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Ted Wheeler is the worst kind of hypocrite. He calls for “restorative justice” in defense of business owners while in the same breath expresses his desire to leverage the carceral system against an indigenous woman of color who interrupted his fine dining experience.
His original complaint to Portland Police led to a series of headlines declaring that the mayor had been “punched” - a statement which is both factually untrue and also unproven. Yet both the PPB and media published Ted Wheeler’s lie before scrubbing it later in the day.
Ted Wheeler continued his vendetta in an interview with the OPB on Jan 11th ( https://tinyurl.com/y5bjz8lz ) While advocating for giving Portland police greater power to surveil and punish, he refers to @cozca503 in great length. We transcribed his words from the linked audio:
“As a citizen here is what is frustrating to me. I’ll give you a personal example. I was in a restaurant the other day with a friend. It was a socially distanced environment. It was calculated to comport with the governor’s rules around not spreading covid, and a large group...
of individuals pushes past the staff, come in, and they start getting in my face, pushing and jostling me. I took photos of those activities. Photos in and of themselves are not sufficient to be able to prosecute somebody but upon a little investigation of the photo I took of...
the individual who had specifically put hands on me, she was well known to the police. And she has been arrested 7 or 8 times, she’s not from Portland, but without that evidence there really isn’t a damn thing I can do about it...
I would love to see that individual prosecuted as a repeat offender. So even though she’s engaged in low-level activity I think by the time you’ve done it 3 or 4 or 7 or 8 times there should be a stiffer penalty...
When you don’t care about the consequences of what you are facing for a lower level assault or vandalism or whatever. If you don’t care what the consequences are because the accountability mechanism is insufficient or it’s not sufficient to have an impact on you that basically..
emboldens you. And you come to the conclusion that you can engage in this activity on a repeated basis and nobody is going to hold you accountable... We have this group of people, who by the way are largely white middle-aged people marauding through the streets and they seem...
to be getting away with it. And that doesn’t sit well with me. And I believe we need to hold people accountable. And I’m looking for any tools, any strategies, any partnerships that are constitutional that maintain people’s first amendment rights but which will actually have...
an impact on the reducing the kinds of violence and destruction that we are seeing. People who are repeat offenders do not seem to be moved at all by the current situation...
Obviously for example the woman I’m referring to, being arrested is no big deal for her. She doesn’t care, she thinks she’s on some great just cause."
