Portland’s Black Lives Matter protests face federal retaliation.

BY DAN DEWEESE

IN A PRESS RELEASE the Department of Homeland Security released last week, titled “Acting Secretary Wolf Condemns The Rampant Long-Lasting Violence in Portland,” the phrase “violent anarchists” is used in seventy of the eighty-eight bullet-pointed items meant to enumerate instances of “lawless destruction and violence.” People on the internet have made fun of the document, since a string of bullet points repeat the phrase “violent anarchists graffitied,” and city folk consider graffiti mundane. The list also includes entries (“Violent anarchists continued to attack officers with lasers”) that are comedy gold for any reader looking to laugh. The whole thing feels like the result of a homework assignment on which students were required to list at least eighty items but without penalty for repetition or absurdity. The operational rhetorical strategy is obviously that if you repeat something enough, people will believe it.

Cool. So here are the violent anarchists that descended upon Portland’s City Hall during the Black Live Matter protests on the night of Monday, July 20th:

City Hall in Portland, Oregon, on the evening of Monday, July 20, 2020.

If that looks like no one, that’s because City Hall, just a few blocks from the federal courthouse, is silent as a tomb in the evenings. When people are told by breathless cable news anchors that Portland is under siege and filled with out of control protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd (and the killings of many, many other Black citizens of this country), people living in Portland often have to reassure friends and family members elsewhere that the big, ongoing protest in Portland is really “just downtown.” Even that is not accurate, though. City Hall is downtown, and no one is there. Portland State University is downtown, and no one is there. The stadium the Portland Timbers and Portland Thorns soccer teams play in during non-global-pandemic years is downtown, and no one is there. There have been Black Lives Matter marches and protests elsewhere in Portland, but the drama gripping the nation’s social media feeds is occurring almost exclusively between the hours of 10pm and 3am here:

But that is just a part of downtown Portland. Here is a wider sense of context, with Portland State University to the south and Pioneer Square to the north:

But that’s still kind of a close-up. Here is a better look, with the east side of the river included:

But even that, really, is just inner Portland. Below is a much more inclusive map of Portland, Oregon. The red square still marks the location of the protests at the federal courthouse. It’s right above the O in “Downtown Portland”:

For those of you out of town, do you see how language that suggests “violent anarchists” have placed Portland “under siege” is news to people actually living in Portland? People in Portland are drinking coffee, going for a jog, taking their dogs to the park, smoking weed, trying to figure out a stylish way to wear masks, and surfing the internet pretty much like most American citizens. The only difference in Portland is that people have an additional question to ask themselves during the day: Should I go down there tonight?

ACTING SECRETARY Chad Wolf flew to Portland last Thursday, had a professional photographer take photos of him in valedictory poses, and left. He then began appearing on television in order to defend the behavior of a camouflage-clad collection of federal officers apparently plucked from a few different agencies and sent to Portland to defend the federal courthouse from graffiti. He does not appear to have personally crossed paths with any of the “violent anarchists” immortalized in his memo (if he had, he would certainly have tweeted a photo of himself with them) but one would assume they are somewhere in the following images:

I would like to write something snarky like “I guess the violent anarchists are just tough to pick out among the parents and children, friends and neighbors, teachers and students, and other citizens of all backgrounds represented in the crowd,” but that would suggest a dark intrigue the event does not have. No one at the Black Lives Matter protests in downtown Portland is hard to detect. Leaders using bullhorns to address the crowd are perfectly visible up front, and sometimes compete with each other. (When Ted Wheeler, Portland’s mayor, showed up to speak Wednesday evening, most people couldn’t hear him, and another speaker with more effective amplification was also addressing the crowd at the same time.) Tables covered by blue and red tents lend Lownsdale Square, the park across the street from the federal courthouse, a festive air. Riot Ribs, a barbecue collective, makes and hands out food for free, the next table offers free snacks and water, another has medical supplies, and other tents have paper plates with paint to decorate them, and (in what might be the only instance of commerce) t-shirts for sale. The energy is celebratory—an anticipatory communal vibe. When Portland police or the federal agents (I haven’t heard a standardized collective name for them beyond “the feds”) tear gas the crowd, this is the park they are firing toward or into. When they push or “bull rush” the crowd, this is the event they are interrupting. They overturn tables, damage grills and food, and destroy medical supplies. It occurs to me while writing this that I don’t know whether the t-shirt vendors abandon their inventory or bundle it up and carry it while retreating. I assume the answer is bundle (it’s what I would do) but I should confirm.

People watching television or livestreams of the protests watch the tense action at the courthouse entrance or along the fence surrounding it. (Technically “fences,” I suppose, since the fence has to be replaced—or not, or somewhat—every time it is torn down.) What viewers do not see is where the one or two thousand protesters go when the police or federal agents start tear gassing the crowd.

