Cry me a river. 50 nights with 23 million and counting in destruction of property is ENOUGH.
This is a local story here and my SO has had her ear to the ground. Kate Brown said today that there has been no property destruction other than some relatively minor graffiti in over 2 weeks. Chad Brown has put federal law enforcement on the streets of Portland, without request to enforce graffiti laws.
Nice arm-chair quarterbacking.
You and I both know it is impossible to arrest the vandals when they embed themselves in legitimate protests. 50 days is more than enough time to "get the point across" with protests. Now, it's time to move on.
I applaud DHS for using private minivans. I'm sure the vandals/protesters had lookouts for gov vehicles. Great way to get past them and get the job done.
This is my metro area, there is no vandalism going on beyond a bit of graffiti. The federal law enforcement are refusing to identify themselves to anyone and are refusing to tell people why they are being arrested. Legally they are also supposed to coordinate with state and local police, but they are ignoring the Portland Police Bureau as well as the State Police.
Personally I think the Portland Police need to start asking these guys for their police ID and if they either don't have it on them or refuse to produce it, arrest them for impersonating a police officer and attempted kidnapping.
How you know it was without due process? VERY biased video there that doesn't show what these people were doing BEFORE they were picked up. Were they spraypainting something? Trying to pull down a statue?
Also, you have NO IDEA how they were processed after arrested.
You are making assumptions here you don't actually have the evidence to support. You've only presented a video to support conclusions that support your political viewpoint.
There are reports from people who were nabbed on the street for basically walking down the street late at night (there is no curfew). They did not have anything in their possession that was illegal, including cans of paint because they were not protesting. They were just minding their own business.
The picture conservative media paints of Portland right now and the reality of Portland is
very different. Fox and other conservative media has been going nuts over the latest O'Keefe video the last month, but the entire thing is completely fake. Portland had Black Lives Matter protests like most cities, but they died down and there are the occasional person standing around with a sign and some vehicles with BLM slogans painted on them (I've seen the vehicles, it's usually that paint high school seniors use to decorate their cars at graduation). The only vandalism has been some graffiti. Probably no more than usual, the graffiti artists are just being more political than usual.
There has been a small amount of graffiti on US government property, but most of it has been on state, city, or private property.
There is no problem here. If it weren't for the federal thugs roaming the streets of Portland in unmarked vans, I would feel perfectly safe walking the streets of downtown Portland these days. Because this town is populated with people who believe in science and listen to good advice from leaders, everyone is wearing masks too.
Theory - what if these were NOT federal officers? I didn't see any markings on their uniforms.
WHAT IF these were leftists doing all this to put blame on the right? Stranger things have happened in the past few years.
Chad Wolf, acting Secretary of Homeland Security, has admitted they are his people and he claims they are federal law enforcement, but he also has told them not to identify themselves. Additionally most of the people who were arrested and released were detained in the cells at the federal court house in downtown Portland. It is completely impossible for any private citizens impersonating police to be using holding cells in a federal court house without the federal agencies being completely in the loop. If these guys are not police, they are definitely endorsed by the executive branch, which means there is completely zero chance these people are anywhere near the left end of the political scale.
Back before we had lots of video of black people getting shot by police for basically going about their lives and not committing and crimes, quite a few white people believed the stories about police shootings were exaggerated or made up. Even I had my doubts. But when videos surfaced of African Americans getting killed by police for no reason, or fairly flimsy reasons, I became a believer that we have a serious problem with at least some police officers killing people for no good reason. I do not support fully eliminating police, 180 degrees from wrong is usually just as wrong, but we need to remove the badges from the bad cops and do something to prevent these killings.
Back when the black community wasn't being believed by most whites, they knew it was happening. When one of these incidents happened, most of the community knew what happened from first hand witnesses and it usually differed from the police's story in some key details.
From all the information that I've heard locally, I'm feeling like those African Americans trying to convince white folks that the police's story isn't true. What is going on in Portland right now is federal police who will not identify themselves, not even identify themselves as police, who have been called in to enforce anti-graffiti laws. And do it wrong by arresting a lot of people who are just minding their own business and happen to be downtown.
We have a raging pandemic that has killed over 130,000 Americans, the economy is in its worst shape in 90 years, and the president as his top priority is stopping graffiti in a medium sized city 3000 miles away from him.
The truth is Trump has been told that if he doesn't turn around his numbers by Labor Day, Congressional Republicans will start running against him to try and save their own jobs. He's desperate to stop his own slide in the polls. He seems to think that Americans are as law and order than they were when Nixon and Reagan were president. And his political instincts are to go full dictator to try and turn around his political fortunes. He hopes this plays well in the states he won in 2016, but now are going for Biden.
He's also trying to push his niece's book from the headlines. The book is very damning of Donald. I'm only a couple of chapters in, but from just what I've read thus far, Donald is a profoundly broken person Psychologically with at least one severe learning disability who should not be in any position of power under any circumstances. This from an experienced clinical Psychologist with over 50 years first hand experience with the subject of the book. Trump needs to distract the country from that, so he's getting tough on graffiti.
