Ebony and Ivory

A man shot by a Portland cop last night has died:

The subject involved in the officer involved shooting has died at the hospital.

On Thursday, June 24, 2021 at 7:06p.m., North Precinct officers were dispatched to a report of a welfare check on a white adult male dressed in all black at a motel in the 500 block of Northeast Holladay Street. After officers arrived with paramedics, they encountered a man matching that description and an officer involved shooting took place.

In a common occurrence the police were called because a mentally unstable man was behaving erratically or assaulting people in the street. Police are revealing nothing at this point but that and that a shooting occurred. Rumor is rife.

Immediately antifa propagandists sent out the call for action, alleging another black victim of police violence:

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The audio of the “interview” mentioned above has yet to appear and the tweets remain up, but neither of these characters, Grace Morgan or Griffin Malone, have updated their reportage, as of this writing, despite the fact early last night the cops–who’ve so far said barely more than that a shooting took place–revealed the race of the now deceased as white.

(notably as “a white man in all black”, like antifa)

Antifa sublimated their disappointment in affected outrage at the very notion they would be any less outraged, and the cynicism of the cops’ transparent, buzzkilling move.

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Among the rumors out there is that the shooter was a black cop and that the white perp was armed with a knife and had slashed someone (someone BIPOC!) before the encounter with police.

This takes place as the state endures a record heat wave.

Update: Koin 6 News here reports witnesses say the cop shot a man attempting to stab another:

Police Abolitionists Winning by Attrition, Still

Last week Multnomah County District Attorney MIke Schmidt charged a Portland cop with assault for an extra baton push or two to the back of a fallen rioter’s head last August 18, the same night the group tried to set fire to the Multnomah County Office Building.

Police internal affairs cleared him after an investigation. The rioter/photojournalist recently won a settlement in civil court–I don’t know what bearing that has on the DA’s decision, timing or prospects in court. The DA might be moving on these slight charges (fourth degree assault, a class A misdemeanor) to appease the left after he recently felt compelled to charge some of the more serious riot offenses of last summer and May Day of this year.

Schmidt threw a bone–with a crushing backhand–to the cops in his announcement:

“I want to start by thanking and acknowledging the Portland Police Bureau for their dedicated work on this investigation into one of their own,” Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt said in a statement Tuesday after the charges were filed. “I further want to thank the many members of the Portland Police Bureau who have showed up night after night in response to civil demonstrations that have at times turned violent. Despite these pressures, these law enforcement professionals remained professional, and their actions lawful.

Notably it’s not that “most” cops do their jobs honorably, but “many”, while the “mostly peaceful protesters” canard remains intact. Hapless police chief Chuck Lovell pleaded conflict of interest by way of involvement in the internal investigation and now legal case, and made no statement. The response by the defiant police union head got the usual bare notice–he can’t get arrested.

Then of course all fifty cops voluntarily assigned to the Bureau’s riot squad quit the detail in protest. Another place, another time maybe for such a move’s chances of shaming leadership or improving the cops’ position. Never one to fear shame or leave an opportunity for improving position unexploited, city commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, declaring the move proof of guilt in Maoist fashion, seized on the opportunity to push for disbanding the unit altogether. The Daily Mail:

City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty gloated in a statement on Thursday that the- resignations are a sign that ‘the good old boy network is crumbling and we can either be a part of the change or part of the status quo – but the arc of justice is bending quickly and it’s imperative that the Portland City Council lands on the right side of history’…

Hardesty, who proposed doing away with the crowd-control unit last fall, said her statement that the en masse resignations ‘are yet another example of a rogue paramilitary organization that is unaccountable to the elected officials and residents of Portland.’

She continued: ‘earlier this week, for the first time in Portland’s history, an officer from PPB’s Rapid Response Team was charged with a misdemeanor for assaulting a photojournalist during a protest last summer. 

Portland cops, like Minneapolis’, are probably among the nation’s least corrupt or cruel. Here the ferocity of antifa’s attack on the police reflects their mostly unchallenged power and the city’s wealth and prospects. The activist grifter goes, like the bank robber, where the money is.

But the demoralizing of the police and decimation of their ranks proceed apace. Their move had no chance of shaming political leadership or public apathy, and like everything that happens now, what we’re served is a demonstration of how one-party rule with compliant media works.

