SEATTLE JUST DEFUNDED ITS POLICE — SORT OF

By Paul Blest, Vice.

August 13, 2020

https://popularresistance.org/seattle-just-defunded-its-police-sort-of/

The Decision Wasn’t Enough To Satisfy Activists, But It Made The Police Chief Resign Almost Immediately.

After a summer of explosive demonstrations that saw protesters take over several city blocks for weeks, the Seattle City Council approved a budget “revision” package on Monday that will cut $3 million from the police budget and eliminate up to 100 positions from the department. The move both fell far short of the demands of activists, and was so forcefully opposed by the city’s establishment that the police chief resigned almost immediately.

Seattle police chief Carmen Best wrote a letter to members of the department announcing her retirement late Monday, effective September 2. Best, the first Black woman to serve as Seattle police chief, spent 26 years at the department before being appointed chief of police in 2018. “This was a difficult decision for me, but when it’s time, it’s time,” Best said in her letter, according to KING-TV.

Best will be replaced on an interim basis by deputy chief Adrian Diaz. Mayor Jenny Durkan, who opposed the cuts, lamented Best’s resignation in a letter to police. “I regret deeply that she concluded that the best way to serve the city and help the department was a change in leadership, in the hope that would change the dynamics to move forward with the City Council,” Durkan wrote, according to KING-TV.

Best’s move comes after the Seattle City Council voted 7-1 on Monday for the cuts in a budget revision. The cuts make up less than 1 percent of the city’s $400 million budget and 100 positions represent 7 percent of the city’s police force. The position cuts include 32 officers from patrol, as well as reductions in specialized units including SWAT and school resource officers, and the removal of officers from the city’s homeless “navigation” team.

The City Council touted it as a first step, after a majority previously committed to cutting the department’s budget in half. In a statement, City Council president Lorena M. González hinted that more cuts would be considered when the next annual budget process rolls around. “The Council has used the summer rebalancing budget process to consider initial cuts, with more budget allocation decisions to be made in the fall during the Council’s regularly-scheduled budget session,” she said in a statement.

The budget cuts follow months of protest in Seattle, which climaxed when protesters took over the immediate vicinity of the Seattle PD’s abandoned East precinct and set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), later rebranded the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). Durkan ordered police to clear the area in early July, but protests have continued, especially after the Department of Homeland Security dispatched federal law enforcement officers there last month.

Anti-racism activists had demanded a 50 percent budget cut, and the lone vote against the package was socialist Kshama Sawant, who thought the police cuts didn’t go far enough and austerity measures in other areas of the budget went too far.

“With my ‘no’ vote today, I affirm our movement’s unchanging demands: Defund SPD by at least 50% and tax big business and the rich, not working people, because we can’t pay and we won’t pay for this crisis – this crisis of the racist and bankrupt system of capitalism,” she said in a statement.

Argentina and Mexico to Produce Oxford's COVID-19 Vaccine

 

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HAITI: TREMORS HERALD THE COLLAPSE OF THE MOÏSE REGIME

By ELAPRE (Struggle and Action for the Revolution), Marxist.com.

August 13, 2020

https://popularresistance.org/haiti-tremors-herald-the-collapse-of-the-moise-regime/


Note from Marxist.com: We received this article from ELAPRE, a group of revolutionary youth in Haiti. Haiti has experienced the same intensification of the class struggle we have seen in many countries around the world. In recent years, the masses in Haiti have fought to change society and could have overthrown the Moïse government many times. But his government is saved by the ruling class and the reformist leadership of popular movements. Seeing no way forward on this basis, ELAPRE was formed to study the ideas of Marxism, learn the lessons of the past, and to build a revolutionary organisation capable of leading the struggle for socialism.

Haiti’s economic and social situation has been steadily worsening since Jovenel Moïse came to power. It is a real descent into hell, planned by the tiny minority of bourgeois families as the holders of the majority of the country’s wealth. These include the Apaid, Boulos, Bigio, Mevs, Abdallah, Deep, Brandt, Braun, and Accra families.

