Portland sees peaceful night of protests following withdrawal of federal agents | Hacker News Reader

Portland sees peaceful night of protests following withdrawal of federal agents

theguardian.com

37 pointsthrowanem12 comments

Did the author write this article too early? There's a viral video from last night about a protester burning himself after failing to launch an explosive at the federal courthouse.

> Did the author write this article too early?

Charitably: yes

Realistically: the narrative bias pulls pretty hard

I know that people will complain about the news source, so here are local journalists covering the same phenomenon [0][1]. The past two nights have been marked by a withdrawal of federal and city police, and a corresponding drop in violence, riots, property destruction, and injuries.

It is almost as if the cops are the ones who instigate violence, and not the protestors.

[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/07/portland-protest...

[1] https://www.opb.org/article/2020/07/31/portland-protesters-g...

The Guardian's generally pretty trustworthy. What people will complain about is posting a single night of data with the expectation that it proves a point or will lead to a HN-quality discussion.

> It is almost as if the cops are the ones who instigate violence

Or it's temporary and we're a couple weeks away from kids getting shot if CHAZ/CHOP is an example.

People have already been shot [0], so I'm not sure I see your point. I'm not sure why you've brought up CHAZ/CHOP other than as a non sequitur; people are not attempting to establish an autonomous zone downtown.

Nonetheless, I'll take your bet; I bet that the violence will not return until the police start engaging again. I can agree that the peace is temporary, but to me, it is merely because there is currently a handoff from federal police to OSP.

[0] https://www.opb.org/news/article/federal-officers-portland-p...

It’s almost as if the city showed that it doesn’t tolerate violence and bend over to mob rule. The protesters got the idea eventually. Feds had to help police get the message across.

[0]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

Are you in Portland right now? I don't know who in the city you've been talking to, but that is not the consensus that I am picking up from folks on the street. Folks are tagging buildings and infrastructure faster than it can be repainted, anti-police flyers cover the power poles, and house after house has "defund the police" and "black lives matter" written in their windows.

As far as the city itself, the city council just voted to defund the police and to give us a vote in November to set up more police oversight. The only people complaining are the police, who are retaliating by digging up dirt on city councilors.

Broken-window criminology happens to be based on fabricated data, bad statistics, and lies; it was created in order to justify racial oppression via aggressive policing. You can learn more about the history of James Q. Wilson and broken-window theory from "How Police Unions Made Cops Even Deadlier" [0] or other detailed analyses of Wilson's legacy. By making casual reference to these theories, you are propagating the same system that killed the people whose deaths spawned the protests that you are bemoaning.

[0] https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

Good

Makes sense now that all the violent protesters have been arrested.

Just the right trying to bring their straw man of antifa violence to fruitition.

They always had the choice to peacefully protest. Everyone knew they were purposefully attacking the courthouse.

Mostly a distraction from real police reform. Federal police arresting violent white protestors is low on the list of important priority police reform issues in the US. Seemed like two groups were trying to make an important moment about themselves.

I'd watch it start to descend into on Twitter, and the feds would let them protest for 4-6 hours until around midnight, usually when it got really bad before declaring it unlawful. And everyone did their song and dance. Then the next day the news and political punditry would be all about vandalizing some courthouse and nothing else.

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