For weeks, I was puzzled by the radical disconnect between what was being reflected back to us by the national media -- and even our friends and relatives in distant parts of the country -- and what Portland residents like me, who live downtown, knew to be the truth.
The national media were repeatedly saying Portlanders were “rioting,” that the downtown was overrun by “antifa and Marxist terrorists,” filled with burning buildings and looting . . . but we saw nothing of that, especially those of us who live closest to the epicenter.
Nervous friends from out of town repeated that police are saying the activity in the streets are “riots.” Nobody’s rioting, we responded, and we’re not afraid to go downtown.
It finally dawned on me that the Portland Police Bureau’s use of the term “riot” was a technical matter -- a legal one -- which had very little to do with the phenomenon American citizens have been accustomed to seeing reported on the national news as riots.
The label “riot” is a necessary legal step the authorities have to take before they can deploy certain tactics and tools, especially tear gas, which is a chemical weapon banned for use in war by international treaties.
The term is technical; it's not descriptive. The police are not legally allowed to act in certain ways unless the activity they are attempting to control somehow qualifies as “a riot.”
In other words, it's like probable cause. If an officer lacks probable cause to stop a vehicle or search a person, then whatever follows, even an arrest, may get thrown out of court.
In the case of a traffic stop, the officer needs to cite some basis, such as “resembled a suspect vehicle described by dispatch” or even something as slight as “failed to signal a turn or lane change” in order to pull over a motorist. The officer certainly cannot search a private vehicle, home premises, or body of a U.S. citizen without having a reasonable basis for believing a crime has been or is in the process of being committed.
Thus it is with the legal designations “unlawful assembly” and “riot.” Conditions on the street have to rise to a certain level in order to qualify . . . but, as it turns out, those conditions are fairly minimal.
According to Portland Police, a riot is defined as “six or more persons engaging in tumultuous and violent conduct and thereby intentionally or recklessly creating a grave risk of causing public alarm, excluding persons who are engaged in passive resistance.”
Conceivably, if the police thought they had seen only six people throw a rock or a water bottle, they could call a riot and are instantly authorized to shoot tear gas at the other 200 or more protesters (and that seems to be precisely what they've done, multiple times, the past month or two).
The definition even leaves it open-ended as to whom the so-called rioters are endangering, it seems to me; if six people got in a brawl with each other, the police could declare a “riot” and descend on everyone. It is even possible the officials haven’t always bothered to count to six.
When we think of a “riot,” we tend to picture a massive, out-of-control mob that roves from one street and set of blocks to another, randomly attacking bystanders and structures, smashing windows, stealing goods, and setting fires to multiple locations.
That’s what happened in Watts starting on August 11, 1965: for six days of civil unrest in Los Angeles, during which 14,000 members of the California National Guard were called in, 34 people died and an estimated $40 million in property damage occurred.
[Photo Credit: World Telegram photo by Ed Palumbo]
That’s what happened after four officers were acquitted of using excessive force in the beating of Rodney King in 1992 . . . and again, over six days, rioting resulted in the deaths of 63 people, injuries to 2,383, more than 12,000 arrests, and estimated property damage of more than $1 billion to roughly 3,767 buildings.
[Photo of burned-out buildings on Hollywood Boulevard, 1992, credit: Ricky Bonilla]
It happened in Ferguson, Missouri, after a police officer shot 18-year-old Michael Brown on August 9, 2014. The protests rose and fell over weeks -- even months -- as the St. Louis County prosecutor announced in November that a grand jury had voted not to indict the shooter, and protesters set buildings on fire and looted stores.
[Photo of riot control efforts on Day 6 in Ferguson, Aug. 17, 2014 credit: Creative Commons, "Loavesofbread"]
But despite the ongoing national publicity, the unrest in Ferguson was different in quality from its predecessors in Los Angeles. Though there were beatings and shootings, no one was killed. No police officers were seriously injured.
Twenty-eight businesses reported having been burglarized on August 10, the first night of upheaval after the Michael Brown shooting, but losses a month later were reported to be somewhere between $250,000 and $5 million. Nothing, as one analysis put it, comparable to the losses from each of several St. Louis hailstorms.
In all three cases, media attention focused on the loudest, most vivid and violent events of those chaotic metro disturbances. Whatever we saw on TV or the web didn't cover everything that happened in those cities.
Violence and vandalism undoubtedly occurred elsewhere, off camera, but the home and business owners who had been victimized were left to pick up the pieces alone, by themselves, unremarked by the nation at the time and by history thereafter.
Those were true riots.
Nothing like these three has happened in Portland this year, save for one night, on May 29/30. Our unrest may have met the legal definition of “riot” for the purpose of police action at times since, but it wasn’t anything like the riots in Watts, or Rodney King, or Ferguson.
Among the many things that were different in Portland:
-- Protesters focused on a specific target, with a single street address.
-- At none of these addresses could a photo ever have been taken of the building -- a single building only -- that showed it burning like the multiple conflagrations in the photo above of Watts in 1965.
-- Whatever property damage or violence that occurred here in Portland was nearly always intensely observed at the time, videotaped, broadcast and shared over and over thereafter, and often exaggerated in regular news coverage . . . never mind the advocacy websites that affixed captions which made claims far beyond what could be perceived in the footage.
-- Vast numbers of “injuries” have been claimed on the part of police officers and federal agents, but no concrete evidence for them has ever turned up: no photos of wounds . . . no medical reports . . . no testimony by medical professionals who would presumably have treated them.
-- Except for some graffiti and a few broken windows, neighboring properties have been left pretty much untouched. In fact, when police pushed protesters out into the Laurelwood neighborhood on the night of August 7/8, eyewitnesses, including live streamers and Oregonian reporters, noted that some local residents invited the protesters into their yards and homes to protect them from the police.
-- If and when protesters moved away from the building that had been the focus of their ire for the night, it was only because the police “bull rushed,” shoved, and even shot at them to drive them there . . . not because they were looking for other targets on which to vent their rage, as happened with Watts and Rodney King.
-- There have been marches of many blocks’ and even several miles’ duration across Portland since May, but they have been organized, peaceful, even festive, and with a clear destination in mind, not random destruction along the route.
-- Over the vast majority of the roughly 90 days since the first explosion of utter rage on May 29/30 in response to the on-camera murder of George Floyd (which riots were a national event, not simply a Portland one), there has been no looting of any sort, despite DHS and CBP officials’ tiresome refrain of “53 straight days of violence . . . 65 days of looting . . . 85 days of no city response,” etc. (and too often, the local news media have not questioned the cliche but parroted it, unfortunately).
When Fox channel or a local media news outlet or anybody else says the word "riot,” most of us likely imagine something much more vast, destructive, and out of control than either:
1. What Portland Police mean when they designate a “riot” . . . because that basically means “we want to do this and that now, but we can’t do them legally unless we slap this label on it”
[and, tellingly, on August 11, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt, the official who is tasked with following up all the arrests made by the police and federal officials the past two months, announced his office would drop all but 45 of 550, or about 8 percent, of those charges -- especially the charge of “rioting” alone, if it is unaccompanied by any other felony assault or property damage allegations]
or
2. The reality of the situation
NEXT: A dissection of the Portland Police Bureau’s accounting of the Portland Protests