From Portland’s FM News 101 KXL: Entire Portland Police Rapid Response Team Resigns
From Portland’s FM News 101 KXL:
Portland, Ore. — FM News 101 learned late Wednesday night that in response to the criminal indictment of Officer Corey Budworth, the bureaus entire Rapid Response Team resigned. Sources with the Police Bureau say the team voted unanimously to disband.
The Rapid Response Team is a group of volunteer officers who respond to civil disobedience, demonstrations, and riots.
Tuesday, a member of the team was charged with assault for actions during an August 18, 2020 riot in Southeast Portland.
You gotta hand it to them, they really rapidly responded by resigning. Take a kudo out of petty cash fellas.Report
Remember that cop that bashed an old man to the ground during the BLM protests? The ones where every cop ignored the unconscious, bleeding man on the ground (to be fair, it looked like ONE cop was about to stop and another cop stopped him)?
They all resigned “in protest” too, because the city was investigating whether “Bashing an old man unconscious for no damn reason whatsoever” was really in line with policy.
Hell, maybe with these guys resigned those two square blocks of Portland will settle down now that the a**holes starting the fights are gone.Report
From Portland’s Police page:
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Ugh, that was ugly.
Anyway, that’s the baseline and we can go from there to figure out whether people have settled down or not.Report
To be sure, Portland indeed has experienced a spike in homicides beginning in July of 2020. So has the rest of the United States of America, both urban and rural. Some places worse than Portland (looking at you, Republican-led Fort Worth, Texas) and some places not as bad.
It’s nothing for Portland to be proud of, for sure, just like our homelessness problem. And, like our homelessness problem, it’s the same sort of problem everyone is having.
N.b., although homicides are the worst crimes there are, it may be profitable while you’re playing with the PPB statistics reporting tool embedded above to look at other kinds of crime as comparators.
I.n.b., “Homicide offenses” on this tool are defined as crimes in which one human takes another human’s life. Here, that includes negligent homicides, such as vehicular manslaughter. This may be a different definition of homicide than is used by other entities reporting crime statistics, like the FBI. The tool provides no way of distinguishing between various grades and intent levels in the homicides reported.Report
This lack of standardization when it comes to crime stats is a problem across the board.Report
Yup good riddance to bad rubbish. If they really need that kind of unit, which a big city might, they’ll find other cops to get the pay bump.Report
Greg,
You demonstrate a shocking lack of awareness of Portland.
Have some protest coffee, it’s an eye-opener.
Portland had “demonstrations” nightly for months.
Nightly.
Not every weekend, every goddamn night.
I assume these were the fine cops that were deputized as Federal police.Report
I work downtown. Often late, due to how I’ve structured my personal habits. I often drive to work on the Hawthorne Bridge and take Main Street to get to my office, or drive home using Madison Street to get to the Hawthorne Bridge, which takes me from the Gus Solomon Federal Courthouse through the three-block “protest zone” in front of the Justice Center. So I’ve seen what’s been going down in those parks with my own eyes, at night, for months now.
I’ve seen a lot of homeless people camping out there. Lots of tents. It’s not pretty but that’s where they are. I love my city and would rather not admit that we have this much homelessness, but it’s the truth.
I’ve also seen cops step outside the side door of the Justice Center facing the protest zone, to have relaxing smoke breaks. I don’t think they’d be doing that if there were protestors there throwing baggies of human feces at them. (Which, yes, has happened.)
What I haven’t seen are a lot of protests or protest activity, since about December. I won’t say none; there are protests that happen there from time to time. But they’re not all BLM protests. I know of at least three “Stolen Land” protests that were large enough to hear from a dozen stories up in my office tower.
Will there be more protests in the future? Certainly. Will some of them be BLM protests, protests in response to perceived injustices perpetrated by the police? Yes, I imagine so. But no, there haven’t been protests there every goddamn night. Not for a while now.Report
From what I’ve seen, they “resigned” from a task force, but are still on the force doing their normal police duties.
So it isn’t at all clear what, if any, impact this has on Portland’s policing.Report
Yeah that kind of TF is an extra duty so they aren’t giving up their pay checks just a bit of extra cash/ time spent on training.Report
And the ability to send people off to federal prison, if memory serves.
(and the fun of playing Star Wars Tunes in the middle of attempting to disperse crowds)Report
They publicly resign, and 6 months from now, they will all quietly be back on the TF.Report
There’s a lo-o-o-ong history of this sort of thing here in Portland, as I’ve recently learned. Here’s some Google searches you can do if you’re curious about the history of PPB (the police department) and the PPA’s reaction to PPB discipline of outrageously-behaving officers (the PPA is the police union). Here’s your first search: “Portland Police dead possum soul food”. Here’s your second search: “Mark Kruger Nazi shrine city attorney”.
In both cases, amazingly outrageous police behavior resulted in very grudging attempts to discipline the officers in question, which produced police union-organized “Cops Have Rights Too” protests in favor of the cops, who after the controversies received commendations, promotions, raises, and cushy cash settlements from the city government, whose leaders proceeded to pretend to not understand what they had done.
So yeah, this isn’t exactly the same thing, but history doesn’t repeat so much as it rhymes.
In this case, here’s some video of what Officer Budworth actually did to get himself indicted. The woman he’s seen, shall we say, “using force on,” was a journalist walking away from a protest zone after the police had issued an order to disperse. Query if Officer Budworth saw the PPB-issued press credential she was wearing. Watch the video, decide for yourself what you’re seeing.Report
“The police union called the prosecution politically-driven, and said Budworth’s baton strike to a woman’s head was “accidental,” not criminal.”
If my experience here in Chicago is translatable to other American cities, these guys have no other friends than cops. It’s a bubble in which everything they do is because they’re the good guys holding the forces of lawlessness at bay. No one is ever calling them out on their BS, so to them this is a perfectly plausible explanation.Report