This flag caused some trouble.
This flag caused some trouble. Doug Brown

Perhaps it was inevitable.

Don’t Shoot Portland demonstrators protesting police abuses briefly squared off with Oregon Occupier supporters still feeling high off the acquittals of the Bundy gang in front of Portland’s Justice Center this afternoon.

The altercation brewed after members of Don’t Shoot marched from Portland State University to the city’s downtown jail, pushing a write-in campaign for sheriff by organizer Teressa Raiford and pressing grievances stemming from a violent conflict they had with police two weeks ago.

At one point, the group apparently plucked up a flag that belonged to a woman who’d been barbecuing in Lownsdale Square, in celebration of the surprise exoneration of Ammon and Ryan Bundy and five codefendants, who no longer face conspiracy charges for taking over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier this year. The acquittals have been seen as proof—to the Don’t Shoot Portland protestors and lots of others—that a group group of white defendants can skate on even well publicized misdeeds, while minorities are shot and brutalized for no reason.

When protestors burned the occupiers’ flag, the woman—wearing an American flag-themed tank top—became upset.

“Why would you burn my property?” she asked.

Before long, members of her cohort had stepped in, accusing Don’t Shoot protestors of breaking the law by burning the flag. Things got racist very, very quickly, with one man telling protestors to “go back to Jamaica,” and using uglier slurs.

As police looked on (they’ve got the road blocked off), people on both sides worked to calm the situation. As of this post, the Don’t Shoot Portland protestors had resumed chanting against police abuse, though an occasional “Fuck the Bundies!” could be heard.

I'm a news reporter for the Mercury. I've spent a lot of the last decade in journalism — covering tragedy and chicanery in the hills of southwest Missouri, politics in Washington, D.C., and other matters...

6 replies on “Don’t Shoot Portland Protestors and Bundy Clan Fans Briefly Squared Off Downtown This Afternoon”

  2. I made a valid point Dirk. It wasn’t rude or trolling anyone, it was simply pointing out the hypocrisy of one of you tweets. Censoring that comment is a tacit admission of guilt.

  3. From the sounds of it, one protest group picked a fight with another group protesting an unrelated issue. For what possible reason?

  4. These protestors should take the time to read more, it would just help them seem a little less ignorant of the factual world around them, as well as understand how laws, courts, juries, and certain charges work as well. Maybe they should stop, and realize that you cant paste racism, or whitw privilage in front of every problem.

  5. I find it so unreal that anyone can rationalize the disgusting level of leniency that the Bundy’s were given. To equate one of the brothers being shot while rushing a federal agent with a fire arm to the hundreds of unarmed people of color that are gunned down within seconds for no reason is monumentally ignorant.

    That said, the BLM movement is expressly against inflammatory and illegal actions like stealing someone’s flag and burning it. No good can come of something like that, and I’d bet good money that this was one of many cases where an agitator is planted in a crowd of peaceful protesters for the purpose of discrediting the cause. Still, the fact that these two groups were in the same place at the same time and contesting the outcome of this particular case without an all out bloodbath is a testament to the overall restraint of humanity. Thank god for that.

  6. The Bundy verdicts sent the message that it’s fine to be a violent thief-as long as you are white. And the Refuge “protester” was reaching for the gun in his coat. If doing that(or the after-the-fact claim that a guy was doing that) is justification enough for cops to kill a black man(or, in Cleveland, a twelve-year-old child), it’s equally reason enough for cops to shoot a white man. Lavoy Finicum was a terrorist. And this wasn’t a protest-it was a demand for a wildlife refuge to be turned over to local ranchers to pillage. Ammon & Co. knew from the outset that the feds would never do that.

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