The department of Justice has condemned the Portland Police Bureau’s response to Black Lives Matter Protests.
This is not a surprise. The police were rioting:
The Department of Justice has delivered a striking rebuke of the Portland Police Bureau for its brutal policing of last year’s racial justice protests, calling out the police for violations of bureau policy and the U.S. constitution, while criticizing a leadership structure that “lacks critical self-assessment” and broadly views “all force as justified.”
In the aftermath of the George Floyd murderer by Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin last May, Portland erupted in a months-long streak of nightly protest demanding racial justice and police accountability. (Portland protests also made national news after President Trump deployed federal officers, who clashed with protesters and swept suspects off the streets in unmarked vans.) The city’s activists recently got a shout out from Floyds’ younger brother Rodney after Chauvin was found guilty. “I’d like to thank the people that stayed in the streets marching night and day — the people of Portland stayed in the streets for 83 days,” he said, “making a statement with us, encouraging us on our dark days.”
In real time, the protests against police violence were met with brutality from the Portland Police Bureau, whose commissioner is also the city’s mayor, Ted Wheeler. The Police used force against protesters more than 6,000 times, ranging from firing less-than-lethal munitions, to launching tear gas, to individual beatings delivered with batons. (Rolling Stone explored the contradiction of this progressive city’s violent cops in a dispatch last summer.)
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The new letter from DOJ is dated May 5th and was published by The Oregonian. It is the federal government’s response to a PPB self-assessment of its work policing the nightly protests. In that assessment, the police appeared not to understand the public anger directed at the bureau, blaming the protests on shiftless youth, writing: “many younger people, lacking entertainment and work, often attended the protests, with some gathering regularly to socialize and drink and a portion of those then engaging in criminal activity.” Independent contractors, hired by the city to offer oversight, had earlier slammed PPB’s assessment as “tone deaf.“
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The Department of Justice found much to criticize in PPB’s “abnormally high” use of force. And it calls out PPB leadership for its inability or unwillingness to impose restraint, writing, “PPB command broadly portrays all force as justified.”
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Public anger at the police bureau runs deep. Racial disparities in arrests in Portland are the fifth worst in the nation. This year the city paid out a $2 million settlement to the family of Quanice Hayes, a Black teenager who was killed while on his knees in 2017 by a PPB officer with an AR-15. Last month, the police killed a man experiencing homelessness, Robert Delgado, who appeared to be in mental distress. As seen in video of the incident, the officer shot Delgado with an AR-15 from long distance while taking cover behind a large tree trunk. (The shooting is under state and county investigation.)
The Portland Police Bureau, as well as the Portland’s city council structure, whose commission based structure is antithetical to good government.
The case of Portland mayor Ted Wheeler, where he has strongly endorsed police brutality, and implied support for violence against protesters, is just one data point showing that this system does not work.