To generate large amounts of money, these bourgeois families occasionally employ the mafioso and abominable machine of exploitation, theft and corruption. These bosses were the main backers of Jovenel Moïse during his 2016 election campaign to become the holder of the executive power in the country. Thanks to financial support from the private sector, the Haitian Tet Kale Party (PHTK), where Jovenel Moïse came from, was able to bribe members of the 2016 Provisional Electoral Council, bribe gang leaders, and buy the media. Jovenel Moïse’s presence marks a more radical continuation of the country’s liberal right-wing mafioso policy, characterised by widespread corruption and waste of public funds.




Strong protests have often taken place since Moïse’s arrival at the National Palace. The events that took place on 6-7 July 2018 due to the increase in the price of petroleum products to more than double their value were a real expression of anger against the government and the ruling class. It was a clap of thunder from the popular classes, who ransacked public buildings and some businesses. Around August of that same year, several large demonstrations took place involving the Petrochallengers, as well as opposition political parties and organisations, whose main demands were the following: the resignation of President Jovenel Moïse, justice, and the recovery of the Petrocaribe funds embezzled by the authorities at the highest levels of the state. Another wave of protests completely paralysed the country at the end of 2019. During three months of so-called lockdown, even the presidential convoy, when it was not blocked in at the President’s residence in Pétion-Ville, was forced to change course to reach the National Palace.

Popular mobilisations challenge the liberal and corrupt policies of the government. Indeed, despite the discontent of the people, the measures adopted by the government remain superficial and propagandistic, not at all capable of mitigating the scale of the crisis. One of the measures preferred by the government is to replace one individual in the government with another from the same clan, who is often even more stupid and incompetent or involved in scandals with the misappropriation of public funds.

The extreme right-wing government of Jovenel Moïse carries with it all usual the rottenness and trivialities. It is a destructive regime, and seems to be particularly hostile to popular demands.

While the health situation of families deteriorates, the political measures adopted wear them down all the more. Far from working to slow the spread of COVID-19, Jovenel instead used this period of uncertainty during the quarantine to put into effect absurd and anti-popular restrictions in his decree of 16 June 2020. In one of the measures in this decree, he even made it compulsory for citizens to pay a fine totalling one fifth of the monthly minimum wage if you are caught by the police on the street without the new standardised national identity card. There is protest among the population against this measure due to its demagogic character, and because it has come about in a context of corruption and serious institutional irregularities.

Jovenel’s power politics trample on the weak rights acquired by Haitian society in order to give everything to the bourgeoisie and the men close to his party. At a time when the spread of the COVID-19 virus is in full swing, the government has allowed the bosses of the textile factories to have the workers return to work. These workers were sent home in mid-March because of the spread of the virus, yet adequate sanitary arrangements have not been made within these factories.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, no drastic measures have been taken to protect the population against infection, except for daring manoeuvres, propaganda based on lies, and false statistics used by the state authorities to lie about the true reality of the disease. On the other hand, all the latest information shows that the amount of infections is rising at a dizzying rate.

This poor management of the risks of the disease has also been marked by the misappropriation of funds and the theft of health equipment and supplies received as donations by state officials. More than $150 million has been released, while not even one well-equipped quarantine centre has been placed in each of the country’s departments. Out of mistrust, the sick have preferred to stay at home and seek treatment with traditional medicine. The state is happy to see more victims because this climate calms the mobilisations against the government. The state is therefore taking the opportunity to strengthen its policy of repression against people who express their discontent in working-class neighbourhoods.

