(07-24-2020 12:14 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Police follow instructions. When they don't, they get judged as individuals. See the George Floyd cases.
Those instructions they follow come from above... They come from (depending on the specific jurisdiction and form of government) the police chief, the mayor, the city council etc. They set not only the tone, but the direction and focus of the police. If they want traffic crimes or drug crimes to be de-emphasised, that is what the police will put into action. The police chief could tell police to generally 'look the other way' or simply 'warn and walk' for certain offenses... or perhaps simply not have any/many police assigned to traffic duty.

This is why I take such issue with the left on this situation.

It seems to me that you have to discuss/reach some consensus... even an agreement to disagree within some parameters... on the severity of the local actions either by police, protesters or leadership BEFORE you can judge the reactions by the feds.


Let's ignore the specifics of the situation and try and agree on a few things:

- I think we all agree that there are protestors who are breaking laws, causing damage, injuring people and risking lives.
- I think we agree that the local police forces act under the specific direction of their leadership and that they owe a duty to their employees (policemen) to provide as safe a work environment as possible while also protecting their citizens and their property from theft, injury and damage.
- I think we all agree that Federal rights/responsibilities to protect their employees and property are not subject to local leadership. As an obvious example, a local decision to less stringently enforce traffic laws in a city does not create an obligation for a military base in that town to also less stringently enforce traffic laws.
- I think we all agree that Federal responsibilities to act to protect citizens when a state does not is also undeniable. Not saying this meets the criteria, just that it exists. A state cannot fail to 'equally protect' its citizens.

Note how little discussion (despite dozens of requests) has taken place about the actions or failure of action by the local police and government, and how much has focused on what appears to be, looking at the reaction by the feds in isolation. There has been recognition of the failure of local leadership, but there seems to be a chasm between that preceding and precipitating event and the action/reaction of the feds. Yes, they made mistakes, but that doesn't justify 'taking people randomly off the streets'.

I understand the point above, but I think the fundamental issue derailing this conversation is a lack of understanding of the details preceding the Feds' decisions to pick up people in unmarked vans (see your third paragraph). If anything, how are we supposed to have a deep conversation about the actions of local officials when we're all relatively uninformed about it, because Portland wasn't national news until a week ago?

Tanq seems to believe that the Portland police basically abdicated from the scene and did not support the feds. But now that I've read more about it, I've come to realization that this isn't true, at all. So it would actually greatly benefit the discussion for us to be on the same page about what each local actor was doing before the Feds started picking people up in unmarked vans.

My understanding, from reading a few timeline articles, is that protests were quite numerous, and turned violent numerous times before feds arrived. Both the local police, and eventually, the feds, responded with the types of crowd control measures (i.e. tear gas) we've been seeing across the country, and they didn't seem to be successful.

But early on, there was a butting of heads between local officials and the feds - see this July 8 quote from the Portland Deputy Chief:

Quote:“I don’t have authority over federal officers,” Davis said. “They’re governed by their own policies and procedures. They’re acting under federal law, federal authority. … It does complicate things for us.”

And then this commentary follows later:

Quote:The increasingly aggressive actions by federal officers have also energized the protest movement in Portland, a city known for its cultural defiance to authority. Crowds grew significantly July 17 and 18.

Note that federal officials had been in Portland since at least July 1.


Finally, the beginning of the article seems to sum up the issue - local officials basically created a song and dance with protesters, and failed at quelling the unrest. Then feds stepped in and made a bigger mess.

Quote:Protesters had settled into a nightly routine at the Multnomah County Justice Center. The fencing around the building had just come down. The iconic elk statue still stood watch above Lownsdale and Chapman Squares, offering a comfortable late-night perch for many protesters.

Then federal law enforcement officers began appearing at the daily protests.

At first, activists viewed the agents as a minor nuisance compared to officers from the Portland Police Bureau, who for many nights before had used impact munitions and tear gas to drive demonstrators away from the building that houses the county jail and out of downtown Portland.

https://www.opb.org/news/article/police-...-officers/