hey, I'm in Portland, and I'm confirming it's been really bad out here. we have the highest rate of police brutality in the country right now. our local cops have been beating and tear-gassing protestors since the end of May. it's gotten so bad that people have started class action lawsuits against the city to ban tear gas. now, the local cops aren't allowed to use tear gas, so the feds have been called in. the protestors in Portland are facing down federal groups - including US Marshals and (I've heard) the PACTF, a DHS task force recently created by Trump to protect statues and shit like that, which answers only to him. the feds are an order of magnitude more serious about shutting down protests than the local cops. they showed up with live munitions a few days ago.
from what I have been able to glean from twitter, two people had seizures last night. one of them was a kid who has some broken bones but should be okay. the other was a houseless man who I've heard died as a result of the police holding him down during the seizure (an extremely basic no-no).
the person who was shot in the head was hit with what I've seen described as a "resin round," and has made it through surgery alright, but the long-term effects are still unclear. (they're being smeared by local fascist "journalist" and threat to the community aηdy ngο, but the incident was caught on video. all they were doing was holding up a boombox, and they gently kicked a tear gas canister away from them.) they were not the only person to be hit in the head with "less lethal" munitions that night, as I've seen at least one person saying they were hit in the head with a tear gas canister.
an Indigenous woman's hand was broken. at least one person has been hospitalized as a result of tear gas inhalation. many protestors are undergoing changes to their menstrual cycles as a result of exposure to tear gas. I've heard reports that another houseless person was killed last month due to the police's use of tear gas. hospital security have been harassing the protestors who showed up in solidarity with their injured comrades. there was an attempted lynching in the park across from the justice center people have been protesting around. people have been struck and seriously injured by cars on multiple occasions. there have literally been so many incidents happening here that I can't remember everything.
we're a smaller city, and we don't tend to make national news very often. our protest scene has its issues - not least because Portland is a very white city and needs to do better about promoting and centering the BIPOC leaders who have been doing this work for years - but we're facing a level of overt state violence that I don't think many other cities are.
in my opinion, the city government thinks that there are enough apathetic middle-class white people in Portland that they can get away with gassing and murdering protestors without the city turning against them en masse. I'm worried that it's true. please, please, pay attention to what's happening here and don't let it get swept back under the carpet of polite white faux-progressiveness that Portland loves so much.
gummygunk
pixelskylines
dededos
izzy806
jacobvanloon
ellievsbear
jbbartram-illu