In Haiti, the state plans poverty. All the institutions are weakened and kept in a state of incompetence, racketeering and total deregulation. They are incapable of offering quality services to the population. On the other hand, these institutions are profitable for the privileged layers. This is because they can manipulate institutional laws in order to offer dirty bribes and produce irresponsible people who are ready to blindly serve the corrupt and mafioso bureaucracy. The poor functioning of public institutions increases the state deficit. In a statement made by the current Minister of Economy and Finance, Patrick Boisvert, he mentioned that the Haitian state has recorded a loss of more than $1.7 billion in its sales of petroleum products in recent years. However, what he is unable to say is that most of these funds are being embezzled by him and his team in power. The audit reports of the Court of Accounts and Administrative Litigation have already shown the depth of the literal theft of assets by leaders at the highest levels of the state.

On 5 June 2020, the Council of Ministers, in the absence of a functioning parliament, adopted the budget for the fiscal year 2019-2020, and provided for a total amount of 198.7 billion gourdes. Of this amount, a total of 90 billion gourdes is expected to come in from the country’s tax revenues. However, this amount is significantly lower than what should have generated in the tax base. But the bourgeoisie involved in the imports sector is organising massive fraud in the Customs Administration, the General Directorate of Taxes, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and other public institutions. In addition, they enjoy a series of tax exemptions and significant state subsidies. These facts show that Jovenel Moïse is the docile child and faithful servant of the ruling class, responding to their every whim.

On the other hand, the Haitian bourgeoisie and the imperialist bourgeoisie exploit the working class with a minimum wage of around $4 per working day, which is sometimes up to 15 hours. These bosses are in the wholesale trade, as well as in the retail trade and they dominate the country’s banking system. The country’s central bank is under their total control. These national tycoons come together in a cartel to form private banks such as the Unibank group, Sogebank, Capital Bank, Banque Union Nationale (BUH). The latest circular from the central bank (circular number 114-1) proves the state’s desire to increase the bosses’ total stranglehold over the economy by giving transfer houses the right to pay transfers in dollars in the national currency (the gourde), which legally allows the bosses alone to keep the dollars while the economy is dollarised.

All misfortunes are brought about to worsen the lives of the poor population of the country. Hunger is at an extreme level. Insecurity is in full swing and leads to many shooting deaths in the poor neighbourhoods of the country. Even the investigative report by the head of the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH), Helen Meagher la Lime on 15 June 2020 has proven the upsurge of intentional homicides and kidnappings in Haiti during the first four months of the year. She reported a 33 percent increase in police-recorded killings, going so far as to say Haiti is a threat to stability in the Caribbean. Yet, all those who spend their daily lives in the country’s poor neighbourhoods clearly know that the reality of insecurity, and its planning, is far more complex than what is presented in the official reports. In the eyes of all international organisations, the state finances neighborhood gangs as agents and weapons for carrying out crimes against those who oppose its policies. Senators, members of parliament, and other government personnel are often caught red-handed carrying out acts of kidnapping, drug smuggling and with mercenaries in state cars, but they go unpunished. The international community, especially the United States, is blind and deaf to all of this, and continues to applaud and support the regime despite its dishonesty.

On the issue of insecurity in Haiti, the human rights organisation “Fondasyon Je Klere” (FJKL – The Bright Eyes Foundation) highlighted the seriousness of the situation in its report of 22 June 2020, drawing attention to the recent formation of a coalition called “G9 ak alye” (G9 and Allies), composed of the most notorious gang leaders associated with the government. The report clarified the mission of the G9: to attack the bastions of resistance to the government, and to eliminate the youth who are organising in working-class neighbourhoods. The PHTK government, before the next elections, is going to great lengths to organise the gangs into government militias, which will have to execute its macabre plan, based on state terrorism and organised crime in order to maintain the regime and allow it to continue. By force of arms and money, this discredited government, rejected by the population, still intends to maintain itself and remain in power.

