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CAREERS Special Edition
Police Brace for Clash of Protests
C ontinued from P age 2
resents everything these (far-right) groups
are against,” said Heidi Beirich, director
of the Intelligence Project at the Southern
Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate
groups. “It’s progressive, and even more
offensive to them, it’s progressive white
people who should be on these guys’ side.”
The groups know they will get a head-
line-grabbing reaction from Portland’s so-
called “antifa,” whose members have is-
sued an online call to their followers to turn
out to “defend Portland from a far-Right at-
tack.” Portland’s Rose City Antifa, the na-
tion’s oldest active anti-fascist group, says
violence against right-wing demonstrators
is “exactly what should happen when the
far-right attempts to invade our town.”
Portland leaders are planning a major
law enforcement presence on the heels of
similar rallies in June and last summer that
turned violent, and the recent hate-driven
shooting in El Paso, Texas. None of the
city’s nearly 1,000 police officers will have
the day off, and Portland will get help from
the Oregon State Police and the FBI. May-
or Ted Wheeler has said he may ask Gov.
Kate Brown, a Democrat, to call up the Or-
egon National Guard.
“There’s no winning for the cops in a
situation like this. There just isn’t,” Beirich
said. “This is hard-core stuff, and I don’t
think you can be too cautious.”
Experts who track right-wing militias
and hate groups warn that the mix of peo-
ple heading to Portland also came togeth-
er for a Unite the Right rally in 2017 in
Charlottesville, Va., which ended when a
participant rammed his car into a crowd of
counter protesters, killing one person and
injuring 19.
The rally is being organized by a mem-
ber of the Proud Boys, who have been
designated by the Southern Poverty Law
Center as a hate group. Others expected
include members of the American Guard,
the Three Percenters, the Oathkeepers and
the Daily Stormers. American Guard is a
white nationalist group, according to the
Southern Poverty Law Center, while the
August 14, 2019
Three Percenters and the Oathkeepers are
extremist anti-government militias. The
Daily Stormers are neo-Nazis, according
to the center.
Portland’s fraught history with hate
groups adds to the complex dynamic.
Many of today’s anti-fascists trace their
activist heritage to a group that battled with
neo-Nazis in Portland’s streets decades ago,
and they feel this is the same struggle in a
new era, said Randy Blazak, the leading ex-
pert on the history of hate groups in Oregon.
White supremacists murdered an Ethi-
opian man, Mulugeta Seraw, in Portland
in 1988. And by the 1990s, Portland was
known as Skinhead City because it was the
home base of Volksfront, at the time one
of the most active neo-Nazi groups in the
U.S. As recently as 2007, neo-Nazis at-
tempted to gather in Portland for a three-
day skinhead festival.
“When I’m looking at what’s happening
right now, for me it’s a direct line back to
the 1980s: the battles between the racist
skinheads and the anti-racist skinheads,”
Blazak said. “It’s the latest version of this
thing that’s been going on for 30 years in
this city.”
Police, meanwhile, have seemed over-
whelmed by the cultural forces at war in
their streets.
At the June rally, masked antifa mem-
bers beat up a conservative blogger named
Andy Ngo. Video of the 30-second attack
grabbed national attention and further
turned the focus on Portland as a new bat-
tleground in a divisive America.
Republican Sens. Ted Cruz, of Texas,
and Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana, introduced
a congressional resolution calling for an-
ti-fascists to be declared domestic terror-
ists, and President Donald Trump echoed
that theme in a tweet last month. Portland’s
City Hall has been evacuated twice due to
bomb threats after the June 29 skirmishes,
and Wheeler, the mayor, has been pilloried
by critics who incorrectly said he told po-
lice to stand down while anti-fascists went
after right-wing demonstrators.
“I don’t want for one minute anyone to
think that because we’re being thrust into
this political show, that I or the public have
lost confidence in (police officers’) ability
to do what we do,” said Police Chief Dan-
ielle Outlaw, who is regularly heckled as
she leaves City Hall by those who feel the
police target counter protesters for arrest
over far-right demonstrators.
Police have noted the violence in June
was limited to a small area of downtown
Portland despite three different demonstra-
tions that lasted more than five hours, with
hundreds of people constantly on the move.
They also made two arrests last week in a
May Day assault on an antifa member that
became a rallying cry for the city’s far-left.
“We’ll be ready for the 17th here in lit-
tle Portland, Oregon,” Wheeler, the mayor,
told The Associated Press. “But at the end
of the day, the bigger question is about our
nation’s moral compass and which direc-
tion it’s pointing.”
Blazak, the Oregon hate groups expert,
said he worries the extreme response from
a small group of counter protesters is start-
ing to backfire. Many in the city oppose
the right-wing rallies but also dislike the
violent response of antifa, which provides
social media fodder for the far-right.
“The opposition is playing right into the
alt-right’s hands by engaging with them
this way,” he said.