PDX Protest — Day 17
Two and a half weeks.
It’s ironic to me that the facet of these protests that frightens me the most is also the only reason they have continued for so long without losing more steam than they have:
COVID.
Last night was weird. Unlawful assembly was declared at 9:30 — earlier than any other night. Word from the police is that a few people were already cutting holes in the fence and one person jumped over. Cops moved in for an arrest, the group started throwing glass bottles, and a “commercial grade” firework (still not sure what that means) exploded “within feet” of the officers.
It’s surprising all this action was happening so early. It doesn’t usually start out that intense. Whether a sign of an escalated baseline or just an oddity of the night, it made for one long, drawn-out dispersal, with late arrivals replenishing what was lost to attrition and people just generally willing to stick it out for longer.
Nothing really noteworthy to say about it, though. If there were any big accelerating acts planned for the evening, they never got past the lobby, so to speak.
Much of the outrage lately has been over PPB’s treatment of journalists during dispersal. Zane is far from the only journalist who’s been roughed up by the police. He just happens to have caught an excellent video of it. But many independent journalists have similar stories, and one even got arrested. Casual statements from officers at the scene have indicated that, after an Unlawful Assembly has been declared, journalists are under the same restrictions as any other citizen. Said journalists disagree mightily, calling it unconstitutional and an attempt to keep the brutality from being witnessed by the media.
I don’t have much of a take at this point, but it’s definitely not a good look.
I still wanna know when Chief Lovell started making decisions for the department. Haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer on that yet. Hell, haven’t got an unsatisfactory one either.
A detail I spotted in the Willamette Week caught my attention, though: lieutenant to chief is a HUGE leap, skipping clean over captain, assistant chief, and deputy chief. He was a “midlevel manager,” and now he’s in charge of the entire department. I’m not honestly that confident that he’s got the skill experience necessary to do a good job at his new position, and it starts to look as though he was given the position purely for the optics of it, hoping that it would serve toward putting an early end to these protests. How much of this was really Jami’s doing? Did she actually misjudge the protesters that badly? Or was there pressure from above? From PPA? From Wheeler? Wheeler has definitely shown himself to be out of touch with his city’s culture, so I’m not gonna lie, he’s a pretty prime suspect. But I also don’t like the guy, so there’s that.
It does raise the question of what IS going to quell the downtown protest. It’s clear that it’s got a life of its own. Protestors will show up, whether there’s an event planned there or not. Clearly the policy changes announced so far are not enough (nor should they be). But is there a level of policy change that WOULD be enough? Would complete abolition of the police do it? Will they persist until Portland has its very own Autonomous Zone? Or does it just need time to run its course? What is the fuel that keeps this protest burning?
Even the media attention is starting to wane. Mercury announced just today that they’ll be scaling back coverage, citing both exhaustion and budget concerns. I don’t hear the news chopper much anymore, either. Just the lower, slower drone of PPB’s eye-in-the-sky fixed-wing. It’s not that it’s no longer newsworthy, it’s just too expensive to be constantly covering.
Hooray capitalism.
In another surprise move, PPB took the Sacred Fence down today. Called it a “symbol of division between the police and the community.” That’s bound to change the course of things tonight.
I wonder how much an evening’s worth of fence repair costs compared to an evening’s worth of crowd control munitions.