Haiti’s economic problems have reached a critical point. These problems are a vicious circle of poverty for the population, driving the people between disaster and despair, but also anger, indignation and revolt. Trotsky formulated a remarkable phrase: “the molecular process of revolution’”. He understood dialectics as an essential tool for developing his social theory and to understand what was really happening in the society of his time. He explained that the process of a change in consciousness of the masses is normally gradual. It develops slowly and imperceptibly but also inexorably until it reaches a critical tipping point where quantity is transformed into quality and things turn into their opposite. This formulation of Trotsky’s invites us to use dialectical materialism to comprehend the evolution of the events that are taking place. In Haiti we can see that the accumulation of anger, rage, and frustration is still taking shape beneath the surface, where each time it reaches an inflection point, it suddenly leads to a powerful popular movement. Thus, this time too, with the extreme cannibalism of the bourgeoisie and its ruling PHTK lackeys, these movements are like the tremors that herald the imminence of a powerful earthquake.

Thus, the impoverished people, awakened in their anger and revolt, still represent a real revolutionary potential. From the beginning until today this social force has remained in the factories, in the countryside, in the working class neighbourhoods, attacking the corrupt and parasitic bourgeois order, at times that no bourgeois, petty bourgeois, or social engineering expert can predict. The only problem is that with each assault on the system, the so-called left has absolutely failed to develop an organised expression of the revolutionary feeling of the masses.
Building A Revolutionary Socialist Alternative In Haiti

There has always been a left wing in Haiti, acting as a vanguard in the revolutionary actions of the various popular movements. From the struggle of the slaves for independence, from the movement of the Cacos and armed groups in Charlemagne Péralte’s insurrection against the American occupation to 1934, when the first attempts were made at building socialist organisations by revolutionaries such as Jacques Roumain and Jacques Stephen Alexis, there has always been a left seeking and driving towards a future that was uncertain until then. Events followed one another to lead to the formation of several trade unions and popular organisations in the 1980s in the fight against the Duvalier dictatorship. The popular movement succeeded in defeating the dictatorship in 1986, but struggled to truly develop into an organised force around revolutionary socialist ideas, which alone is capable of breaking radically with the parasitic bourgeois economic structure that has been in place to date in Haitian society.

The popular revolutionary potential in the struggle from these years to the present day has not managed to avoid or protect itself on the one hand from bourgeois infiltration and on the other hand from petty-bourgeois opportunism gaining a good position in the leadership of political parties, popular and peasant organizations, and even the trade unions. As a result, there has been a rise in populist tendencies and liberal reformism in the recurring wave of popular struggles. Each time the movement is victorious, we see only new compromises with the parasitic bourgeoisie along with a recycling of the same reactionary policies, which are sometimes mediocre and absurd. However, so far no real and frank socialist revolutionary alternative has materialised that can profoundly affect the critical state of the living conditions of the impoverished masses of the country.

Thus, in the so-called Haitian left, there has been a gradual disintegration, a divorce from the line of proletarian socialism in favour of focusing instead on the basis of petty-bourgeois reformism and vulgar nationalism. In the tradition of the Haitian left, the culture of elitism and opportunism of the leaders of political parties, peasant organisations, popular and student organisations has prevailed. It has encouraged political activism instead of developing action on a strong organisational basis with a tradition of struggle subject to a real revolutionary rigour and discipline. Today, this Haitian left is scattered across several small groups which have become dated in their isolation.

Today, in the face of the powerful attacks of the bourgeoisie and of the Jovenel government against the population, it is all the more urgent that the radical and revolutionary left reconstitute itself in a more organised manner, before it is able to join the population in the conquest of its rights and achieve the transformation of its living conditions. A coalition between the parties and organisations of the revolutionary left needs to be strengthened to pursue common goals through coordinated methods and strategies, one of the most necessary of which is reconnecting the revolutionary popular, worker and peasant organisations with the masses for the conquest of political power and the realisation of a proletarian programme at the head of the country.

Epstein, Clinton, Trump -- It's A Big Club & We Ain't In It!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uEGmRgBHvQ

LEBANESE DEMAND CHANGE AFTER GOVERNMENT QUITS

By Al Jazeera.