Here is how the Portland Bureau of Transportation describes the grid of downtown Portland:

The majority of Portland has 200 x 200 foot blocks, whereas most other American cities have much larger block patterns.
Some Portland history indicates blocks were made at the 200 feet scale to create a pedestrian friendly downtown. The more widely accepted version says is it was done to create more highly valued corner lots for businesses, with the positive side effect being a pedestrian friendly downtown.

A pedestrian-friendly downtown is also a protester-friendly downtown, because when a crowd of a couple thousand people backs out of Lownsdale Park, they are backing into a grid of streets that quickly absorbs them. Protest leaders on bullhorns remind people not to panic or run, but to walk slowly. People who feel the protesters are violent anarchists will, I imagine, find that detail further evidence that the protests are being run by professional violent anarchists, but when camouflage-clad agents with guns and armor or Portland police in tactical gear with military-surplus equipment are firing flashbangs, pepper balls, and tear gas into a large crowd, the presence of people urging calm and pointing out safe routes of retreat seems a responsible act of public safety. The crowd increasingly includes people who are neither experienced protesters nor particularly athletic—if that is a word that should be used to describe the skill of escaping tear gas and munitions without tripping over curbs, running into benches or trees, or colliding with other retreating citizens—so there are also medics and organizers asking anyone who appears to be struggling if they are okay or need anything.

A video feed mounted on a van displays action occurring across the street at the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon.

A crowd outside the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon.

It’s difficult to imagine how this appears to the federal agents Acting Secretary Wolf has bussed or flown into Portland. (I don’t know how the transportation works when you get plucked out of your Border Patrol Unit and sent to Portland to defend a courthouse from vandalism.) Any agent unfamiliar with downtown Portland would be watching a crowd of a thousand people retreat into a grid of streets that hold, only a few blocks away, buses still running their routes and light rail trains still rumbling into their stops. (There is also a streetcar system, but that line is a few more blocks away and doesn’t seem to come into play.) To anyone who lives or works downtown, the routes and timing and speeds and directions of these vehicles are familiar. To people from cities without public transportation, though, Portland’s use of just about every form of public transport has to appear inscrutable to the point of random.

I’m sure the Department of Homeland Security has supplied their agents with all of the necessary maps, just as I’m sure the agents are smart enough to send someone in jeans and a black t-shirt out into the crowd to see what’s going on. All an undercover agent would be able to report, though, is that there are intersections every two hundred feet, that it requires only four or five traffic-less blocks to absorb the thousand people, and when tear gas and pepper balls are fired, most of the crowd moves up the block and waits for everything to clear. What the nation is monitoring on twitter livestreams, many of the protesters are monitoring from a block or two away. (Wednesday night, livestreams featured Portland mayor Ted Wheeler dutifully serving a shift eating tear gas up against the fence at the federal courthouse, a gesture rendered even more strange when one considers that Wheeler also serves as Commissioner of the Portland Police Bureau—an entity that has been teargassing protesters for several weeks.) Tear gas and smoke billow from Lownsdale Square, and a considerable part of the crowd watches from down the street. After fifteen or thirty minutes, when the police or the federal agents—or the on-again, off-again combinations of police and federal agents—return to their original starting points, the crowd files back into the park, the tents and tables are set back up, and the cycle begins again.

Agents of the Department of Homeland Security appear from behind the Multnomah County Justice Center on Monday, July 20, 2020, in Portland, Oregon.

Protesters in Portland, Oregon, wait up the street while avoiding tear gas and munitions being fired by federal agents in Lownsdale Square on Monday, July 20, 2020.

I’VE FELT CONFLICTED about covering the protests. I’ve lived in Portland for twenty years, and though I consider this city my home and can’t imagine living anywhere else, there are many heroic journalists already filming this story night after night, from right inside the cloud of gas and munitions. Long before any white moms wearing yellow t-shirts began attending, there were Black and Indigenous and brown moms doing the hard work of organizing and sustaining the continued demand for accountability from the city of Portland for the deaths of citizens like Quanice Hayes and Jason Washington.

I was taught to write news features like this in a tone whose evenness strikes me as inaccurate, and therefore a failure to capture the event. I’m also a middle-aged white male, so when I walk up in jeans and a black t-shirt, I’m sure there are members of the crowd who think: There’s the cop. I could wear an orange shirt so everyone would say It’s a dad!, but I’m not attending as a dad. And when everyone has watched the livestreams every night, is my written account even necessary? Do I have, as they say, an angle?

If I do, it’s probably just that if you live in Portland and are interested in the Black Lives Matter protest downtown, the city’s grid and the protesters who are navigating it are accommodating. But can I put to rest anyone’s concern that someone will soon be killed? No. There are plenty of people, both in Portland and elsewhere, who—at least on the internet—profess to wanting to see the protesters shot. I find a lust for violence and being in thrall to power odd in adults, but power and violence always seem to find a way. Likewise, it does not appear to me that violent anarchists are the ones who have placed the city of Portland under siege. But if you want to look into it yourself, parking is easy.