Dispatch from Portland 2022: New Dangerous Territory

And some of the same territory

I arrived home last night from a three-week West Coast jaunt to learn that Portland had just had its 16th homicide of 2022. This morning, the number had reached 17.

Let’s put this in perspective: there were 92 murders in the Rose City in 2021, up from 55 in 2020. If 2022 homicides continue at this rate, they will outstrip 2021 by double-digits.

Some of the reasons for the rise can be measured. Defunding the Gun Violence Reduction Team at the height of the mayhem in 2020 was a political move and did nothing to keep the city safer. And the Portland Police Bureau, as of last fall, was understaffed by more than 100 officers. But there's something more dangerous, I think, a general unease in Portland that I might compare to a common cold, one you assume will go away but does not, it burrows, making the body susceptible to the real harm we are seeing play out in murder #16.

Here is what we know: Last night around 8pm PST, activists gathered in a park in Northeast Portland. They would march to protest several shooting deaths of young black men by police, notably Amir Locke, killed on Feb. 2 in a no-knock raid in Minneapolis. Before the march could start, an armed homeowner came from a nearby house, shouted at the protesters, and after some back-and-forth, started to shoot. One protester was killed on the scene, five others needed medical attention. At least one protester returned fire, striking the homeowner. I am writing this at 5:12pm EST, and the Oregonian just ten minutes ago ran its first comprehensive update, which included the following:

Police issued a statement Sunday, calling the scene at the park “extremely chaotic.”

“... (A) number of witnesses were uncooperative with responding officers,” police said in the statement. “Most people on scene left without talking to police. Detectives believe a large number of people either witnessed what happened, or recorded the incident as it unfolded...

A press conference where police officials planned to address the shooting and a separate fatal shooting by police that also took place Saturday was disrupted by an estimated 50 demonstrators about two minutes after it began at 11 a.m. Sunday.

Portland Police Lt. Nathan Sheppard stood by silently as protesters began to speak to the media gathered outside the front doors of the downtown Central Precinct. He eventually got into an unmarked car and drove off, trailed by shouts and heckles.

I appreciate the Oregonian writers' restraint in framing the actions of the protesters at the press conference. You be the judge. Video cues up at 3:32, first speaker comes on at 4:15. Click here.

You might watch this and think, this is cuckoo bananas, or, what an extraordinarily odd outburst, or that PIO Sheppard stepping away from the mic is some sort of dereliction of duty. I don't think any of these things. I think we are seeing a general unease eating away at what we assume are common concerns, about safety and how and when we look out for one another. I see one side trying to give out information, and another side saying, no; your information is shit, you don't pay attention to what's important, to who's at fault and what's really going on here.

I have my doubts about what the speaker is saying, that Mayor Ted Wheeler ordered the Gypsy Joker Motorcycle Club (whose clubhouse I used to live around the corner from) to kidnap her. I don't know whether she believes it or whether it's a term of art, a tactic she thinks might get her from here to there, though I further cannot tell you where "there" is or if there is any end game; I've asked ad nauseam and the answers are usually nostrums in the form of "ACAB!" or, "Fuck you, fascist!" While in my experience activists are quite bad at effecting actual change, I give them credit for organization and sticktoitiveness; they can mobilize like a veritable ant colony - you know the medic by the word MEDIC somewhere on his person; ditto, PRESS, OBSERVER, TRAFFIC, et al - and they are very, very good at shutting down anything they deem oppositional to their aims of the day.

For instance, this morning I read tweets and Facebook posts from protesters, about how you never talk to police, how you dip before they can ask you questions, how you scrub your social media feeds, this last another reason why the details of #16 are taking so long to seep out, protesters being extremely good at crafting the visual narrative, and this story maybe looks a little bad, protesters carrying guns when they are protesting gun deaths, when they are all about protecting people, as the banjo-and-rifle-carrying young man told me in Nov. 2020.

"We've started carrying in Portland and overall, we've gotten a great reception," he said. "It's nothing to be ashamed of, also, not everyone should do it. As long as you're cool-headed and know what you're doing."

That more would be carrying now, not all of them cool-headed, seems to me ineluctable, seems to me the only way this arc goes, for people who refuse to let the public hear details about a murder they deem inconvenient to whatever narrative needs to be crafted today. Or maybe it's simpler than that, maybe it's about shouting until people get fed up and walk away, as we saw in the presser today. Though to what end?

This morning I had, for the umpteenth time, the conversation about which protesters stay around, and why, when the bulk have gone back to jobs or to school or have otherwise reinserted themselves into the world without having to put on a black mask every night.

"The radicals stay," said my friend, a 33 year-old Portlander who marched once back in 2020. "I thought it was important," he said, "but boring."

Sure, and maybe the way to relieve the boredom was to up the ante, you were just playing it smart, you never knew who could show up, who could mean you harm. And absolutely last night, from what we know, the marchers did not start the confrontation with the homeowner, whom a source tells me is not expected to survive. But you were prepared just in case, in case someone whose house you’d been meeting across from for months, someone whose home you maybe more than once marched past shouting, "WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP MOTHERFUCKER WAKE UP!" Maybe you knew one day one of these people might snap, and you'd be ready.