PDX Protest, Day 50 — Divided as One

Biggest numbers we’ve seen downtown since the 4th, hands down.

Largely due to a joint rally between city commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty and Hip Hop Stand Up. Hardesty’s side of things brought a whole lot of “normies” compared to the black-bloc “supersoldiers,” and a surprising number of these stuck around after the rally and even after the initial 10:30 gas attack. But then, the 4th had a good 800 people total putting up with repeated gassings, so it doesn’t seem to be as much a matter of Portlanders’ ability to withstand gas as it is a matter of getting them out there to begin with. (Though there’s also a good chance that the seldomness with which they come out contributes to their willingness to put up with it.)

Toward the end of her speaking, Hardesty gave a grandiose call to action. “Today we show the country and that the world that the city of Portland, as much as we fight amongst ourselves, will come together to stand for our constitutional rights. “Woulda come off more genuine and less political if she had stayed out till five in the morning getting gassed with the rest of them, but I, obsessively watching Twitter from my distant perch, am one to talk.

The fighting she mentioned was some heckling through a portable loudspeaker by some police-abolitionists, and it served to bring into sharp focus the divide between groups like PNW Youth Liberation Front and Rose City Justice: abolition vs. reform.

Defunding, as the word is being used, fits into the reform framework, along with banning chokeholds, mandatory liability insurance, the end of qualified immunity, and so on. Abolition is the complete end of policing as we know it, with not just some, but all of the police budget going to social programs and new models of emergency response.

Reformists seek to reach policy change through conversations, negotiations, and, when necessary, compromise. Abolitionists see any negotiation as inherently weakening and seem to want to just push and push and push until the opposition caves, which reformists see as, if not ineffective, then at least inefficient, with needless collateral damage.

Abolition can clearly not just happen overnight with any kind of stability, and I’m not sure what the process of abolition looks like to the abolitionist leaders. I’m sure the reading is out there somewhere — though of course, what the leaders see as a viable path and what the people on the street try to do may not be in tandem.

I understand the concerns of reform being too impotent. Politics can be damned slow, without authoritarian unilateral action. And so the question to me is if revolutionary reform is even possible. Bernie Sanders was my latest litmus test for this, and it failed. Seattle’s 50% police budget reduction is pretty impressive, but everything then hinges on where that money ends up going, which I haven’t heard anything about.

Money. Why does it always come down to money?

With so many people downtown and an such an ideological divide, 3rd Ave had the impression of multiple simultaneous protests. There was Hardesty’s program of speeches on the Justice Center steps followed by the Hip Hop show, there was people hanging out and eating food at Riot Ribs across from the Courthouse, there was a group listening to radical speeches over megaphones in front of Green-Wyatt, and a handful of folks rapidly dismantling fencing from around the parks.

A street preacher came around at some point — a chubby little guy with a portable speaker, microphone, and Bible — expounding man’s inherent sinfulness and the resultant need to accept Christ as Lord and Savior. He was unrelenting, no matter how hard protesters tried to eject him from the crowd, always looking for a way around the defenders and into the crowd. Cornered against a not-yet-dismantled section of fence, he went limp. When a woman tried to drag him away, he clutched at the chain link. The woman yanked angrily and repeatedly at his shirt collar. “I love you!” he cried, his face turned red. “I seriously love you! I want to forgive you!” Several protesters pushed them apart, pulled her off, and talked her down. Eventually the preacher was physically carried away by like five people as he prayed to God for rescue.

The first batch of gas came really early at 10:30, which split the crowd temporarily as a chunk went to yell at Ted Wheeler’s condo for a bit, thinking that the gas had run off the rest of the protest. Once it was discovered that a lot of people had returned to JC that group did the same as everyone coalesced in front of the JC again.

The street preacher was back, having tied himself to a lamp post. While it did make him hard to remove, he hadn’t thought of how helpless it left him. His speaker and Bible got taken, his back got spraypainted with “BLM,” and his head was overed in silly string as a crowd of people around him jeered and squeezed squeaky pigs.

I don’t really see what was gained from this. Which an incomprehensible number of evangelicals are inexplicably racist, this dude seemed to just be preachin’ Jesus, unless there was more than was being told or filmed. Someone on twitter said he’d been attacking people all night, but when I asked “attacked how?” there was no response. If he’d just been calling them evil sinners and shit and they responded with physical force, uh, I really don’t want to be the one to point it out, but that’s a pretty disproportionate escalation. From what I saw, the dude turned the other cheek pretty admirably.

He was eventually cut down, had his Bible returned to him, and was escorted away by someone kinder than the seeming average. I’m glad there wasn’t another gassing while he was tied there. I bet at least a medic would have rescued him, but he was completely unprotected.

Regardless of any ethics or morality, the footage the incident generated will make really powerful anti-protest propaganda. “Look at how these violent hoodlums treat an emissary of the Lord!”

It was just a bad call all around.

From there it was a full three hours of anxiety-inducing, PTSD-expanding anticipation while a select dozen piled the fence panels and sandbags against the doors of all three government buildings until the final coordinated joint clearing of downtown, with feds on the gas and munitions and PPB on the insane bullrushes and violent arrests.

Pretty familiar stuff, but in a more integrated fashion than ever before. PPB’s bullrushes in particular felt highly coordinated and exceptionally viscious. I’m wondering if federal tacticians are directing PPB movements.

Oh, also, there’s a low-altitude flight restriction covering Portland for the next month, and an internal Customs and Border Patrol memo from a few days ago indicated that drone assets are on standby to assist as needed. I saw and heard a fixed-wing aircraft fly past my location twice last night at a much lower altitude than PPB’s plane does, in opposite directions, about 15 minutes apart, as if nipping off to refuel. A Predator drone was used for surveillance in Minneapolis last month.

So that’s fun.