'Tear Gas Tuesday' in Downtown Portland | Hacker News Reader

'Tear Gas Tuesday' in Downtown Portland

forensic-architecture.org

41 pointsl3mure38 comments

> Within a timeframe of only three hours, between 21:00 and 0:00 that night, the PPB used at least 148 munitions (of which 138 were likely chemical munitions). With our model, we are able to show that these munitions caused airborne chemical concentration levels to exceed the 2mg/m³ threshold beyond which exposure is ‘immediately dangerous to life and health’ (IDLH), as defined by federal US agencies (specifically the US Department of Labor’s Operational Safety and Health Administration). According to their own internal documents, the PPB is aware of these established IDLH thresholds and the ‘severe risks’ caused by exposing civilians to ‘high concentrations’ of such chemical agents—yet these regulations appear to have been actively ignored by the PPB officers on duty.

Portland residents have the dubious honor of joining the ranks of US citizens subjected to chemical and biological weapons by their own government.

[1]

> As the decades of the criminal malpractice involved in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments dragged on, the U.S. government continued to treat citizens as guinea pigs: the Cold War era saw scientific trials that involved injecting unwitting U.S. citizens with plutonium, and dousing San Francisco (and many other places) with test sprays of bacterial bioweapons. In 1952, the first open-air atomic fallout studies began in Minneapolis, just as construction was getting underway on Pruitt-Igoe. “Army researchers,” Martino-Taylor writes, “would release and then measure ‘cloud travel’ of the material and engage in ‘penetration studies’ inside residences and buildings such as the aging brick structure that was Clinton Elementary School in Minneapolis.”

[1] https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-commun...

> Portland residents have the dubious honor of joining the ranks of US citizens subjected to chemical and biological weapons by their own government.

During one of the BLM protests in downtown Phoenix they used tear-gas on the protesters because they decided to try to stop traffic on the I-10 and the police said “nope”.

I was watching the whole thing from a live camera on one of the newscopters and as soon as they started popping CS grenades I had to go check it out.

Hadn’t smelled CS since I gotten out of the military and never thought I’d see people getting gassed down the end of my street.

In all honesty the police were pretty chill until they decided to try to shut down a major US interstate then they drew a line and held it. The police helicopter was telling people to disperse for quite a while (which is how I found out about it because I heard the commotion) before they started gassing people.

I do know that the amount of CS the police deployed was nothing compared to what the army would hit us with every so often.

I was out there, helping people who were exposed and such. Protip, N95 masks and dust goggles aren't perfect but they do help, tear gas is actually a powder. Another tip, gas canisters become very hot, so it's important to have some kind of high temp glove when neutralizing them or tossing them back.

Protip, tossing them back could be considered assault and will more than likely result in a barrage of similar munitions being sent your way.

This comment is really not helpful or productive. The Brits really didn't like it when we dumped their property off a ship and into the harbor. It did invite "more projectiles" and imprisonment. I'm not sure what your point is.

Police doing their job was very rare during BLM riots.

> exposed civilians exercising their democratic right to protest and assembly

Where is destroying private property, throwing bricks, and setting things on fire in that sentence? Let’s call a spade a spade.

Edit:

And just so I’m not misinterpreted, I am completely against excessive force by police. Both sides are wrong and the author of this piece conveniently leaves that out.

TIL the illegal actions of a few entirely negate the civil rights of the masses.

If you have a crowd of 500 and 100 of them are bad actors, how do you disperse only the bad actors?

But this is frequently done when curfews are enacted. They are put in place and limit civil rights of everyone to control a few bad people.

With all due respect, that's not my problem. I am supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. My rights are not supposed to be stripped from me without due process. What my neighbor does is irrelevant. The fact that a wrong is common now does not make it less of a wrong.

Edit for clarification: It is not my duty to surrender my rights and accept collective guilt for another's crimes in order to make things easier on government agents.

Of course, you are innocent. But the crowd, as a group, is guilty based on their actions.

That’s like saying “I’m not part of this lynch mob, I was just standing next to the tree protesting peacefully. Innocent until proven guilty.”

For me, if I’m protesting peacefully and 20% of the crowd starts smashing stuff or burning cars, I’m going to split and disavow them.

This isn’t your neighbor who lives next to you that you can’t do anything about.

In my city, a peaceful protest turned violent and started smashing stuff. I’m not sure how I avoid that if I was trying to peacefully protest.

I can't disavow them because it always cycles back to "You're conveniently hiding the violent protesters!" or "You're denying the protesters as a whole were violent!" I'm not allowed to say "I'm non-violent and don't support violent protest", instead I am supposed to say "Because some some of those protesting discrimination against my people turned violent, I repudiate their cause and am obligated to support discrimination against my people".

So if you want to stop a protest you don't agree with, you can sabotage it by committing a few crimes during it and painting the protestors with the same brush. This is especially doable if you have the support of local law enforcement or the city.

Or likewise, you can get away with a whole lot of violence by claiming it was all done by saboteurs.

Yeah, it's kind of suspicious when the police go in to arrest someone busting windows and everyone in the protest tries to stop the police...

