the right thing.”
“The future of Americans to conduct commerce with the expectation of safety and security is under threat,” he said, adding, "We need a return to our core values of political honesty and government transparency.”
Restore Law & Order is expected to file its first multi-plaintiff lawsuit in Oregon within two months and has plans to expand its model to other blue states and cities across the country.
Donors and plaintiffs can contact Gregg Schumacher and Restore Law & Order at: [email protected].
Editor's note: This is an updated version of an article originally published on March 28.
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