My son is a Portland Police Officer and the good news is that everyone is scheduled in advance for a lot of overtime. I think Chief Day is both solid and communicative and there appears to be much more planning for this go-round. Portland does not need any more mayhem.
If there is violence, I hope that neither Chief Day nor Mayor Wheeler will allow themselves to be hobbled by the ACLU or other leftist sympathizers. That happened in 2020-21. City Hall and law enforcement need to take advice from their own lawyers on what they can and can't do in response to violence and not be stymied by outside influences.
There's this: as damaging as the anarchist riots of 2020-21 were to Portland in so many lasting ways, elected and appointed leaders at the state, county and local level have failed Portlanders in two important respects.
First, there is no official history of the civil unrest. The general public knows only what the media reported, and the media let the public down. Surely the social justice zealots over at the Portland Mercury knew a lot more about the key actors than they ever reported. What is needed, for example, is an in-depth account of the decision making process in the Mayor's office, the Portland Police Bureau and other nodes of executive action and law enforcement. That would include the names of individuals who influenced the government's response to the violence.
Why, for example, when anyone who followed Twitter could learn the date, time and location where anarchists were to gather for another direct action, did law enforcement never prevent the black bloc criminals from rampaging through the streets?
More importantly, why didn't the Mayor or any of the other members of City Council issue a statement explicitly condemning anarchist violence as soon as it became apparent that they were starting to hijack the Black Lives Matter protests?
Secondly, and this overlaps with the first item, the general public does know the names, biographies and political affiliations of the individuals who were chiefly responsible for the unrest. We don't have an insider's view of their motives and objectives. The public does not know their sources of funding and how they made decisions. Now, given law enforcement's deplorable failure to solve property crimes generally, this may not come as a surprise. But 100 successive nights of riots deserve a more robust response in the form of detective work and other law enforcement responses than a random broken car window.
Why does this matter? Well, there's a high likelihood that the principal perpetrators of Portland's most recent wave of political violence are still among us. It would certainly be reassuring to know that law enforcement is keeping an eye on them so we don't find ourselves in 2026 wondering how the riots of 2024-25 came about.
My son is a Portland Police Officer and the good news is that everyone is scheduled in advance for a lot of overtime. I think Chief Day is both solid and communicative and there appears to be much more planning for this go-round. Portland does not need any more mayhem.
If there is violence, I hope that neither Chief Day nor Mayor Wheeler will allow themselves to be hobbled by the ACLU or other leftist sympathizers. That happened in 2020-21. City Hall and law enforcement need to take advice from their own lawyers on what they can and can't do in response to violence and not be stymied by outside influences.
There's this: as damaging as the anarchist riots of 2020-21 were to Portland in so many lasting ways, elected and appointed leaders at the state, county and local level have failed Portlanders in two important respects.
First, there is no official history of the civil unrest. The general public knows only what the media reported, and the media let the public down. Surely the social justice zealots over at the Portland Mercury knew a lot more about the key actors than they ever reported. What is needed, for example, is an in-depth account of the decision making process in the Mayor's office, the Portland Police Bureau and other nodes of executive action and law enforcement. That would include the names of individuals who influenced the government's response to the violence.
Why, for example, when anyone who followed Twitter could learn the date, time and location where anarchists were to gather for another direct action, did law enforcement never prevent the black bloc criminals from rampaging through the streets?
More importantly, why didn't the Mayor or any of the other members of City Council issue a statement explicitly condemning anarchist violence as soon as it became apparent that they were starting to hijack the Black Lives Matter protests?
Secondly, and this overlaps with the first item, the general public does know the names, biographies and political affiliations of the individuals who were chiefly responsible for the unrest. We don't have an insider's view of their motives and objectives. The public does not know their sources of funding and how they made decisions. Now, given law enforcement's deplorable failure to solve property crimes generally, this may not come as a surprise. But 100 successive nights of riots deserve a more robust response in the form of detective work and other law enforcement responses than a random broken car window.
Why does this matter? Well, there's a high likelihood that the principal perpetrators of Portland's most recent wave of political violence are still among us. It would certainly be reassuring to know that law enforcement is keeping an eye on them so we don't find ourselves in 2026 wondering how the riots of 2024-25 came about.