August 13, 2020

https://popularresistance.org/lebanese-demand-change-after-government-quits/

“We Need New Blood.”

Many believe the government’s resignation will do little to change political deadlock and economic crisis.

Angry Lebanese have demanded the removal of what they see as a corrupt ruling class to blame for the country’s woes, adding that the government’s resignation on Monday did not come near to addressing the tragedy of last week’s Beirut explosion.

A protest with the slogan “Bury the authorities first” was planned near the port, where highly explosive material stored for years exploded on August 4, killing at least 163 people, injuring 6,000 and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

Prime Minister Hassan Diab, announcing his cabinet’s resignation, blamed endemic corruption for the explosion, the biggest in Beirut’s history and which compounded a deep financial crisis that has collapsed the currency, paralysed the banking system and forced up prices.

“I said before that corruption is rooted in every juncture of the state but I have discovered that corruption is greater than the state,” he said, blaming the political elite for blocking reforms.

Talks with the International Monetary Fund have stalled amid a dispute between the government, banks and politicians over the scale of vast financial losses.

For many Lebanese, the explosion was the last straw in a protracted crisis over the collapse of the economy, corruption, waste and dysfunctional government.

“It does not end with the government’s resignation,” said the protest flyer circulating on social media.

“There is still [President Michel] Aoun, [Parliament Speaker Nabih] Berri and the entire system.”
Little Hope

Many people in Lebanon, and on social media, felt Monday’s announcement by Diab would do little to change the political situation.

“It’s a good thing that the government resigned. But we need new blood or it won’t work,” silversmith Avedis Anserlian told the Reuters news agency in front of his demolished shop.

“I don’t think it [the government’s resignation] will make a difference. All the ministers in Lebanon are just a face. Behind that are the militias who control everything,” Rony Lattouf, a shop owner in Beirut, told Al Jazeera.

“It’s these militias that decide on things in Lebanon. People have to make a powerful move to remove them,” he added, standing in front of his collapsed shop not far from the port.




Aoun is now required to consult with parliamentary blocs on who the next prime minister should be, and is obliged to designate the candidate with the most support.

Forming a government amid factional rifts has been daunting in the past. With growing public discontent and the crushing financial crisis, it could be difficult to find someone willing to be prime minister.
Picking Up The Pieces

Beirut residents, meanwhile, continued to pick up the pieces as search operations for the missing continued.

Officials have said the blast could have caused losses of $15bn, a bill Lebanon cannot afford.

Speaking from Beirut, Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith said as the political situation develops, people were still concerned about the devastation to their homes and business.

Ihsan Mokdad, a contractor, surveyed a gutted building in Gemmayze, a district a few hundred metres from the port.

“As the prime minister said, the corruption is bigger than the state,” said Mokdad.

“They’re all a bunch of crooks. I didn’t see one MP [member of Parliament] visit this area. MPs should have come here in large numbers to raise morale.”

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THE FEDS LEFT, BUT THE BATTLE FOR PORTLAND CONTINUES

By Shane Burley, ROAR Magazine.

August 13, 2020

https://popularresistance.org/the-feds-left-but-the-battle-for-portland-continues/

The Retreat Of Federal Officers From Portland Was A Victory, But The Continued Violence Of Local Police Shows That The Problem Is The Entire Model Of Policing.

Protests at the federal Justice Center in downtown Portland have become a nightly ritual, but protesters have also been expanding their reach across the city. Demonstrations at various precinct offices and the Portland Police Association, the police union, have drawn crowds of hundreds. In recent days, the demonstrations focused on these “satellite offices,” mainly because now that the federal officers have left, people’s attention turned back to the local police.

On both August 6 and 7, the East Precinct, near the edges of the city proper, were overwhelmed by protesters. In what has become a daily ritual, the police ordered the dispersal of a protest whose only objectionable behavior was relegated to vandalism, loud noises and trash can fires. The police then blanketed the residential area with teargas and “impact munitions.”

