PDX Protest — Anniversary Edition

Things are happening, I’m not keeping up, and that’s fine. We’re all swine, here.

I had written a thing about the protest on the 25th, but then I posted that thing about not despairing instead, cuz it seemed so much more important.

So here is an incredibly untimely report on the one-year-anniversary protest for Black lives.

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It was like the entire PDX Press Corps was out to prove me wrong. Not only was there a ton of photos and videos and livetweeting and even a streamer or two, but some of my old-school journalistic staples were out, too. Most notably Alex Zielinski and Donovan Farley. Sergio Olmos was back from Columbia. Suzette Smith was out. Add them to the more recent names who had backfilled my feed like Grace Morgan and Chris Landis, and the news was hard to keep up with.

It was downright nostalgic.

So why not do an old-school PDX-protest article. Maybe the PTSD will wrap me in a comfortable familiarity where I’m not so preoccupied with something you’ll like.

I caught wind of two events (though there were surely more, given the anniversary). The first, I never saw a flier for, so I’m not sure who organized it. It started at Revolution Hall, so it coulda been Rose City Justice, but I really don’t know. They marched from Rev Hall to the Burnside Bridge, camped there for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, then marched back. That was literally all I heard about it.

The other one was downtown, in front of the Justice Center — the site of so much water bottle and tear gas last summer. I thought for a minute that the Rev Hall march might have been heading there, but nope.

I saw two variations of flyer for the JC event, both prominently featuring George Floyd’s face in the center (say his name), with the names of several other victims of lethal police violence in the background. Tamira Rice (say his name), Patrick Kimmons (say his name), Breonna Taylor (say her name), Daunte Wright (say his name), Quanice Hayes (say his name), Adam Toledo (say his name), etc., etc., etc. There were repeated names, but there was also a lot of occlusion, so, whatever.

One flyer labeled Floyd’s face (say his name) as “one of many,” asking, “How many names till we have had enough?” Declared 8:00–10:00 pm. The other called on the “May 25th night shift” to come “all out for abolition” “by reason of intentional systemic failure of justice & human rights.” “Small actions. Big targets.”

It’s interesting to look at these two fliers as a pair. I have no idea if they were designed by the same person or not. The similar element of listed names in the background points to maybe. And it’s interesting that the first lists an end time, while the second doesn’t list a start time. The second also carries a much more adversarial tone. Taken as a pair, it’s almost saying, “Look, everybody can get your asses out here from 8–10. We’re getting scrappy after that, though, so if that’s not your thing, you might wanna peace out. The rest of you? We’re going hard from the time other thing’s over until whenever. Come prepared.”

At 8:20, Grace Morgan reported 50–70 people, which had grown to close to 200 by 8:45. Apparently there were a lot of folks not in bloc, but by the time I saw any videos, all I saw was black. Police announced the crowd to Twitter, suggesting drivers avoid the area.

A fair bit of graffiti had gone up on the Justice Center already. “All Cops Are Chauvin” was new to me. There were a couple large pieces that looked like straight-up tags, but that would be so out of place that I feel like I must have been mistaken. I sure couldn’t read them, though.

At 9:20, a dumpster fire was started and rolled up against the Justice Center. (Really a sizeable dumpster fire, too.) A couple fireworks were launched into the air.

Man, fireworks. They didn’t used to bother me, but after last summer… I don’t jump so much as feel a shiver of anxiety ripple up my spine. Sirens, fireworks, street racers, and the buzzing of small airplanes. Bleh. I knew I was taking on some degree of trauma from watching so closely and so nightly. Just wasn’t sure how it was going to manifest.

So many sirens in this city.

Cops declared an unlawful assembly over the dumpster fire. A line of riot cops did a walking advance down that street to clear the way for the fire department. One woman cried out, “Fuck you, firefighters!”

With the fire out, Cops threw smoke and retreated. A firework bounced off the top of the riot van and exploded. Another exploded just behind the line of press.

Whoops.

Probably.

Some reports of munitions fired during the retreat. One person said paint rounds. Another person said green OC. Does OC powder come in green?

It was good to have so many journalists out who hadn’t been in so long. I figured they wouldn’t be as numb to the munitions and tactics, and so I had pretty high confidence that I’d hear about anything that got deployed. Even if there was disagreement about what exactly they were.