Portland Dispatch June 23: Lost Highway

Portland Police will no longer stop drivers for traffic violations not deemed an immediate threat to safety.

On Tuesday, Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell announced that he’s directed all officers to only focus on policing traffic violations that threatens [sic] public safety. This would limit officers from pulling over drivers for low-level infractions, like a broken headlight during daylight hours or expired tags—policies that have historically been used as pretext to predominately stop and question drivers of color.

Black drivers have long been overrepresented in traffic stops in Portland. Portland Police Bureau (PPB) data shows that in 2019, 18 percent of all traffic stops involved Black drivers, despite Black people making up 6 percent of the city’s population. This disparity is magnified when officers are assigned to deter gang activity: In 2018, a city audit found that 59 percent of drivers stopped by PPB’s former Gang Enforcement Team were Black.

Traffic stops were used by the now-disbanded Gang Enforcement Team to harass and sometimes intercept gangbangers before they can engage in retribution killings.

The city’s nominal police chief Chuck Lovell contends the net effect will be greater public safety–by allowing broken headlights (apparently specifically mentioned is pulling people over for not having their lights on at night), unregistered vehicles and unlicensed drivers. One wonders why we’ve left this public benefit laying in the gutter all this time! And that it can be realized not by the expenditure of resources, but by saving them! The logic follows that of other reforms: remove the police, negate the laws and black people, finally, will thrive.

Lovell mentioned that these changes, specifically regarding violations, will improve the rate of traffic fatalities along with the city’s ability to police equitably. According to the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT), the city has seen a 47 percent increase in traffic deaths in 2021, compared to this same time in 2020—an increase from 17 deaths to 25. Directing officers to focus on only pulling over people for violations that threaten safety will free up officers’ time to prioritize driving issues that could turn fatal.

Like most things, Portland’s leadership is ignorant of the increase in black traffic accidents in the George Floyd era that Steve Sailer calls “the Racial Wreckening”:

The sudden slaughter on the highways of blacks (black road deaths were up 55% in June 2020 over June 2019) is obviously due to the Racial Reckoning leading to black feelings above suddenly being above the law and the cops backing off making traffic stops of blacks driving badly as The Establishment was demanding.

Leader of the police abolition movement and city commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty approves of course:

“I strongly support today’s announcement that PPB will no longer pursue minor traffic violations and will limit car searches, while informing drivers of their constitutional rights during these encounters,” Hardesty wrote. “This allows the police to focus on traffic violations that pose an immediate safety threat and other higher priority crime mitigation efforts, such as solving crimes related to the increase in gun violence.”

Get that? We’ve pulled police off the streets, so now we have more resources for solving the attendant increase in murders. Likewise, I imagine, taking traffic enforcement away from the police will free up their time for more important things, like responding to all the fatal accidents. Portland logic.

Postmodern Saint

George Floyd has earned his sainthood. Floyd achieved in nine minutes and 29 seconds more than the collective left has achieved in the last decade, hastening perhaps the death-blow in their long fight against Western Civilization–and he did it on Fentanyl. They owe him a statue or two.

Monuments are tiny fractions of the surplus wealth eminent individuals create, given back as tributes; the billion-plus, and counting, George Floyd’s lurid and ultimate sacrifice produced can finance no end of monuments. It would be a grave omission if Floyd didn’t have several.

A cult, in the classical sense of the cultivation and “care” for Floyd as a kind of local deity, is of course already here, in the graffiti and tacky murals; in the credulous reporting and cringing essays that make up his legend. He joins a pantheon, along with Breonna Taylor and Michael Brown (another unfortunate face), one totemic head taller than those lesser deities, having achieved so much more.

George Floyd’s magnificent ugliness is no hindrance to religious veneration, and may help; the crude-featured massive head and its stony, inexpressive eyes–blank and dull, onto which the acolyte projects a sort of preternatural wisdom–remind me of nothing so much as the heads on Easter Island.

If you’re non-believer, a dissident or normie, cowed into silence, that face that one immediately, maybe furtively, associates with a familiar black malice and stupidity–an association born of harsh personal experience for most, yet increasingly unutterable due to repression; well, it just seems like the humiliation of being hectored by such a tacky prophet becomes the punitive point. Believe or suffer the misery of sight is the choice–or check out. People now cultivate ignorance, nod along to the absurd and look at the sidewalk as they walk past the gaudy, violent iconography of the new order. Insulate, insulate, insulate as the wealthy stock broker says in Bonfire of the Vanities, that’s how you get by; now a necessity for every common man, psychic insulation from the bombardment. We sit like Viet Cong in our bunkers as B-52s with BLM paint schemes drop rainbow-colored bombs on the countryside, brushing the occasional falling dirt from our laptops and phones, where we try to navigate Globohomo’s increasingly poisonous content.