They chased protesters through the streets, shoving them to the ground and using metal batons in a spectacle that almost has the appearance of a military occupation. The police signaled their intentions on Twitter, stating that the call to march to the precinct “will not go unanswered,” intimating that the protesters would be met by force.

Over the weekend, the protest tactics continued to escalate. A three block line on the busy Lombard Street was barricaded by a combination of food trucks and burning dumpsters. The Portland Police Association office was boarded-up like a fortress after protesters had broken into the building and set it ablaze at an earlier demonstration, yet it took little more than an hour for protesters to tear down the barriers and torch the inside again.

The police arrived quickly, firing teargas and projectiles, almost immediately hitting people marked as reporters. One demonstrator had a flash grenade explode between their legs, and had to be dragged into a house by a street medic. As the police pushed protesters down an adjacent road and into residential areas, the protesters quickly built new flaming barricades, facing continuous assaults from dozens of riot police.

While for the last few weeks, the focus of the media and the public has been on the presence and conduct of the federal officers in Portland, the extremely violent means by which local police have attempted to subdue the protests after the feds left highlights what activists have been saying for years: the issue is not certain police forces being more violent and abusive than others, the problem is the entire model of policing itself.
Battle For Portland

The protests in Portland began shortly after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They started with explosive riots on May 29, with protesters looting stores, breaking into the Justice Center and setting it on fire. But in the days that followed, while growing in size they became slightly more moderate in tone and focused on practical solutions to “defund” the police. The Portland Police applied their infamous heavy handed approach, blanketing the streets with teargas every night and using dangerous crowd control tactics.

Many journalists who were caught in the midst of this faced injuries or arrest as the police stated that reporters would have to follow nightly dispersal orders as well. These police tactics eventually brought a series of lawsuits from the ACLU and others, putting injunctions in place on their behavior. And that is when the federal officers arrived. A confederation of agencies, including Border Patrol, were ordered in through an executive order from Donald Trump to protect federal buildings and deployed their officers against the wishes of state authorities.

Their behavior has since become notorious: kidnapping protesters by snatching them off the streets and dragging them into unmarked vans and applying excessive violence while attacking the protests, seriously injuring many. But rather than deterring the protesters, it only drew larger crowds, growing the numbers of the demonstrations and bringing in high profile contingents, like the “wall of moms” that would stand in between the protesters and the police.

The anger around the deployment and behavior of federal officers was palpable, with Democratic politicians coming out in performative shows of solidarity. This pressure likely worked and eventually Oregon Governor Kate Brown negotiated a removal of the officers with the White House, saying that the local police could handle it. Articles and think pieces came out saying that the protests had returned to peaceful demonstrations in the absence of the federal officers, all of which missed a key factor: the local police were still here.

Now, as the protests push into day 75, the fundamental issue that has driven the protests from the start is being exposed by the way in which the Portland police is responding to the protests. Long before the federal officers arrived, the Portland police had been known for their brutal and violent treatment of left-leaning protesters, from recent antifascist demonstrations to the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown.

“The Portland Police have made it their goal to suppress, demoralize, wear out and harm protesters and press. It appears that the police’s only solution against our anti-police-brutality message is more brutality,” says Jeremy Smith, a member of the Defend PDX collective, who says he has been targeted by the Portland Police for what he thinks is his journalism work.

Each night of protests follows a similar pattern, starting off with speeches, marches and chants by the protesters and the police eventually intervening to disperse the crowds, which is when the police are at their most violent. The protests are technically illegal in that they occupy public spaces, like roads, intersections, highways etc.

Law enforcement’s argument has consistently been that the protesters are engaged in violence, which they take to mean throwing water bottles, vandalizing property, setting trash fires and generally behaving as a nuisance. The police, in response, attack the crowds with CS gas and a brutal combination of impact munitions and their clubs.

