So I went out with the first-ever shift of the new Portland Queer Patrol on Saturday night. Though we didn't actually see or deal with any of the potentially-violent situations that Q Patrol was formed to fight, walking around Old Town with a posse of 15 activists and four police officers on a Saturday night was a unique experience. Here are three things I learned:

1. Bachelorettes are everywhere. I distilled my observations of the people in Old Town into this highly scientific pie chart, wherein you can see bachelorettes make up approximately 60 percent of the entire Old Town population.

2. Bachelorettes constantly demand things from police. I was assigned to the patrol with Sgt. Pete Simpson, who has covered the entertainment district for a year (and is about to become the assistant public information officer as current spokeswoman Mary Wheat goes back to working as a detective). He told us beforehand that drunk bachelorettes often ask officers to handcuff them or pose with them in photos, but I didn't think this would be so rampant. But, yep, at our very first stop the doors of Silverado burst forth with bachelorettes headed to their pink stretch limo and they seized on the police officers, demanding photos.

3. If you walk around with cops, people will shout, "I'M VIDEOTAPING YOU!!" Sgt. Simpson says that whenever he makes an arrest in Old Town, the cell phone cameras whip out and he is surrounded in a blaze of photo-snapping. Occasionally, people seemed to think the Q Patrol was a group of a half-dozen unfortunates being arrested en masse.