tl;dr : This is a tactics thread. A key emergent goal of our nightly clashes with the cops is attrition: exhausting them physically and financially, interfering with their ability to police-as-usual. Thus we should force them to use more cops, or lose. How? Be (more) like water.

Tonight's #PortlandProtest at the JC was tactically instructive. This was a night when the organic (ie. not very organized) nature of our movement was visible. For hours & hours: the old reformists-on-mic vs. milling black-clad dynamic. (Fierce Elk is a nice touch, admittedly.)

At times, the question seemed palpable: what exactly are we doing? The energy flowed here and there, looking for a focus, but fairly obviously no crew arrived with a plan (or at least, not one that they chose to implement reasonably early when the max crowd was there, around 11).

Instead, folks just organically did the normal: amp up slowly to provoke the cops into demonstrating their brutality, yet again. Finally, after really quite a few fireworks and fires and storming to the back of the JC, the PPB finally formed a line and attacked.

Then something interesting happened. We withdrew to the Parks, then stopped. They didn't have enough cops to force us out of the park (because it's a wide area), so they just pushed the bulk of people north along 3rd.

But many of us were left on the sides, and then behind, and they hadn't enough cops to adequately protect their rear. A cop tried to to walk a handcuffed arrestee to the cop line, and he was unarrested. The cops were ragged at the back.

At the front skirmish line, they were also out-personned. Paint and fireworks were thrown. They were nervous. Eventually they pulled back. We applauded each other, then returned to the precinct. They lined up again, drawing us into the narrow road between JC and Fed courthouse.

They pushed forward again, paused at the park, then teargassed the park and pushed the crowd back to the west. But really, there weren't at all enough of them to clear the park!

The tear gas was mediocre compared to the Feds' wall o'gas, especially with the wind (and how many masks were out there). And they had far from enough cops to make a line across the entire park. It was easy to fade to the sides and flank them, but almost no one did it.

It would have been almost as easy to do so a block later, as well, to go to the sides a block and reconvene behind the police line. But we didn't.

Let's be like water, more. Water sticks together, but it also flows around obstacles.

If we do this, the cops' options will be to either risking getting surrounded (which gives protesters many options to contest control of the situation), or to use twice or three times as many cops, and establish a perimeter big enough to sweep everyone and prevent flanking.

Forcing them to use that many cops is a win, in a war of attrition! Our purpose is not just to shout our anger, or to shock our fellows' conscience: it is to grind policing to a halt. Like a strike does, like a siege, like a flood. Be water! #BlackLivesMatter