Video by Sergio Olmos
For nearly two months, a small portion of downtown Portland has smelled like tear gas. Nights are filled with the sounds of explosions and drums, police warnings to clear the area, and the shouts of protesters. Outside the Multnomah County Justice Center — now blanketed with graffiti calling for the abolition of the police or death to cops — riot-control police square off against citizens wearing gas masks and homemade armor.
The clashes playing out in the city, and amplified by social and traditional media, have put Portland on a national stage and have led to President Donald Trump’s decision last week to deploy militarized federal police. Reports surfaced quickly of unidentified officers in unmarked cars abducting protesters off the street. Other agents, dressed in the camouflage of soldiers deployed to a war zone, seem to have little restraint — or were told to leave it at home. A few nights ago, one officer smashed his baton repeatedly against a male protester (and Navy veteran) who was not resisting, before a second officer sprayed the protester in the face with a chemical agent.
The chaotic situation in Portland, although contained to a tiny area of the city, has already led to more than 400 arrests and cost the local government millions of dollars. And now the arrival of federal officers has made a bad situation worse, galvanizing protesters and reportedly drawing reinforcements from places like Washington state, Texas, and Arizona. It has also led to second-guessing among the local protest community and the Portland Police Bureau alike: How did we get here? Could it have been avoided, and are there any lessons to be learned?
Gregory McKelvey, a longtime protest organizer who began with Don’t Shoot Portland — and who is campaign manager to Sarah Iannarone, the challenger to Mayor Ted Wheeler in the November runoff — attributes the staying power of the protests and clashes to pent-up community grievances over Oregon’s history of racism, as well as excessive use of force by the Portland police. He also thinks a lack of leadership and a mishandling of the protests have poured fuel on the fire.
“Each protest ended up being a protest of the previous night’s police escalation,” McKelvey said. “Had those escalations not occurred, we would not have had a situation in which Donald Trump was looking to Portland as a staging area.”
Wheeler, for his part, has defended his handling of the protests and community concerns. After an initially muted reaction to federal policing of Portland streets, however, he made it clear last week that he wants the federal forces removed from the city. “We can handle better than they can what’s going on in our streets,” he said on July 17. “The impact they’ve had over the last several days is to make things much, much worse.”
The limitations of crowd control
The May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis triggered a national upheaval. In Portland, though, protests and sometimes violent clashes with police have continued, even though conflict in many other cities has subsided.
On May 29, the second night of protests over Floyd’s killing and, more generally, police brutality, a vigil in North Portland was followed by a march downtown. A small group of protesters broke into the Justice Center, setting a fire inside the ground-floor lobby. Looters also ransacked downtown businesses, and dozens of people were arrested.
Since then, protest gatherings have continued at the Justice Center almost every evening, often culminating in nightly violence. At the same time, the large peaceful protests that took place on the east side of the Willamette River have mostly faded away.
Even before federal law-enforcement agents arrived, the PPB’s reliance on conventional crowd-control tactics — namely tear gas, riot munitions, and intimidating bull rushes down city streets — simply wasn’t working. For every city block cleared, protesters dug their heels in further, while video footage of police tactics only served to reinforce the conflict.
According to experts on mass demonstration and crowd control, central to the PPB’s failed approach is a focus on crowd, instead of individual, behavior. When police use force on an entire group of protesters, many of whom haven’t been committing crimes, “you’re essentially radicalizing the crowd,” said Edward Maguire, professor in criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University. “There is a psychological change that occurs [among more moderate protesters]: Their views get more extreme. Their perception that violence and disruptive behavior is warranted tends to increase.”
Instead of focusing on tactics of overwhelming force that only serve to anger people, Maguire said police departments like Portland’s need to step back and think about the longer view. “We need to rethink our strategies,” Maguire said, “and that’s not happening.”
Andrew Riley, a spokesperson for Unite Oregon, a nonprofit focusing on equity and justice that helped organize the protests in Portland, agreed that the heavy-handed police response helps explain the unprecedented activism seen since Floyd's death. "If the goal of the crowd control tactics is to suppress dissent or to quell the movement, I think it’s backfiring."
Two Portland police officers, speaking under condition of anonymity, say the sheer intensity of the protests, in combination with protesters’ late-night tactics specifically, created a seemingly untenable situation. “They’ve challenged the traditional method of crowd management, and that’s the unique factor here,” one longtime officer said. “This is very different than all the other demonstrations that we’ve seen over the years because of its sustained level of aggression.”
