Here's a long thread on what's happening in Portland from a friend of mine on the ground.

It’s a complicated situation. In the first week or so after George Floyd, there was widespread looting and rioting throughout downtown Portland.

There wasn’t a jewelry store, cell phone store, or bank that went untouched. Broken windows and graffiti all around. That has mostly subsided. Portland, even downtown, is 95% peaceful and you can walk around any time, day or night, and have a nice time.

You can be a block away from most of these protests and not even know something is going on. Small businesses are having a tough time, but it’s hard to say how much is due to the protests and how much is the covid shutdowns.

The action now is mostly confined to a few blocks where we have a row of parks that are surrounded by the city hall, jail, police headquarters, federal building, and county and federal courthouses.

So we’ve got an easy staging area for assembly surrounded by the symbols of authority they’re protesting against. For weeks, the protests were centered on the local justice center (jail and police HQ). These would follow a predictable pattern.

People would start to gather around 5pm. They would give speeches, march, shout provocative slogans (“ACAB”, “F the police”, etc), demand action. The crowd is a mix of average citizens, activists, and the antifa kids. The police would put up a flimsy chain link fence.

Later in the evening, the peaceful protesters would start to thin out, and the more active and instigative people would stay. Around 11pm, the police would find an excuse to declare an “illegal assembly”. And somebody in the crowd would always provide an excuse.

Sometimes it would be tearing down the fence or shooting fireworks or throwing rocks. Sometimes it would be somebody throwing an empty water bottle within 20 feet of the police. Police come out to disperse the crowd.

The crowd is now made up of independent press, volunteer medics, peaceful protesters, and the instigators or people who support them. They play cat-and-mouse advancing and retreating. The police use tear gas, rubber bullets, lines of cops with riot shields.

The protesters use fireworks, projectiles, green lasers in the eyes. Some people get shot by rubber bullets, some people get gassed, some people get arrested, some people get beaten. Some of those people are peaceful, some are not, some are medics, some are press.

Portland police have been videoed slashing tires and spray painting cars of anyone suspected to be supporting the protesters.
The introduction of the feds has pumped everything up. Crowds are now 5-10 times larger every night. Interest had been waning.

It most certainly is not now. The focus has gone from the justice center to the federal courthouse next door. The feds are inexperienced in this type of work and it shows. The crowds are massive and pumped up.

Mom-and-pop protesters are out en masse and coming from every area of the city. The pattern is similar. Peaceful protests > instigation > enforcement > drama.
Property Damage? Certainly. Tons of graffiti. Tons. Everywhere in those few blocks.

In my opinion, no effort is being made to clean it up because it looks bad on TV and gives justification for enforcement. Fences get torn down nightly. Again, in my opinion, this is just bait. Everybody knows they’re going to get torn down.

The protesters like having something easy to tear down, the cops like having an excuse to come out. The fires you hear about are mostly nothing. Some are campfires set in concrete just because people like to gather around a fire.

Some are debris pulled into the middle of the street just to cause a disturbance. Some are tiny little bits of debris on a sidewalk set to be provocative. These concrete buildings are in no danger of burning down. But, if there were no enforcement, I’m sure things would be worse.

Protester Violence? 99% of the protesters are peaceful. But in a crowd of thousands, somebody is going to throw a rock. Somebody is going to throw a water bottle. Somebody is going to shoot some fireworks.

They have started shining green lasers into cops’ eyes, which is a bridge too far in my opinion. Protest leaders speak against it. Many protesters actively discourage it. But it is going to happen. Violence inside the crowds is virtually non-existent.

Some Proud Boy trolls have started going down there to start trouble, but have mostly been unsuccessful. I wouldn’t want to go down there wearing a red MAGA hat, but you can walk through the crowd and be just fine. Most of the time it’s like a big dance party.

They even have free food trucks!
Police Violence? Yep. People are getting shot with rubber bullets. Sometimes in the head. People are getting gassed. People are getting arrested. People are getting beaten. Some of these people are violent and destructive. Some are peaceful.

Some are press. Some are medics. Some are observers. Police don’t really care. You’re the problem. You’re in their way. They will take care of you. Portland police have been doing this for years. The feds are too, they’re just really bad at it.
Federal Overreach?

There was no need to send the feds in. The damage to the courthouse is estimated at $50,000, mostly in graffiti clean-up. We have 114 federal agents in town to “prevent” that. The courthouse wasn’t even a central target before they showed up. Now it’s a showdown.

The agents are dressed in camo riot gear. Their uniforms are unmarked with anything identifying their name or agency, or often even that they are law enforcement. They are untrained in crowd control.

They are detaining people and putting them in unmarked rental cars because they have no local vehicles of their own. Where those people go, whether they get charged, whether they get jailed, whether they’ll be prosecuted, is still a mystery.

There is no evidence that these people are being “disappeared”. But the feds are playing hide-and-seek with their information.

Every inquiry just leads to finger-pointing and “well, that’s not my agency, you’re going to have to go ask those guys over there”, but nobody knows who those guys are. The lack of transparency and the potential for abuse is disturbing.