We've been hearing more and more this morning about some of the rough conduct by police during last night's anti-police-brutality march in Southeast—including the story of a woman who said her face was cut open, with her glasses broken, after officers grabbed her from a sidewalk and shoved her to the ground.
Witnesses say the arrests came after the petty vandalism and property damage—smashed car and restaurant windows, tagged cars, and strewed trash—that the Mercury and other media outlets reported on last night. The Portland Occupier has a pretty detailed blow-by-blow of the arrests on its blog.
The march—in solidarity with some 400 people arrested and tear-gassed in Oakland last month—wasn't an official Occupy Portland event and was organized autonomously by people within the movement along with other groups. It wound up getting a huge burst of publicity after police sent out an all-points bulletin that all but warned they would respond with force.
"I was outside my house," Emmalyn Garrett, an Occupy PR team member, told the Mercury this morning. "I came outside to check out what was going on, and I was arrested just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had not been breaking any laws last night. I was not one of the people who smashed windows. Those people were long gone."
Update 4 PM: Garrett called back to clarify she'd been referring to what another arrestee had said about being grabbed "outside my house," and that she was along for the march but on the sidewalk when she was arrested.
Micaiah Dutt, a former police liaison for Occupy Portland, told me he saw at least one completely unaffiliated person arrested in similar fashion last night: a man who showed up to tell both cops and protesters to get off his lawn.
"He wasn't even part of the march," Dutt says. "He's pretty shaken up."
News reports say at least 10 people were arrested—Garrett says she was within a group of about seven people who were taken into custody in what she called "snatch and grabs," a tactic similar to the police bureau's response to a Tahrir Square solidarity march last month. I've got a message in with the lead police spokesman, Lieutenant Robert King, to ask about the names and dispositions of those arrested.
Update 11:20 AM: The police bureau sent out a statement identifying the eight adults arrested last night (two other arrestees were kids) and confirming that no one arrested was actually accused of property damage. Read it after the cut.
Garrett and Dutt both say police moved in long after the vandalism and after marchers had moved to sidewalks.
"The police were not around when the windows were smashed," Garrett said. "They were outside" Colonel Summers Park before the march. "They were not around when the windows were smashed. They just did snatch-and-grabs later."
As we reported last night, a lot of the smashing was apparently done by Black Bloc adherents, or at least people dressed up to look that way. Dutt said there were several factions that took part in the march, not all of them with the same agenda.
"There was one group that happened to smash stuff up, and they did it right in front of police and they didn't get arrested," he said.
That's echoed by the Occupier's article:
The persons who had actually committed the acts of vandalism quickly left the scene, and were not apprehended by police. The police, for their part, changed their tactics quickly. Instead of lining up to clear the streets, the riot police began bum-rushing protesters on the sidewalk, in violent snatch-and-grab maneuvers, who clearly had not been among those destroying property. They would swoop up on their vans, leap off, tackle a few protesters to the ground, and make a line to prevent the shocked protesters on the sidewalk from helping their compatriots as they were pinned to the pavement. There was a wave of four arrests on Belmont, as peaceful protesters were slammed to the ground, zip-tied, and then shoved into the back of vans. The police later reported that these arrests were made because the protesters went into the streets or interfered with police actions, though many were only walking on the sidewalk, and were singled out for unknown reasons. One protester who was arrested, named Nefi, claimed that a bike police officer came at him with a glass bottle as he walked on the sidewalk on the north side of Belmont....A second wave of protesters, mostly recognizable from previous Occupy protests and events, gathered about a block north of Colonel Summers Park just as the first wave was dispersed by police. They began marching south on SE 20th Avenue until they reached Hawthorne. Here, riot police, supported by mounted and bicycle police, swooped out again.
Update 11:15 AM: Nathan Gilles got a comment from Mayor Sam Adams this morning. The mayor contends, based on what he heard, that police really did arrest people "suspected of vandalism"—something several other witnesses, and now the police, contradict.
"We approached last night's protest in the same way have approached all unpermitted protests in the city," he said. "I wasn't there, so I can't say for certain what happened. From the accounts I was given, this was not a safe and not a civil protest and the police acted accordingly, making arrests of people they suspected of vandalism and people who didn't get onto the sidewalks when asked."
Garrett says yesterday's warning by police about the "tone" of some of the fliers promoting the march overlooked the nuance behind its planning and called it, ironically, "the best advertisement the event got, in terms of media turnout and numbers."
"Their response, which was an assumption of militancy, really was detrimental to the event as a whole," she said. "The intentions of the organizers and the vast majority of the marchers were totally peaceful."
The police statement detailing the arrests:
On Monday February 6, 2012, Portland Police officers arrested 10 people related to an anti-police brutality march that started at Colonel Summers Park in Southeast Portland.Two of the arrests were juveniles: A 15-year-old male and a 17-year-old male were arrested for Disorderly Conduct in the Second Degree and Interfering with a Police Officer.
The eight adults arrested are as follows:
29-year-old Justin Pellingra
Charges: Disorderly Conduct in the Second Degree, Interfering with a Police Officer and Resist Arrest27-year-old Emmalyn Garrett
Charges: Disorderly Conduct in the Second Degree and Interfering with a Police Officer21-year-old Joana Levy
Charges: Disorderly Conduct in the Second Degree and Interfering with a Police Officer18-year-old Maggie Debusk-Kneidek
Charges: Interfering with a Police Officer and Resist Arrest25-year-old Jose Moreno
Charges: Disorderly Conduct in the Second Degree28-year-old Nefi Martinez-Bravo
Charges: Interfering with a Police Officer22-year-old Taylor Sharpe
Charges: Disorderly Conduct in the Second Degree27-year-old Jessie Glaub
Charges: Disorderly Conduct in the Second DegreeAll adults were given citations and released, other than Jose Moreno who was booked on an unrelated warrant.
Although there were multiple reports of vandalism along the march route, no arrests have been made in connection with the property damage.
Anyone with information about who was involved in the vandalism is urged to provide information to the Portland Police Bureau by emailing CrimeTips@PortlandOregon.gov
