THE COPS pretty much knew—when they saw not just one viral video of officers scuffling with and Tasering a 16-year-old from Roosevelt High, but two—that they had an “oh shit” moment on their hands.

That lightning bolt didn’t wait long to hit, either. It was Sunday night, just hours after Thai Gurule, a sophomore football player, was taken to a hospital and then charged with resisting arrest.

The recordings of the encounter, which erupted in downtown St. Johns a little after midnight early on Sunday morning, flooded social media nearly immediately—with dispiriting talk about cops targeting young black men and plans brewing for a community protest this Wednesday, September 17.

And it wasn’t long before that outcry—louder than ever in a post-Ferguson America—reached the cops’ ears, too. They started looking for ways to turn down the heat.

Monday morning, with the story of what happened to Gurule still absent from Portland’s news sites, the police bureau made its move. In an unusual departure from protocol, the bureau not only released a summary of the incident and announced a formal review, but it also proactively shared 911 audio, police reports, and links to both eyewitness videos.

We learned that officers had been called about a group of teens who’d been making threats and messing with property in St. Johns—and that officers said they were trying to calmly detain Gurule for questioning when, they say, he refused to be handcuffed. We even learned that the officers all reported injuries.

But we also learned—troublingly—that officers didn’t know for sure that Gurule and his friends were the same kids from the 911 calls, even if they thought so because they matched a description. Gurule’s brother, Giovanni, who also scuffled with cops after watching his skinny brother being punched, kneed, and Tasered, later told reporters they were headed to a skatepark.

The bureau has issued disclosures like this before—like the time it shared footage of officers Tasering a man with mental illness in Whole Foods before reporters got wind of it. But all of that information at once, accountability experts say, was unprecedented.

“This is very unusual,” says Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch. “I can’t think of any case where, within two days, we saw this kind of paperwork.”

It’s smart media management—and it’s an encouraging nod to transparency. While the reports and calls don’t answer whether the cops who stopped Gurule were within policy—in fact they may raise more questions—their release short-circuits potential criticisms about the bureau circling the wagons and clamming up in the face of controversy.

“We’ve come to a point in the world where people share things on social media and they go viral very quickly,” says Sergeant Pete Simpson, the bureau’s lead spokesman. “When the incident involves the police bureau and has the potential be very inflammatory, we want to get as much information out as quickly as possible.”

Simpson says the bureau doesn’t have any reason, yet, to believe the officers violated policy in tangling with Gurule: “It’s a distinct possibility that if his actions were those of a calm young man, we would have walked away.”

But he said the bureau wants to continue showing more of its cards and sooner, no matter what they reveal. He invoked an expected shift toward body-mounted cameras, for hundreds of patrol officers—and suggested an interesting pledge.

“That may be the new standard,” Simpson says. “We don’t move as fast as social media. I don’t think we’re going to try. But we’re going to take opportunities when we can to provide context.”

Denis C. Theriault is the Portland Mercury's News Editor. He writes stories about City Hall and the Portland Police Bureau, focusing on issues like homelessness, police oversight, insider politics, and...

6 replies on “Hall Monitor”

  1. I’m glad I saw two videos. I feel more confident about what we’re likely looking at here, from two slightly different angles. I know people always see different (even opposite) things when looking at the same images…but after looking at these two videos a few times, no matter how hard I try, I can’t see any “head lock” being attempted. I do see someone who is trying to stay upright and not be pushed onto his face on the concrete. I think that in his situation, I might have found myself reacting in the same way as he did. It’s probably just the instinct of self preservation. One thing that is crystal clear to me: he was not “resisting” at the moment when the cops first started pushing him. He was just standing there in the middle of them.

  2. This Friday – Alberta Park – 5pm.

    Alberta Park is between Ainsworth and Killingsworth & 19th & 22nd Aves

    Enough is enough. Recently Thai and Gio Gurule were assualted, and essentially JUMPED by the PPD (Portland Police Department) in the St. Johns neighborhood.

    3-4 officers were caught on film punching, twisting, kicking, and tazing a 16 year old youth who was not drinking, who was not smoking, who was doing nothing wrong other than the crime of walking while non-white.

    We told Mike Reese that we would not tolerate another event like this. Those boys were lucky to not have been killed by the obvious power tripping members of our heinous police force.

    So join us this friday the 19th at 5pm to demand justice!

    Never again will there be another Mike Brown, Keaton Otis, Fouad Kaady, Aaron Cambell, James Chasse, Kendra James, James Jahar Perez, and many MANY others murdered by the police.

    No justice, no peace!

  3. A police officer yells: “CALM DOWN!!!,” as if THAT is supposed to clam somebody down. What the officer should have been doing, would be to de-escalate the situation. Instead, he was himself the one who was out of control. It took three police officers to wrestle a stationary child to the ground. I suppose that would be resistance, but not to arrest so much, as resistance to going down on the ground; a natural reaction, just as is not becoming relaxed when three brutes are threatening you, and yelling at you to calm down. If just one of these police officers were to have been adequately trained in Aikido, as are Japanese police, the youngster could have handled easily and harmlessly.

    https://www.facebook.com/UnitedMartialArts…

    https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=33857…

  4. Hapkido even ‘mo bett’a! Ask Randy Osborne in Garden Home. Joint locks are employed to hold and restrain an aggressor while non-injurious pain can be increased or decreased by slight variation in amount of little pressure. If the police had better training, they wouldn’t be so panicky and over react all the time. They would be more confident because they would actually know how to maintain control of an attacker as well as control of themselves.

  5. First of all, the police out numbered the kid. Why were to police so up tight? Just because they were responding to a complaint doesn’t necessarily mean that the complaint was legitimate. If they weren’t sure that the kid was the subject of the complaint, couldn’t they have been nice and polite when investigating? If the kid got upset, wouldn’t it have been more civilized to let him have his say? Why aren’t the police better listeners? Why couldn’t they address the kid’s response in a calm, quiet, relaxed manor? If they really felt the need to handcuff the kid, why didn’t they calmly inform him that they have to go by the book, and so they will need to handcuff him and escort him into the car? By letting a subject know what to expect, with assurance that no harm will result, a subject has time to let the adrenaline dissipate a bit, and be able to think more rationally, rather than to panic. When the police are themselves scared and acting out of panic, it’s unsettling for the target of their aggression.

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