This has created a question of scale, where comparisons between the supposed “violence” from the protesters and violence from the police put the two in different leagues entirely.

With the federal officers, injuries were very common, including among the press, because of the widespread use of munitions, often fired directly into the crowds. This type of violence was impersonal, and so went the accusation that it was the presence of federal officers uniquely that was resulting in the excessive violence. The Portland Police are using fewer munitions, but officers are charging directly into the crowds more often, with insults from officers being caught on camera as they bludgeon fleeing protesters. For many protesters, the local officers have made it personal.

Zippy Lomax is an independent journalist who has been documenting the protests since the beginning, often live streaming on social media. She is part of a growing scene of young journalists who are coming out without institutional backing or money and just doing the work of documenting the historic protests on their own. Like many of them, she is brandished with the word “PRESS” all over her helmet, clothes and tactical vest.

On August 1, Zippy was at the Multnomah County Sheriff’s office in Southeast Portland covering the breakaway march there. When the police, ordered the dispersal of an entirely non-violent protest and charged the crowd, Zippy tried to disperse in her car. Police then slashed her tires and bashed out the window of her car as she was telling them she was a reporter.

“What’s messed up is I had several encounters with the feds and they were actually polite to me and if I was compliant they left me alone. I would never think I would say this, but the feds were better,” said Lomax. “I do think [the Portland Police] are targeting the press.”

This perspective has become common for protesters and independent reporters on the ground, who feel that the approach by the police has been to demoralize the protesters through aggressive treatment, including those intent on documenting police violence.

“A large part of [the Portland Police’s] abuse has been intimidation tactics: the police maintain their power through fear and their monopoly on violence is threatened when people overcome enough of that fear to stand up to them. From what we’ve seen at every protest, it is clear the Portland Police understand this,” says the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front (PNWYLF), a radical youth organization that has been involved in organizing some of the more militant protests and who spoke to me through encryption and as a collective voice.

PNWYLF has been a favorite “boogeyman” in recent weeks, both for right-wing commentators and for the police’s communications department who screenshots and reposts their activity on Twitter.

“The feds consistently fired an enormous amount of tear gas and similar chemical weapons each night downtown, while the Portland Police have more frequently charged protesters with batons,” says the PNWYLF.

As they continue their assaults on protesters, legal observers and the press, there is a question of the legality of how the police is handling the situation. While injunctions were put into place and the public condemned police behavior, very little is actually done about it.

“You have to know that for a lot of these cops it’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. That’s what we are seeing in the streets right now with the use of impact munitions,” says Juan Chavez of the National Lawyers Guild. “I think the federal weapons that were deployed, were deployed seemingly more indiscriminately and they were more impactful and harmful…all of that felt like a breaking of the norm.”

“Maybe that’s why it grabbed so much attention and condemnation from our local officials,” Chavez adds. “But I have been watching PPB and the other agencies they work with brutalize people for years, and that playbook has never changed. And now, what we are seeing since May 29 has been some of the most vicious police conduct in this city.”
Police Are The Recruiters

Part of what happens in social movements is that, over time, the weight of the heated protest collapses into some amount of moderation. More conservative voices arrive, compromises are made, policy directives are clarified, and a movement that started with a revolutionary outlook acquires a more reformist one.

For that process to take place, however, a certain stasis is required, but the nightly barrage of teargas has only accelerated, not slowed down, the movement. As a result, a radical movement to defund the police, which had been softening to a focus on reducing police budgets so money could be siphoned off for social programs, has instead hardened and remained on the streets demanding total abolition.

This has been surprising for many who thought that the removal by federal officers would have been a final victory for the demonstrators, but they misunderstood a key issue. This protest was not about federal police, or a unique situation of policing. It was about the very concept of the police as an institution, which many protesters no longer believe can be viable, even with progressive interventions. The excessive use of force by the police during the protests helped solidify this position in the minds of a broad section of the city and the nightly assaults have only kept protesters in the streets and radical solutions on the table.