I agree, that is suspicious.

Additional insight for this, from my perspective as support ops for protesters in Portland.

Bad actors from eastern Oregon, a heavily red and still pretty racist part of the state, would come into otherwise peaceful protests and cause property damage so police would be able to use greater force. It's a very effective way to get a protest re-labeled as a riot.

Remember, Oregon banned black people as a way of dealing with the Civil War. [1]. Portland is a liberal island in a sea of of red, hence why it's become such a friction point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws

I see this claim every time the riots of 2020 are brought up, but have seen little evidence for it. Are we to assume that anyone who misbehaves at these events is a saboteur? That seems awfully convenient.

it's also awfully convenient to assume that only the protesting party is at fault.

I didn't say "only". I'm responding to GP's assertion that these were "otherwise peaceful protests" if not for "bad actors from eastern Oregon". They're the one claiming it was only the other side.

To be clear, I am not taking a centrist "both sides" position. I definitely think the vast majority of the violence and destruction was carried out by BLM and Antifa, in Portland and everywhere else that these riots occurred. But I won't go so far as to say that there were absolutely no saboteurs. I believe there were a handful of documented cases of them.

It is weird how much of a talking point it is. No evidence whatsoever, yet it’s mentioned so frequently. “I just know that all the bad actors were not the good people.”

I’m sure soon the police will claim that the bad police officers are just non-police dressed up.

Umbrella guy was clearly intending to incite violence and is believed, as far as I’ve read, to have been a “saboteur“.

Of course it’s not everyone. Mobs are idiots. But it’s not no one and the approach works, so it shouldn’t be ignored.

This covers in detail one day of gassing in one place, if an intense one, but between PPB and the feds tear gassing went on for months and extended into neighborhoods on both sides of the river. The long-term impact on plant growth in repeatedly gassed neighborhoods alone is incredible.

The guardian has a nice piece on this:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2023/apr/...

If it's a choice between protesters getting tear gassed vs your shop and livelyhood being burnt down by rioters the gas is not that much of a price to pay

Are there actually any small businesses left in Portland?

Even big ones like REI are closing their last location in Portland: https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2023/04/rei-to-close-its...

Even accepting this dichotomy at face value, rephrasing this a bit you could say it's a choice between bodily injury (to the protestors) or property damage. It's telling that in the US property "wins".

Property is acquired through the trade of one's resources, which are acquired through a time tradeoff in almost all cases.

The property vs. body isn't about valuing "things" more than people. It's about recognizing that the decision to destroy someone else's property is illegal, and that activity should be interrupted by the government. It is one of the few responsibilities a government should have. Underlying the property, real damage is being done to real humans by destroying their past and future bodies through the proxy of property and the tradeoff they would need to make to reacquire it.

It is about valuing things more than people. By saying that it's ok to respond to property damage with violence you are valuing property at at least the same, if not more, than people.

Yes. My point is that it took the equivalent of human life to acquire the property, so destroying someone else's private property is akin to destroying their life.

Obviously they're still alive so can spend time acquiring more, but let's not pretend property crime is priceless. That said, I don't advocate for violence and would prefer to see the legal system work the issues through.

This is a silly way to frame the issue. If you tell me "I have a baseball bat and I will use it to either hit a random person or smash the window of this car," I 'll choose the car. On the other hand, if a random person walks up to a car and starts smashing it, I don't have a problem with someone using force to stop that.

If it's worse to attack someone then it is to damage property then why would it be ok to attack someone to stop them from damaging property?

Because I value living in a society where people aren't free to victimize others more than I value that person being free from arrest or other violence.

In most cases, the protests were perfectly peaceful until the police escalated with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Perfectly peaceful? You must be talking about a different Portland. One without a Federal courthouse that was attacked nightly for months on end.

“Fiery, but mostly peaceful” is a euphemism we all can live with.

>At sampling location A (highlighted in image above), which simulates conditions at the intersection of SW 5th Avenue and SW Yamhill Street, a key location in the 2 June protests, the IDLH value was continuously exceeded for a period of six minutes and twenty seconds. The maximum airborne concentration recorded at sampling location A was 443.9 mg/m³.

>At sampling location H (highlighted in image above), just one block north of sampling location A, at the intersection of SW 5th Avenue and SW Morrison Street, our simulation recorded the highest airborne concentration value across the sampled locations: 4,568 mg/m³, more than 2,000 times the IDLH threshold.

Just from knowing how gases/ aerosols disperse- the airborne concentration is extremely dependent on proximity to the particular tear gas munition that is emitting the tear gas. Any individual tear gas munition that is emitting gas at a particular moment is certain to exceed the IDLH threshold in its immediate vicinity. This article leaves out the level of detail that would be needed to know for sure whether they placed a sampling location within 6 inches of a live tear gas grenade, but the weirdly absent details following their scary citation of 2,000 times the limit sure makes me think they did.

It's also worth noting that places like Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland are sunken public spaces, which, while helpful in diffusing sound and making a nice common area, also means the tear gas will linger longer. [1]

[1] https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g52024-d126568...

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