High-ranking Portland police officials told state lawmakers they’ve tried to de-escalate violence at nightly downtown protests but a small group of anarchists intentionally try to injure officers and require them to use tear gas and other munitions that affect entire crowds.
Portland Police Deputy Chief Chris Davis testified Friday that officers who face off with violence-prone demonstrators know “who a lot of them are,” but the risks are usually too high to forge into the crowd and immediately arrest people they see engaged in criminal activity.
“It’s very challenging to go into a large, dynamic crowd and pluck one person out of there without creating an even bigger problem for ourselves,” Davis said.
Davis and Captain Craig Dobson, a Portland police incident commander who has helped coordinate the bureau’s response on the ground for all but a few of the last 50 nights, testified before the Oregon Legislature’s Joint Committee on Transparent Policing and Use of Force Reform during a hearing on police use of tear gas in Oregon. Portland police was the only agency questioned by lawmakers during the hearing. The 12-member committee, co-chaired by Sen. James Manning Jr., D-Eugene, and Rep. Janelle Bynum, D-Happy Valley, sprang from the June special legislative session centered on racial justice.
In their testimony, the pair characterized a small group of protesters who gather downtown each night as harboring “a very criminal element.” They portrayed officers, many of whom are outfitted in body armor, as at serious risk of dying from the impact of items protesters throw at them from a distance, including rocks, water bottles and fireworks. Davis said leaders of the group are “motivated by an anarchistic ideology.”
Portland police’s use of tear gas during protests has prompted lawsuits against the city as well as repeated objections from people who’ve said they’ve been caught in the gas while at protests but refraining from criminal activity or, in some cases, simply being in their homes or stuck in their cars near a demonstration.
In mid-June, a federal judge banned Portland police from using tear gas except in cases where the lives or safety of officers or the public are at risk. And a state law that took effect June 30 says tear gas can only be let loose after police have declared a riot and given people time to disperse.
Portland police haven’t reported using tear gas since June 30. But federal officers, who’ve been in contact with Portland police during downtown demonstrations, have used tear gas as recently as Friday.
Davis told lawmakers while city and federal officers have no authority over what the other is doing, Portland police "try to coordinate as much as we can with the federal authorities."
He said a member of the Federal Protective Service has regularly been in the Portland Police command post during downtown demonstrations. This is as Mayor Ted Wheeler repeatedly says the city doesn’t want or need federal aid during protests.
The police bureau announced Saturday that no one from the Federal Protective Service would be in the city police command post during protests that night.
The same day, Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty released a statement demanding Wheeler either stop local police from working with federal officers to use force against protesters or put her in charge of the police bureau.
Hardesty noted the latest police response came soon after she left a peaceful downtown vigil she organized that drew several hundred people. She said federal agents launched an “unprovoked brutal attack” on attendees still in the area that included her own staff members and members of the city’s hip-hop community as they were performing for the crowd. Portland police later joined in, Hardesty said.
She accused Wheeler, the city’s police commissioner, of putting her staff and the community in danger.
“We need you to be better,” Hardesty said of Wheeler. “We need you to stop denying the violence being perpetrated by our own police force and make it clear and unambiguous: Portland police are directed from the top to never collaborate with (President Donald Trump’s) goon squad, to take off their riot gear, and to stop contributing to the violence that was occurring before the feds arrived and still continues night after night.”
Wheeler’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
When asked Friday by Bynum if Portland police may have used the new statute to escalate its use of tear gas, because it allows use of the toxin as soon as police declare a riot, Davis said no, citing an unusual “level of violence” police encounter at the demonstrations.
“I can assure you that we have not somehow ratcheted down our standards so that we can get to tear gas faster,” Davis said. Dobson said a riot is declared by police only after six or more people engage in “tumultuous activity,” such as throwing rocks, bottles, fireworks and other objects at officers.
Rep. Alissa Keny-Guyer, D-Portland, said that police use of tear gas and other force strikes her as far more violent than the protesters’ lobbing of hard items toward police.
Davis acknowledged deploying the gas “doesn’t look good.” But he said he and all other Portland officers who control crowds have been subjected to it to know what it feels like and if people want to stop feeling its effects, “all you have to do is walk out of the area.”
Davis and Dobson said officers give several warnings and allow time for people to leave before they shoot out tear gas. Dobson later likened some of the fireworks thrown toward Portland officers to improvised explosive devices like those deployed against U.S. soldiers in Iraq and said that several officers have reported permanent or temporary hearing loss.
“The water bottles aren’t just filled with water, often those water bottles are filled with urine or feces or some other kind of putrid type substance that they’re throwing at us,” Dobson said. “When we talk about fireworks, they’re not sparklers. These are fireworks that if they hit us and land correctly, they will kill us.”
Davis and Dobson said officers try to keep out of the crowd’s view during protests unless incidents escalate to where they feel they have to intervene. He cited the time when protesters set a fire in a dumpster next to the police bureau’s North precinct as a prime example of an urgent threat to officers’ lives that demanded police response.
“When it comes to de-escalation, we run the gamut, but at this point, we won’t present ourselves unless we have to,” Dobson said. “This group is an anarchist group who shows up with the purpose of continually poking at us and doing things until we do show our face and they present themselves so that they create life safety issues such as trying to burn a building down or hurting someone in the crowd.”
Many members of the public testified in opposition of tear gas at protests, challenged police accounts of the conduct of protesters during demonstrations and that the collateral damage caused by the gas isn't worth the use.
Jordan Barbeau, a Portland-based attorney and member of the Multnomah County Bar Association, said she felt it was “particularly grotesque” for a chemical irritant to be used during a pandemic caused by an illness that affects the respiratory system. She said Davis and Dobson’s statements on police de-escalation efforts don’t match what people are experiencing nightly.
“We’re seeing officers reacting with overwhelming force and characterizing and identifying all of these people as working towards some nefarious aim together,” she said. “It’s part of that problem mentality that prevents officers from seeing these people as their constituents and more as an enemy to fight.”
-- Everton Bailey Jr.
ebailey@oregonian.com | 503-221-8343 |@EvertonBailey
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