The officers say a small, organized group of anarchist-identifying agitators have set more than a hundred fires downtown. This subgroup of protestors is also setting off large fireworks and using slingshots to launch ball bearings, bottles of frozen water, and containers of urine and feces — all deliberate and repeated attempts to injure officers.
Riley, an activist in Portland since 2004, also has been puzzling over why the recent unrest feels so radically different: "Some of it could be that it's a pandemic and folks are already running ragged. They're already feeling robbed, all the things the pandemic has exposed in terms of American racism and what have you."
Riley has also noticed that, instead of more talk about moderate police reforms, other local activists now listen when the conversation turns to abolishing police: It "doesn't get you laughed out of the room — and that to me is a really critical change."
The police say they believe only a small fraction of the people coming downtown each night are there to fight and antagonize. A second and much larger group is there to protest police actions and to support the more aggressive protesters.
Yet there is a third category of attendees as well: the curious. People who want “to see what’s going on and be there for whatever happens,” as Deputy Chief Chris Davis put it in his testimony last week to the state legislative Joint Committee on Transparent Policing and Use of Force Reform.
A Timeline of Events
Leadership Challenges
Meanwhile, the duration of the protests and the vitriol directed toward police officers could have a lasting impact separate from police reform. For many of the officers involved in the nightly protests, particularly younger ones, the experience could leave them feeling alienated from the community and the work itself, according to Norm Stamper, former chief of police for Seattle and the author of two books calling for police reform.
“If you’ve got a young police officer facing the kind of conflict that we’re seeing on city streets over this past month, that’s going to be bewildering — to put it mildly,” Stamper said.
While calls for police reform intensify, fights over leadership — or accusations about its absence — continue. Sal Peralta, a secretary of the Independent Party of Oregon, who has been watching the situation closely, said, “I have not seen Portland’s elected leaders, with the exception of [Portland City Commissioner] Jo Ann Hardesty, really try and put their shoulder into getting things moving in a more pro-social way.” Even before Hardesty urged Wheeler last week to turn the bureau over to her if he couldn’t restrain police, she had been calling for police reform and accountability, holding a vigil outside the Justice Center and supporting nonviolent protests.
Teressa Raiford, the longtime community organizer who leads Don’t Shoot Portland, faults Mayor Wheeler. Instead of “having a conversation about the demands of protesters or how he could work to dismantle the systems that oppress us, his response was violence and then the disingenuous division tactics,” she said. “He’s literally the one that we’re looking to for leadership on all levels.”
Wheeler bristles at the suggestion that he’s not providing the leadership Portland needs. “Since this began, I’ve been discussing not only the tactics, but I’ve been holding meetings regularly with people who’ve been leading demonstrations,” Wheeler said. He cited the council’s decision, which he supported, to defund the Gang Violence Reduction Task Force, as well as making other changes, such as restricting the use of tear gas. Wheeler has also said that he’s “committed to further reforms around police accountability and oversight.”
For now, he said, the short-term path is clear: “We get rid of the feds. Number two, we contain and de-escalate the situation. Number three, we clean up downtown. And number four, we open up for business. That’s the plan.”
This moment, wrong tactics
The PPB has long maintained that its crowd-control tactics are among the best in the country. When major news outlets need a national expert to comment on policing during protests, they sometimes call on Portland officials. When out-of-state police officers need a course in crowd control, they do the same.
But in the wake of the killing of Floyd, Portland’s protesters have battled local police to a standstill. The stalemate has led to federal police deployment to protect federal property and to assist the PPB, sparking controversy and thrusting the city into the national spotlight.
How did the protesters do it? Through determination, training, tactics shared on social media, and legal support and financial backing. The protesters have also exploited the questionable police tactics that have been employed due to staffing shortfalls and, some say, political calculation.
The result is an ongoing quagmire in which police use the same controversial tactics night after night — clearing masses of protesters in response to provocations by a few. This strategy has generated a cascade of negative publicity, while failing to stop the vandalism, arson, and attacks on police carried out by a small fraction of protest participants.
“They’re losing the PR battle,” said Jim Moore, a Pacific University government professor who serves as political outreach director of the Tom McCall Center for Civic Engagement. “Regardless of the reforms that [elected leaders] are talking about, when you fire tear gas and flash-bangs, it looks like an occupying army.”
