(07-24-2020 04:27 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  

(07-24-2020 04:19 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  There's a few things that are problematic with how you frame the above.

1) There are more options. For starters, they could continue to protect the court house and only arrest those that enter the physical grounds (so don't wade into the crowd).

2) Option C has a wide range of possible methods of execution. Some possible suggestions on what could change:
-make sure that they verbalize why they are detaining someone and where they will be taken to
- do not detain individuals and only arrest specific individuals that they will charge with a crime
- if they want to detain someone, do that in public
- only conduct detentions/arrests during daylight hours when there are not active riots going on

3) If we could go back to the beginning, when the Feds were first brought to Portland because local police/officials were unable to get the protests and riots under control, the Feds should have immediately put themselves in a supporting role, only, to local officials. There is something about Federal agents that does nothing to deescalate the situation, and it seems to be proven time and again, that a show of force is not going to deter people from protesting or rioting.

Listening and working with protesters seems to be the fastest way to get these situations under control - heavy handed violence doesn't seem to work.

So your solution is to keep the people who failed in charge and to give them more resources... but give no authority to those people

Your opinion is noted. The people who do this professionally obviously disagree. I am not saying that makes them right and you wrong.... but I am saying that it doesn't make you right... and certainly implies that they've considered that and declined it.... since the practices seem to transcend administrations

You say 'when the feds were first brought to portland'... you may not mean it this way but that implies to me that they were asked to come in... I have this same issue with democrats on the military... You don't call the military if you don't want it dead. Certainly they can do other things and they don't do it haphazardly... but an f-14 wasn't designed to deliver amazon packages. Federal police aren't designed to 'connect with the community' that they don't live in. Even if they weren't asked in (I'm betting they weren't) they should have known that it was a reasonable possibility.

My understanding is that they were sent by the executive, and not invited by locals. So a more careful word could have been used. And based on statements by local police officials, they felt like this was a complicating factor in trying to manage the protests and riots.

And I appreciate your words about no obvious rights/wrongs. In a similar vein, I’m not necessarily advocating that my options in #2 would have necessarily resulted in better outcomes - I was more trying to clearly delineate that more options were available. But I do think that #3 would have been less likely to result in the same escalation. But we know the executive believes firmly in acting from a position of strength and trying to project strength, and sending federal agents in to do just that, is what happened.

Based on the current outcome, it seems pretty clear that it backfired.