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This is a decent touch stone of where things stand in Eugene. Black Unity (whose leadership is public and made up primarily of BIPOC) has been leading peaceful protests mainly advocating reform combined with partial defunding to reallocate resources to non-police intervention-- https://twitter.com/kmtr/status/1287939332297207808
like CAHOOTS, and other services that prevent the desperation that turns into crime. They have also talked to police multiple times at protests to negotiate how to keep things peaceful and to ask for internal policy changes in how protests are responded to.
Mayor Lucy Vinis, the city council, and even EPD Police Chief Skinner have actually been listening to them and beginning the slow process of reform, including inviting members of BU leadership to sit on a new committee created to advise on public safety reforms to support BIPOC.
The majority of matches in Eugene-Springfield were organized by Black Unity and they are nonviolent and will stop to take issue with anyone matching with them who wants violence or property destruction.
There are a handful of other groups also protesting who take serious issue with Black Unity and see them as ineffective or boot-licking collaborators with the system who are selling the movement out for empty promises from a system that needs to be burned to the ground.
Some of these groups have BIPOC leadership, including the BIPOC Liberation Collective, who have led several marches and a bunch of teach-ins. Some are white anarchists who seem to be the most gung-ho to salt the earth. All want anonymity and no pictures.
I'm too sick to be on the ground so I don't have a complete picture of events, but I have been following local journalists closely most nights. In the videos I've seen and reports I've read, it's largely been white people throwing rocks as destroying property.
I'm not going to condemn property damage or equate it with violence because I understand the intent behind it and after the first night it's been pretty deliberately targeted at businesses complicit in racism like Wells Fargo, Whole Foods, and Elk Horn Brewery this weekend.
But I'm not sure it's actually accomplishing anything. They're not really open to negotiation, it's pretty much "dismantle the entire system as fast as possible or we keep breaking windows and trying to take down the fence around the jail."
I'm not defending the current system because it sucks a lot, but the vast majority of the city doesn't want it gone entirely, they don't seem to have a plan for who the system is still half-assedly protecting (including Black protestors hit by cars or threatened at gun point), --
-- and I frankly don't think "the community can police itself" would at all be less racist or violent in an 85% white city that's almost entirely either white supremacist racist or white liberal "Coexist bumper sticker" racist.
And they seem treat anyone who tries to engage with and negotiate with the system as a traitor, so everyone in power is sort of writing them off. There's no reason to leave a seat at the table for people who threaten to flip the table when you offer a chair.
And I do think Black Unity is a little naive and overly optimistic about what they can get through asking nicely and peacefully and it's quite possible all it will lead to is yet another completely ineffective police oversight committee in the city.
Black Unity do believe in abolition, but see it as a very slow process of continually renegotiating the role of police vs. non-police emergency responders and preventative services. But people are tired of waiting and empty promises.
It's also worth noting that CAHOOTS and White Bird Clinic more broadly frames themselves as abolitionists, but they do collaborate with police (which they're sometimes criticized for), and their responders have said in interviews they wouldn't want to be out there with no police.
I do firmly believe that most crime could be prevented or remediate through robust non-carceral systems, but there are also just some fucking evil, dangerous, and predatory people out there you have to do something drastic with, and I'm against killing them.
And watching everything unfold here I have some fucking complicated feelings about EPD Chief Skinner because on the one hand I do think EPD have used excessive force dealing with protesters, every Black friend I have has stories about their racism--
-- and is constantly hyper-vigilant to avoid them, they do murder people, and they've been completely useless to everyone I've known that needed them, and way too lenient or friendly with violent white supremacists, and all of that deserves criticism and consequences, --
-- but on the other hand, Skinner was making reforms before the protests and has made more in response to them, he seems to agree there is racism in the system that needs to be solved, he's backed off use of force in protesters a lot --
-- (although the response has escalated again as recent protests have gotten more rioty), he freely admits EPD has made mistakes handling the situation, he's been a champion of CAHOOTS for years and worked to get them a very large funding increase last year, --
-- he said publicly tonight he doesn't want the Feds here, and he actively advocates for his department to do less and more appropriate response units to be created to do more instead. So I genuinely don't think we'd do better with someone else in that job.
And we're a fuck ton better off than pretty much everywhere else with sustained protests. So who knows what will untimely take shape in this town out how effective reforms will be (because I do think we're looking at reforms, not scraping the system and starting over).
Oh, I also forgot the part where the alt-right counter protesters increasingly have guns (so do some of the BLM protesters). The alt-right protesters have fired a gun in the air once, & drawn them to menace several times, which have been deescalated, but it's a matter of time.
