Last night, while cities around the nation howled with outrage over the freedom of Officer Darren Wilson, Portland kept mostly quiet. It was easy to wonder if "Little Beirut" had lost some of its edge along the way.

Tonight mostly dispelled those questions. What began as a heavily attended rally, march, and sing-along near the Multnomah County Justice Center at 4 pm took a turn around 6, when protesters decided there were better things to do than repeat "We Shall Overcome" again.

Hundreds upon hundred of incessantly chanting Portlanders began marching the wrong way down SW 3rd and, when cops threatened to arrest them at the foot of the Morrison Bridge, took to the Burnside Bridge instead, blocking both lanes of traffic at points. Then they blocked NE MLK. Then SE Grand.




Throughout all this, the police were content to follow, and watch, and admonish people to get out of the street from their ice cream truck-like public address wagon.

"The AMA (Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for Justice and Police Reform) thought they were going to hijack our protest," one activist said around this time. There was a palpable resentment that the early hours of the demonstration—led by the AMA—lacked antagonism.

That ended at SE Washington and Water, when a small contingent hopped onto the long, curving viaduct that puts you onto Eastbound I-84 from the Morrison Bridge (because blocking freeways is in this year). The cops, watched closely by police bureau bigwigs, got upset.



Denis believes he saw Sgt. Kyle Nice (he of the road rage and James Chasse complicity) pepper spray someone. I saw cops throwing their bicycles down in frustration, and looking on helplessly as marchers tipped a parked police motorcycle. Overall, though, they showed admirable restraint during the portions of the march I saw, even amid some pretty bad behavior.

One guy threw something heavy at a brand new car as we passed the Chevytown dealership. A bunch of people set themselves on a dark SUV as marchers trekked west across the Morrison Bridge, bashing out a window and smashing it with heavy objects (I'm told it had hit a bike someone was using to block the road). The vast, vast majority of people, though, were content to march, chant, and block traffic.

By the time I parted from the protest to type this post, it had lost roughly a third of its members, and was making its way up to Providence Park, where Denis' tweets suggest things are tense, and where people are calling individual cops out for condoning the "I Am Darren Wilson" sentiments of their colleagues.



Follow Denis for the latest. That's all for now.

(Except that tonight was the first and only time I've walked across the automobile lanes of the Morrison Bridge, and so the first time I was able to examine the bridge's worrying defects up close. It looks bad, with screws and bolts showing through the surface all over the place. I'd have taken pictures, but my phone died.)