“Night after night of police brutality against protesters has definitely inspired people to keep coming out each night, and has galvanized the much broader community against the police’s attempts at repression,” says the PNWYLF. “Right now, it’s hard to see a clear end to the current protests. Every night, it seems, the police do another dozen things that are worthy of protesting [against], and Portland has been a town of protests for years. The last 70 days have trained thousands of Portlanders on exactly how to resist police violence, and the police have unwittingly created the force to be reckoned with.”

The presence of the federal officers was generally viewed as an “occupation,” ordered by an unpopular president and staying despite objections from the entire state. Now, the language of occupation is still being used by protesters, not because the police are from out of town, but because the Portland Police also behave like an occupying force. Local politicians promised that the return of local police would be the return to normalcy, but this claim exposed the very heart of the problem: the ”normal” way of policing in Portland was already extremely violent.

As protests continue to rage on, escalating in attitude and tactics, and the police are likewise fed up with a city that seems intent on rejecting them, a stalemate has emerged. With the hyperbolic rhetoric about Black Lives Matter and “antifa” (though that label does not accurately apply to these demonstrations) doing the rounds in the right-wing press, the police likely see the protesters as occupiers as well, complete with “terrorist” motives.

“I think they believe the lies about BLM and antifascists, and they are convinced that they are holding back the barbarians and the gates,” says Chavez, of the National Lawyers Guild. “It’s part ideological, too. That’s why I think we’re seeing something of a cold war, in a way. There’s been this strange arms race between protesters and [the Portland Police], and they are locked in. There’s no reason for the protesters to back down. [The Portland Police] could back down…but they won’t, because they are afraid of looking weak in the face of criticism and protest.”

The road ahead for the protesters is a hard one, mostly because they are committed to demanding the impossible. The protests are not simply about police violence, or the broken state of Portland’s department, but instead the implicit inequality, white supremacy and both the structural and direct violence that many think is at the heart of the very idea of policing.

“We continue to see the indiscriminate use of crowd control munitions and the targeting of specific legal observer…We see Black women leading marches every night and receiving constant brutal treatment. The police are more interested in protecting their own union hall than they are [in protecting the city’s] residents,” says Standard Schaefer, an activist who has been joining the nightly protests and stood back as police charged through barricades on August 9.

“Nothing changes on their side, except that they are more tired, antsy and edgy,” Schaefer adds. “They’ve decided the remedy for an uprising against police brutality is more beatings and gassing. More night sticks. They are willing to chase people into residential areas to [secure a] win, even as it annoys and endangers local residents. And everything they do seems only to fuel the uprising. There is no end in sight. As long as the cops keep escalating, the uprising looks certain to continue.”
A Total Delegitimization

The Portland Police feel alien from the community of Portland, a feeling that is almost certainly mutual. While the police are ostensibly from the area — or at least nearby — the streets of Portland are not treated like home, the protesters not treated like disagreeable neighbors. With the police not interested to get any kind of approval from the community they are policing, a dialectic of resistance has created a committed opposition that only has the capacity to inflate.

The demand of the movement is not just reform or about the specifics of one department or the other, but that the notion of policing and its structures have to be severed to bring some amount of peace.

While the protests will likely continue, it is unclear what leverage either side actually has on the other. The police violence has only drawn more people into the streets and increased sympathy for the protests, and the police have now gone too far to back down.

Instead, the nightly protests will likely dissolve into the general culture of distrust and rebellion that is becoming more and more the underlying dynamic of Portland and other cities around the country. This is part of the long process of delegitimization of police as an institution, spearheaded by the Portland Police as the symbol for the coercive inequality of the legal system.

The escalation from the city’s residents will not just be in the next few days, but will continue to play out over the next decade as a new generation has decided that policing is unsalvageable.