Perhaps this explains why so many accept it: they see no choice, with the political, social and cultural worlds all captured by the new dispensation and dissent not just barred but increasingly perilous: why continue to see? Why torture yourself–nothing can be done after all–by considering the perverse comedy of turning over the country to its most incapable people, as a reward for their persistent dysfunction, who in turn, too dull to see the con, condescend to explain things to their moral and intellectual betters–and are we not that, after all?

Portland Dispatch June 2: Flags and Hags

Andy Ngo was discovered infiltrating an antifa march last Friday night, beaten and chased into a hotel.

People in a May 28 protest crowd in front of the Multnomah County Justice Center chased, tackled and punched someone they believed to be right-wing author Andy Ngo, pursuing him through the streets of Portland until he hid inside The Nines hotel.

The enraged group pulled on the hotel’s front doors and shouted, “You wanna kill us? You wanna kill us, Andy?” at The Nines staff while the hotel staff frantically tried to hold the entrance closed.

Antifa have hated Ngo long before they developed the rationalization that he was a mortal threat, by “providing atomwaffen with kill lists”, mostly by posting publicly available arrestee names and mugshots. With this justification, they’ve declared him fair game and it sounds like he received a pretty good beating before they let him get away.

A group of five to 10 people in identity-obscuring clothing called “black bloc” followed the person they suspected of being Ngo for blocks, inquiring who he was. At one point, the person they pursued said his name was Jake. In front of the AC Marriott, the group tried to unmask the unknown man. He ran for blocks until someone in the pursuing group tackled him—at Southwest 4th Avenue and Morrison Street—and punched him several times after his head hit the brick sidewalk.

A nearby man holding a skateboard admonished the group, saying that their quarry looked like he’d “had enough.” However, when someone nearby shouted that the person they were assaulting was Ngo, the skateboard-carrying man changed his attitude, swearing and joining the group.

Only as I was writing this did Ngo take to Twitter to confirm his identity, five days after the assault:

The Nines Hotel downtown is fairly swanky, and the Denver Nuggets were staying there during the little siege Friday night. This isn’t the first time the hotel was used as sanctuary for antifa’s would-be victims; I recall during the post-election rioting of 2016 a group besieging the lobby after someone wearing a MAGA hat fled within.

Some people are suggesting a man found floating in the Willamette River after going missing on May 1, May Day, was abducted off the street by antifa. He was last heard from on a phone call telling a friend he was being followed by someone through downtown Portland.

Also this weekend Ted Wheeler braved another night out and was assailed by a concerned citizen who said he “…gasses children in their homes where they cancer and die!”

Jo Ann Hardesty and faction were outraged when noticing a contractor working for the city had “thin blue line” flags on their trucks, shamefully and openly displayed:

The terrifying imagery:

The company has declined to remove the flags and Hardesty is issuing vague threats.

I’m convinced the anarchist movement here is suffering a crisis of numbers and cohesion–barely able to work up a beat-down of dainty Andy Ngo. Infighting is hinted at in their communications and nothing energizes, still, like defending the blacks against the Man, so they await the next George Floyd. But how much longer they can count on black rage is less a question than how much more can they themselves endure–of the most exhausting creature on the planet, the delusional and angry black American.

Carnac the All-Seeing, All-Knowing, All-Omniscient, All-Woke…

Much is being made of the performance of faux-negro teacher Katherine Watkins in a professional development Zoom meeting for teachers sponsored by the Beaverton School District. Beaverton Oregon is outside of Portland; outside of Portland the “browning” of the population with recent immigrants has been policy and is leading to predictable outcomes in student test scores and woke demagogy. Watkins may indeed have some precious quotient of black blood in there, but, ironically, it’s hard to make out behind all her extravagant signaling of blackness–to the point of caricature here. Something I’m sure not lost on people like, say, the more melanin-endowed Joy Brown next to her.

