66% of Oregonians Think Portland Protests are Violent and Counterproductive

[lfromnj]

"I'm a libertarian! I'm a libertarian!"

Has sampled 31 flavors of boot

the best boot for stomping hippies is a tie-dyed pair of Chucks.  I reserve the combat boots for stomping skinheads.

Btw this would only be hippies and skinheads threatening to burn down your home or cause similar harm right to your life,liberty,property ?
*Wink

[PSOL]

I support riots only if they’re organized by bipartisan protesters in a bipartisan manner for a bipartisan cause and supported by bipartisan politicians

This is the moderated response that we can all agree is the worst compromise.

[TJ in Oregon]

What is the actual issue with Portland?  I can tell you that the issue with Seattle is that our city attorney Pete Holmes and our county prosecutor Dan Satterberg both refuse to prosecute protesters who are arrested, no matter what their crimes are or how many times they're arrested.  As a result, we have this endless cycle where they f--k everything up, the police arrest them, they go to jail and post bail pretty quickly, and then ultimately never have to go to court because Holmes and/or Satterberg drop the charges.

There is nothing that Mayor Jenny Durkan can do about this.  There is nothing that Governor Jay Inslee can do about this.  The voters need to vote out Holmes and vote out Satterberg.  Unfortunately, 95% of Seattle has no idea who these two men are, and continue to blame the mayor for things she has no control over.  The stupidity and ignorance of Seattle voters never ends.

Anyway, I wonder if the situation in Portland is something similar.  Surely if Wheeler or Brown had any power to actually solve the problem they would have done it by now.

The Multnomah County DA Mike Schmidt has similarly refused to prosecute most of the arrests made. Among other concerns are that many of the arrestees are charged with Interfering with a Peace Officer (failing to follow a police order, generally to disperse when an assembly is declared unlawful).

Portland's mayor has more or less resorted to pleading sadly. In fairness, there's really not much he can do. Brown has mostly avoided the conflict except her brief foray into the standoff with the federal government, which she seemingly made things better by, and her less-than-steller attempts to guarantee protections by promising stuff she doesn't have the authority to do (deploy Clackamas and Washington County officials and promise the DA will actually do something). I guess it's fair to say Brown's response has been a lot better, but still leaves something to be desired.

In the end, the core issue is that there is no authority the protesters respect enough to listen to, and no authority every else respects enough to support them taking drastic enough action to stop the violent protests. The end result will be that this will continue indefinitely.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Yeah, that sounds about right.  If anyone wanted to be objective about any of this, the real takeaway from these west coast riots is that a handful of activist high-level attorneys choosing not to prosecute a class of people towards whom they bear political sympathies towards is sufficient to totally undercut an entire city.  Voters need to be aware of this trend and need a recourse to recall those attorneys (Holmes, Satterberg, Schmidt) and in general this needs to be more of an issue in the future.

This may be new for Schmidt, but Holmes/Satterberg have been on this BS for quite a while, refusing to prosecute serial criminals because they are homeless junkies and would just end up in prison.  It's ridiculous, but it's also a large part of why Seattle became a haven for those kinds of people.  Portland had the same problem last time I was down there (last summer) so it may be a Schmidt problem as well.

Unfortunately, nobody pays attention, and in the last election Holmes cruised to re-election by a 50% margin over a DSA Bernie Bro who probably would have done the same thing.  Instead everyone just blames the few public figures they're familiar with -- the mayor, the governor, the presidential candidate for their political party -- and nothing gets done.

[Badger]

I don't exactly know what you want Kate Brown to do, and how people opposing the protests affects Kate Brown.

She needs to send in the national guard

And make the situation worse no.

No to stop this

Republicans would support Tiananmen Square if in china lmao.

uh what, the national guard has been sent in many times to stop riots

Usually with bad results. The National Guard is largely not trained in crowd control. Local police forces are.

There is no evidence that the Portland PD and County Sheriff's Department aren't numerically overwhelmed by the handful of continuing protesters, and the smaller percentage they're of which are destructive assholes. The only, and I emphasize only reason to bring in the National Guard for crowd control is if the local police authorities are numerically overwhelmed and the Civil Authorities have no choice but to resort with a military shooting response.

I know BLM rubs you the wrong way, but is that really, truly, what you want?

National Guard doesn't mean that though

...yes it does? The National Guard is literally a component of the military. It's the portion of the Army and Air Force reserves that function as state militias.

Look at Berkeley in the 1960s , their were less casualties I beleive after the national guard was sent in then before when the regular police where there

There was one death by police and none with the National Guard. That's a completely silly analogy and you should know it.

In addition, no matter how much the memory of Reagan's boots on a nightly basis, you do realize that sending in are National Guardsmen to well what were peaceful protest - - outside the cops that is - - is a very very bad thing not to replicate.

[TJ in Oregon]

Yeah, that sounds about right.  If anyone wanted to be objective about any of this, the real takeaway from these west coast riots is that a handful of activist high-level attorneys choosing not to prosecute a class of people towards whom they bear political sympathies towards is sufficient to totally undercut an entire city.  Voters need to be aware of this trend and need a recourse to recall those attorneys (Holmes, Satterberg, Schmidt) and in general this needs to be more of an issue in the future.

This may be new for Schmidt, but Holmes/Satterberg have been on this BS for quite a while, refusing to prosecute serial criminals because they are homeless junkies and would just end up in prison.  It's ridiculous, but it's also a large part of why Seattle became a haven for those kinds of people.  Portland had the same problem last time I was down there (last summer) so it may be a Schmidt problem as well.

Unfortunately, nobody pays attention, and in the last election Holmes cruised to re-election by a 50% margin over a DSA Bernie Bro who probably would have done the same thing.  Instead everyone just blames the few public figures they're familiar with -- the mayor, the governor, the presidential candidate for their political party -- and nothing gets done.

Schmidt was just elected this May with 77% of the vote and took office Aug 1. This means he cannot legally be recalled until February, even if that was successful. I don't know a ton about his predecessor's enforcement of laws but Schmidt seems to be a clear break in the direction of not enforcing them. The protesters and Schmidt have a legitimate point that "Interfering with a Peace Officer" is sort of a bogus charge, but if it's removed we need to replace it with something like "Refusing to Disperse from an Unlawful Assembly".

As for the homeless, the way this works in Portland is the city will occasionally post unlawful encampment notices at homeless camps and then the people there have 10 days to move or they can have their stuff thrown away and can be charged with "Interfering with a Peace Officer". It's all very arbitrary since we all know they're simply going to move somewhere else until the city decides to disperse that encampment also. There has to be some charge on the books to force them to move but "Interfering with a Peace Officer" is a rather silly one to threaten. In any case, it's super easy to see people shooting up with hypodermic needles in the open, so I imagine they could charge much more severe crimes if they really wanted. What ends up happening when laws are blatantly not enforced is that they end up getting enforced selectively.

The system is very broken here.