Kate Brown, Oregon’s Democratic governor, has been recently urging her constituents to do their part in preventing forest fires. Those seem to be the only fires she cares to stop.
Brown has had little to say about continuing violence and destruction in Portland. She and Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler spent much of late July trying to blame President Trump and federal officers protecting the courthouse for the assaults on peace, even though the violence predated federal presence in Portland by nearly two months.
Now, federal law enforcement officers have drawn down, but the violence and arsons continue.
On Saturday, the mob broke through a door and started a fire inside the Portland Police Association. They set other fires in dumpsters and in the streets. Rioters used plywood as an accelerant to try to burn down one of the Portland Police Bureau’s precincts last Wednesday. They have continued to heave bottles and rocks at police officers and to shoot at them with fireworks. On Sunday, an officer suffered burns on her neck after being hit by a mortar.
Wheeler has been all but forced to speak out against the violence. As federal presence has waned, there has been no one else to blame but the perpetrators.
“When you commit arson with an accelerant in an attempt to burn down a building that is occupied by people who you have intentionally trapped inside, you are not demonstrating, you are attempting to commit murder,” Wheeler said in a press conference last Thursday.
Finally, then, Wheeler has come around on that. But it didn’t happen without some public prompting from the men in blue. Portland’s chief of police, Chuck Lovell, wrote about the continuing violence in an Aug. 3 New York Times op-ed. Lovell wrote particularly about the secondary and tertiary effects of the riots.
“Investigators’ cases lie on their desks as they work nights to process arrests,” Lovell says. “We have seen an alarming increase in shootings and homicides. We need to redirect our focus to preventing and solving these crimes that are taking a hugely disproportionate number of minority lives.”
Daryl Turner, president of the Portland Police Association, took his liberty as a union head to criticize Wheeler more pointedly.
“Twice in the last two days, these rioters have accomplished their mission: chaos and destruction,” Turner wrote in a Friday letter to Wheeler and the county district attorney, Mike Schmidt. “That is because the Police Bureau’s operational direction from the Police Commissioner [the mayor] and City Council is to let the violence escalate almost to the point of no return, and only then can the Police Bureau intervene. That is insane.”
Turner was even more frank: “As Police Commissioner and District Attorney, your primary jobs are public safety, not politics. You are failing.”
Wheeler hopes that a political argument will help quell the unrest. “Don’t think for a moment that you are, if you are participating in this activity, you are not being a prop for the reelection campaign of Donald Trump — because you absolutely are,” he continued in the same Thursday press conference. The mayor likely overestimates the prevailing political interests of these violent groups, as have most of those in politics and media who have been criticizing them as anti-Trump. Their primary interest is tearing it all down, even their ultra-progressive town.
At least Wheeler recognizes the threat. If Gov. Brown can be shaken from her trance, which has her believing that nothing is happening in Portland aside from people walking their dogs, cooking dinner, and playing with their kids in the park, the city may be able to end this madness.