Garth den Heyer, who spent 38 years as a police officer in New Zealand and who has studied and written extensively on crowd policing and counterterrorism as an instructor at Arizona State University, said the problem is not limited to Portland. “I think police are really suffering from a lack of leadership or a lack of reading or interpretation of what cities and communities are thinking at the moment,” said den Heyer. “They’re obviously caught in something they don’t understand or know how to respond to.”
Criticism about the use of tear gas and riot munitions is neither new nor just a Portland issue. Many crowd-control experts say these tools often undermine the overall aim of controlling crowds. Other times they backfire completely. Maguire says a better approach is to use teams of officers—colloquially known as “snatch teams”—to arrest only the people who are actively engaging in crime.
“One of the things that really upsets me about what I’m seeing around the country is … police taking enforcement action against an entire crowd in response to the misbehavior of just a few people,” he said. “But the few people are not getting arrested.”
Mayor Wheeler, however, scoffs at the idea of targeted mid-protest arrests, saying such moves merely incite the crowd. Officers, he said, “don’t go wading into the crowd of hundreds to try to make the arrest unless they’re darn certain they have the right person and they can do it safely. Instead, they follow up with the investigative unit.”
Privately, local police say that an often-overlooked problem at the root of this mess is too few officers to do the job effectively. Some protesters have prepared for such efforts and pride themselves on a tactic dubbed “de-arresting,” pulling fellow protesters away from police who are trying to take them into custody.
Without sufficient reinforcements, even police using the snatch-team approach will be shorthanded. Yet with several lawsuits filed against Portland police already, other agencies in Oregon are reluctant to send officers to support crowd-control efforts, as would happen under normal circumstances. “We don’t have the people,” said one longtime officer, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Beyond that, some officers hint that bureau leadership wants them to avoid the unfavorable optics that can accompany aggressive arrest tactics in the middle of a demonstration, like the use of batons or scuffles with shrieking protesters.
A Timeline of Events
Portland Police Association President Daryl Turner suggested that, in general, pressure from elected leaders doesn’t allow bureau managers to respond as quickly or aggressively to outbreaks of violence as they would otherwise.
“I think our hands are somewhat tied by the political dynamics of the City of Portland,” Turner said. He added that the City Council does not provide the support “to allow us to act as swiftly and appropriately as we need to to some of these riots to be able to disband them earlier, before they become almost out of control.”
Even without more aggressive arrests, the constant pressure of nightly clashes has produced numerous videos of what appears to be excessive force and other misconduct, including against journalists. Outside the Portland Police Association office early on July 14, for instance, an officer violently knocked a cell phone camera from the hand of a protester who was recording peacefully, committing no crime.
No Jail Time
The challenge for police is not only how to make appropriate arrests. It’s what comes next.
In non-pandemic times, police rely on jail time to detain protesters suspected of crimes like arson, assault, or vandalism. But COVID-19 makes that impossible. Under current guidelines adopted to respond to the coronavirus, most defendants booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center are immediately released without bail. Meanwhile, due to the coronavirus’ impact on court scheduling, protest cases are being postponed until August, prosecutors say, meaning even less accountability for those who do perpetrate violent crimes.
For those who do get arrested and need bail, nonprofits have stepped up to support any defendant jailed while protesting under the banner of Black Lives Matter. An online legal fund organized by the Portland General Defense Committee has raised more than $1 million to pay for bail, criminal defense, and related costs for defendants, according to Amelia Cates, an organizer behind the effort. Most people are bailed out within 12 hours of being arrested. Beyond that, many Portland defense lawyers are volunteering to represent protesters for no charge.
“There’s such an outpouring of generosity and desire from people to support people in the streets,” Cates said. It’s critical, she continued, to ensure that protesters can exercise their First Amendment rights and “go out and make a difference and make change happen.”
No one knows what the next round of protests will bring, but the cycle cannot continue in perpetuity. Den Heyer, the crowd-control expert, said the PPB needs to adapt. The city needs more creative and proactive methods that support peaceful protest, while carefully discouraging violence. From the look of things, he added, leadership needs new ideas. “Their tactics aren’t right at the moment.”
This project was produced in collaboration with the Pamplin Media Group.
