I see a lot of people asking "What's really going on with the Portland protests?" so I thought I'd do sort of a FAQ addressing the usual questions. Journalists like @MrOlmos and @IwriteOK are doing amazing work, but here's a version you can easily send to your grandma. 1/

"Is the city under siege? Has your house been set on fire? Are you scared to walk the streets?"

No. The city is fine. Or, y'know, fine for a pandemic. Every night there's a few blocks where cops attack people, but other than that everything is normal. 2/

"Don't cops have a right to arrest people assaulting them and starting fires?"

Maybe, but that's not what they're doing. The overwhelming majority of protest arrests have no actual crime attached. Folks are getting arrested for resisting arrest or not following an order. 3/

A followup on that point: Portland's new District Attorney, @DAMikeSchmidt, has announced that he will not prosecute protest arrests that don't involve an actual crime. It's a good start. 4/

"Can't you just protest peacefully?"

Yes, and we do. What you must understand, what is CRITICAL to understand, is that peaceful protests STILL GET ATTACKED. I've been out there on nights when guys were throwing junk and lighting trash fires, and the cops attacked. 5/

I've been out there on nights when nobody was doing any of that, just singing and changing, and the cops attacked just the same. Even the most "violent" protests are 99% peaceful and 1% dickheads, but that makes no difference. The cops attack regardless of what we're doing. 6/

(Singing and CHANTING in the previous tweet, as usual I spot a typo one second too late.)

"What are these protests even about? What do you hope to achieve?"

We don't want a police force that's based on violence. We asked them to be less violent, and they became more violent. 7/

Many Portlanders, myself included, have become effectively radicalized on the subject of the police, and that's 100% due to the actions of the police over the last three months. They are so addicted to violence that they will not stop, and so we need to replace them. 8/

"Can't the protest organizers control the bad elements?"

No, not really. Have you ever been in a crowd of thousands of people? If some rando was lighting a fire on the other side of that crowd, how would you know? And what could you do if you did? 9/

"Can't the city government do something about this?"

They're trying, sort of. If the police were massively defunded or reformed, the protests would end. But the cops are very entrenched, and politics moves slowly. Every limit they try to put on the cops, the cops dodge. 10/

The best example is when the city said the cops can't use chemical weapons unless there's a riot. However, guess who decides whether something's a riot? Yep, the cops. So they just roll up, declare a riot REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THERE IS VIOLENCE OR NOT, and open fire. 11/

I've saved the best one for last:

"Aren't there any peaceful protests?"

Yes, there are. I've been at some. You know what made them peaceful? The cops didn't show up.

No cops, no violence.

Because, in EVERY case I've seen, the cops initiate the violence. 12/

I don't like the conclusion this has led me to: the police do this because they like it. It's fun for them. Whoever's still accepting riot duty at PPB is doing it because they enjoy hurting people.

This is why I say we can't fix this with sensitivity training classes. 13/

There is something profoundly sick in the culture of the Portland Police Bureau, and I believe in police culture nationwide. We cannot keep putting band-aids on this, we need to drain the infection at its root.

Doing that will be painful and scary. But it's necessary. 14/14