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One night, a little bit after the Portland police rolled a flashbang at my ankles for no apparent reason, I was heading home when I saw the feds posted up outside the IRS building. My partner urged me to stop by and open up a civil chat, so we swung on by.
After a summer of tear gas, the sight of their silhouettes spiked my heart rate. I was careful to keep my hands in plain view. But the feds weren’t looking to scrap, they were studiously refusing to meet our eyes.
Only one — I assume the one in command — would even look us in the face. We asked which agency they were from, we got a vague answer. We asked which city they were from, we got a vague answer. Then we asked why they had black tape over their badge numbers.
“Because of a death in the law enforcement community,” was the response. It was a symbol of grief, he said. He was not interested in specifying more. So on our way home we looked at the Officer Down memorial page trying to figure out who they were memorializing.
I was sure it wasn’t the fed who died from an accidental discharge inside a police station, and pretty sure it wasn’t any of the auto accidents. Most of the officer deaths in the line of duty that year were from COVID-19 — I doubted it was any of them.
I eventually came to the conclusion that the officer who had died was the one who had been shot by a Boogaloo extremist in California, and who, ironically, was not memorialized on the page (possibly due to his employment status?).
But what was notable was that after that long, terrible summer of tear gas and flames, I could not pinpoint another officer death related to the protests.
