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I live in the suburbs of Portland and worked in the city of Portland before COVID-19 (I now work from home).
Before COVID, my primary personal interaction with the very regular protests was occasionally seeing Nazi graffiti near my office (this one photo I snapped in 2018 is one among a number I've seen)
I think people generally have heard of antifa, but aren't as aware of how aggressive and disgusting the Proud Boy protests have been. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/17/portland-oregon-far-right-rally-proud-boys-antifa
There's a strong sense that the police favors the Proud Boys in these altercations, and this video blew up last year because it seemed to straight-forwardly show that that's exactly what's going on. https://twitter.com/sprtneo/status/1268929732327821313
Antifa protesters (and anarchists) are a real thing in Portland, and they occasionally behave in very provocative ways and (especially the anarchists) annoy other protesters.
This was all status quo heading into the George Floyd protests.
As a person who lives in the suburbs, nothing substantial really changed. Unless I'm thinking about attending a protest, I take note of when protests are taking place downtown and steer clear.
As a person who lives in the suburbs, nothing substantial really changed. Unless I'm thinking about attending a protest, I take note of when protests are taking place downtown and steer clear.
This isn't that different from how I behaved when I lived in NYC. I attended a lot of minimum wage, marijuana and pro-student rallies in my 20s, but when I wasn't attending one, I tended to give them a wide berth.
It's worth being clear about the fact that over the past couple of decades, the police have upped the ante on the kinds of dispersal techniques they use and when they use them.
When I was a student between 2000-2004 it was normal to see annoyed cops in riot gear occasionally rushing crowds and trying to arrest people they claimed were violating the law (especially at weed protests, "claimed" did a lot of work)
That said, I attended a bunch of anti-poverty rallies that got pretty contentious, and I never saw the casual use of tear gas, projectiles and totally unprovoked arrests you see today.
(and to be clear, these protests had a very diverse group of activists, and other than the weed protests, white males tended to be in the small minority)
It's also worth noting that antifa tends to react to proud boys protests and police overreach, which honestly is a fairly sympathetic and in some cases effecitve reason for a group to behave provocatively.
Many more people have written far more cogently about the day-to-day from the perspective of protesters (strongly recommended: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/07/20/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-battle-of-portland/)
From the perspective of someone living in the city, the normal experience of antifa and the proud boys is much more of a bunch of disorganized folks than organized "terrorists" https://www.wweek.com/news/2019/08/17/proud-boys-wander-lost-through-portland-as-police-allow-wild-goose-chase-by-antifascists/
I give all that context to contrast it with how things felt after the feds showed up.
Until that point, I felt angry on behalf of the way the police were waging literal war against the protesters, but never felt personally in danger because of the protests.
Until that point, I felt angry on behalf of the way the police were waging literal war against the protesters, but never felt personally in danger because of the protests.
This is in part because as bad as the cops could get, their behavior was fairly public and subject to a certain amount of public judicial process.
When the courts ordered the mayor to do something, he did something in the ballpark of compliance.
When the courts ordered the mayor to do something, he did something in the ballpark of compliance.
But the feds are now behaving in a way that is totally unexplained, not constrained by courts (e.g. the Portland cops were banned from using tear gas, but the feds just don't give a fuck). It's not like the cops were on their best behavior (lol) but you could sort of predict it.
On the other hand, a bunch of random, untrained federal officers who don't seem to be aware of basic arrest procedures, are operating far away from federal facilities, and are too disconnected from Portland to be held remotely accountable by the public is legit scary in a new way
The irony of the whole thing is that the claim of the Trump administration is that the feds are needed to make people feel safe in their own city, and what they have instead done is make the city feel vastly more lawless, unpredictable and scary.
I want to be very clear that I'm not downplaying how much is sucks to protest in Portland, nor the ways that the cops have evaded attempts at accountability and do things like declare "riots" so they can keep using tear gas.
I just want to call out the ways in which the feds have made the situation feel materially less safe among the group of people who are supposedly being "helped" by it.
I suspect that the Oregonians most in favor of federal action are people who would rarely have gone to Portland proper in the first place. Anyone who has to be in Portland can see clearly that the feds are not just violating rights, they're making things *feel less safe*