Via some impetus, the crowd turned around and marched across the parks to City Hall at 9:55. Lime rental scooters appeared from somewhere and were promptly swung through windows. Kinda hilarious, really. I’ve always hated those scooters.

Cops brought up the LRAD and told people to disperse to the north and west. The march moved, but I think they moved south. Hard to tell.

I found myself wondering who decides the destinations. Somebody’s at the front of the march. Some entity has that power.

I’m still pretty confident that mob manipulation is a driver in the ebb and flow of these events. It’d be too effective not to have been considered, and some of the folks out there are too experienced not to have considered it. Mobs have— …

The atmosphere of a mob is such a weird thing. I’d never felt it myself until the Occupy protests. It was like… the boundaries of my identity melted into the crowd, and I became a piece of an organism rather than an independent agent. My own will annealed into the collective “consciousness.” A whole to which I contributed my own frustrations, and from which I took on its alloyed fury. A man threw three dollars on the ground, and I was inches away from picking it up, lighting it on fire holding it up to the crowd and shouting, “We don’t need this shit!” For those couple of you here that don’t really know me… that’s not me. I don’t do shit like that. I pick pennies up off the ground, not destroy cash. But in that moment, there was no “me.” Only Us. “Me” had left my body and been replaced by the amalgam that had assimilated it. Exiting the boundary of that Occupy protest was like walking out of a mind-control fog. My memory of the previous hour was that of a third-person observer. It was the weirdest fucking thing, and it scared the shit out of me.

If I’m being 100% honest with you, that is why I don’t participate in protests.

So if one could keep their head above that fog enough to harness that weird hive behavior of an unruly mob, my god do you have some power at your fingertips. And from what I’ve seen on Twitter over the winter, some of the old-school heads are way too savvy not to know this.

So it makes sense, you know? Lead a mob somewhere, let them rail at the building for a while until the cops show up, lead them elsewhere, do the same. Or just lead them in circles while they fuck up windows along the way. On and on, until either there’s not enough energy to sustain it or there’s not enough black bloc bulk to provide cover.

So many windows got broke. Washington Federal Bank. Affordable Jewelry & Precious Metals. Starbucks. Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. (With diners inside.) A firework thrown into the Starbucks. Bank of the West smashed. Pinkham Millinery. Another Starbucks. Indochino bridal shop — window smashed, mannequin dragged into the street. Pandora jewelry shop. “Kill Ted” scrawled on the Apple Store’s iFence.

No looting, that I heard of. Just smashing. And the cops just let it happen, following the march with the LRAD, eventually bothering to declare it a riot and announce downtown as closed.

It’s not wanton destruction. One theme runs through the center of all of those targets: wealth. I’ll be honest, I’m not gonna shed a tear for Starbucks. For a bank. Pinkham’s is a little unfortunate, being a Portland business. Same with AJPM. But jewelry, bullion, and custom hats are boujie as fuck. There’s no way around that. They are commercial institutions for those who have.

But then, when you’re downtown, what isn’t?

Qdoba, I guess.

Cops did start making arrests at some point. Very precise, targeted arrests. Careful not to even touch another protester, where it could be avoided. I think they’re playing the optics game. Property destruction is… unpopular, amongst the majority. And increasingly so. A lot of the popular support for these protests was fueled by videos of police misconduct. A lot of PPB’s past strategy has been to explain and demonstrate why what they did was “necessary.” To endear themselves to the people. It hasn’t worked. And so now I think they’re just trying to step back and let the protester destruction further erode popular support for the protests. But I dunno. Hard to say from just the one night. It was remarkable to see them be so hands-off, though.

There were a few cycles of arrest, the cops backing off in between to let the crowd break some more shit. Arrest, back off. Arrest, back off. The official police statement this morning said that protesters were using umbrellas to obscure sightlines and prevent positive identification, and so I think they must have sent some undercovers into the crowd. Makes sense. And I think some in the crowd started to suspect this, too, as a fistfight broke out after the third arrest cycle — the sort that breaks out when one person accuses another of being a cop — basically putting an end to the march. Coulda been unrelated, though. People had been marching for hours. Nerves were probably pretty frayed.

My last view of the evening was an uncommonly pretty piece of graffiti. A solid red background had been rolled onto the plywood of a window covering, and on that had been painted in white cursive,

ACAB
Fuck every cop
who ever lived

Who’s even taught cursive anymore?