Nazi Police State on SW 4th and Oak
author: Downtown Worker
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The reason I noticed this, is because the police car nearly ran me down as it swept around the corner onto 4th, going the WRONG WAY on a ONE WAY STREET. And the reason I stayed is that this society is going the wrong way, down a path I don't think any of us really wants to be on.
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I was returning to work after a late lunch. You know how chewed up downtown is right now - workers tearing up roads everywhere, new max tracks going in, streets closed... there's a lot of confusion. Everything's crazy. It's hard enough to find ones' way safely down there right now. So imagine my shock, as I was crossing 4th just a block from work, when a police cruiser came whirling around the corner, barely missing me in the walk, heading right into four lanes of on-coming traffic! Imagine what all the oncoming cars must have thought!
I thought it had been a really stupid mistake. I turned to see the cruiser suddenly slide into a U-turn, whipping back around to face the right way. But instead of heading off down the street, the car skidded to a stop along the sidewalk. Curious, I stopped to see what was happening.
On the other side of the street, in front of the building where all the bike couriers come from, I saw two men sitting in the rain, with their hands cuffed behind them. A "Clean and Safe" person (mercenary private police force employee) stood over them. One of the men, an African American whom I recognized from the neighborhood, was loudly saying, from the wet sidewalk, that someone had put him in a choke hold. Now I took this very seriously, in a city where the police have killed Black men with choke holds, and then joked about it. The other person in cuffs, a white man whom I did not recognize, just stared ahead into the rain.
Whatever had happened over there, it must surely be pretty important, to lead an officer to put so many people into so much danger by driving like a jack ass and careening around corners going the wrong way on one way streets, right? Well, one would think.
There were lots of witnesses standing around. One approached me and noted that the police car had come very close to hitting me. "Yes," I said. "And curiously, this is not the first time I've nearly been run down in a crosswalk by a police officer." (But that's another story.) I asked the man if he had seen what happened across the street. He told me what he saw. And bear in mind, I am repeating someone else's account. I did not see this with my own eyes. But here is what he said.
He said that the white guy was a staff person at the parking lot on the corner. The black man is a homeless man from the neighborhood. Apparently, according to the witness I spoke with, he was asking people for money. For some reason, this set off the parking lot attendant, who may or may not have previously asked him to leave. In any event, the witness I spoke with said that he saw the parking lot attendant grabbing the black man and putting him in a choke hold, and shoving him off the sidewalk, yelling something like, "And Stay Outta Here!" When the other man complained, some yelling ensued, and the next thing anyone knew, the fake and real cops were there throwing the same guy onto the ground again, this time hand-cuffing him as well.
So, for the crime of being poor and black in downtown Portland, this man was grabbed, put into a choke hold, and roughed up by someone who felt perfectly entitled to do such a thing. (Maybe he felt that way because of the abysmal example being set all over the city by the "clean and safe" private mercenary army patrols, whose job it is to "rid the streets" of visible poor people.) Then, before he could even dust himself off, he was thrown on the sidewalk by the police.
At the very least, I have to say that -- if this witness is to be believed -- the police at least made a pretense of putting cuffs on the white guy as well. Just as I was contemplating all this, a man came out of the Starbucks (!) nearby, and remarked that the black man "must be high or something." Isn't it funny how quickly peoples' minds begin to try to justify whatever they see the police doing. It's like the way that our brains fill in the blind spots in the corner of our eyes, so that we think we see what isn't really there. We don't even notice what we're just not seeing, because we're busy substituting comfortable illusions in there.
I'm not even sure what I was looking at this afternoon. It looked to me like this city is getting really mean. It looked like a homeless man was being brutally persecuted for being poor -- both by private citizens and by the police state. And it looked like at least one of the onlookers was perfectly comfortable making assumptions about the victim that could, in his mind, justify the attack.
Is this really the road we want to be on?
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thanks for posting this ...
in solidarity for justice...