(Seems to me there’s a sweet spot for the ambitious mixed-race hustler, between one-quarter and one-half black, where one might inherit white qualities inherent to success, yet appear fully black enough to, for one thing, avoid the inevitable sorting out of the barely–or questionably–black strivers, that can be fairly anticipated as the negrophilia movement advances or declines from here.)

The point is an awful lot of damage is done by those with a more tenuous claim to black privilege, the fakers and the marginally melanated; they have to try harder, and will have to try harder still, whether their movement succeeds or fails, as the rush for spoils intensifies either way. Ridicule is appropriate but insufficient.

I’ve no idea how representative the above group is of Beaverton’s teachers, or students, but it’s significant the only white guys are Kevin the sign language interpreter and Josh Porter he, him. I’d like a peek into his psyche for some enlightenment on the effects of all this madness.

Watkins gives away the striver-element of the game, and her own appropriation scheme, in her screed:

Our district is only getting browner and browner with our children. Obviously, you can’t change your melanin, alright, but you can change your mind, so that you can actually function in a district that is full of BIPOC children.

No, you can’t change your melanin, but you can buy authentic African headdresses online.

The Equity-Anti Bias Anti Racist District Wide Summit 2021, “Equity ABAR Summit” above seems, beneath all the vapid platitudes, dedicated to making teachers more proactive in assailing their white students with critical race theory propaganda.

Anyway, Watkins sees the future and provides the answers, like another broadly comedic character:

Summer of What

Update: Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all counts as I was writing this.

Last Friday night summer weather returned to downtown Portland and so did antifa. A mentally ill man with a gun was shot and killed by police in Lents Park that morning, and as is standard now a crowd formed to harass police at the crime scene.

PPB said during the on-scene investigation a crowd estimated to be over 100 people tore down crime-scene police tape and came into the work area.

A line of officers had to create a blockade on multiple sides of the scene to keep the crowd back. Police say officers were hit with sticks and full water bottles were thrown at them. A group of people grabbed an officer’s baton and tried to pull it away. Officers deployed OC (pepper) spray to stop the criminal behavior.

At least one police vehicle’s tires were flattened. As officers began to leave the scene, police say they were chased and had things thrown at them. Officers used smoke canisters in an attempt to help them leave, but people kept following them. A Rubber Ball Distraction Device was also used to allow officers to leave. No officers were injured. No arrests were made. Officers did not deploy chemical munitions.

During the Derek Chauvin trial there seems to be an agreement among the factions of the left to “center” yet again black voices. The “stop Asian hate” grift, probably not bound for long-term preeminence here anyway, was stood down. Despite anarchists’ advocacy for the homeless a new law working its way through city government allowing auto-camping in city and residential streets but amended from its original form which would have allowed homeless camps in parks, has barely stirred their interest one way or another, with its dull, depressing details about grey water, compost toilets and zoning laws. The mentally ill man shot by police after they answered calls about a man with a gun turned out to have been holding a replica. He was also turned out to be white. Antifa is consistent and resourceful enough to rally around it, but blacks as always are indifferent.

But right now it’s all about the blacks, with the Chauvin trial result nigh. An adverse decision could bring the angry black element and large crowds of early summer last to downtown and elsewhere. As if warming up for a post-verdict campaign, antifa is attacking multiple targets.

For no clear reason the Apple store downtown became the target of about a hundred black-bloc anarchists. At 1:52 in the video below you’ll hear what police later claimed were shots fired from a vehicle. At 3:42 you can see Apple’s security guards evacuating after the fire was put out.

They also returned to befoul the hapless Oregon Historical Society again. Despite the museum’s thoroughgoing wokeness for several years now, having “history” in your name and a history of engaging in history, which in Oregon used to mean celebrating pioneers and settlers, Lewis and Clark and the like. Now despite straining to retcon Oregon’s history as one of women of color and the like the museum, like the nation as a whole, is learning that feeding this beast does not content it

Not far from the church, the Oregon Historical Society was also damaged and had their windows smashed for the second time in a year. 

“Here we are again, it is depressing on many levels,” said Kerry Tymchuk, the museum’s director. He says after the last time, they reinforced doors and windows to help keep people out.

“We invested in windows that were impenetrable so they weren’t able to get in as they did last time and throw flares in to the building or steal things, which they did last time.” He said fixing the damage will cost several thousand dollars.

The museum and church will both remain open. And they both believe there has to be a better way to solve problems in our community other than violence.

“If history teaches us anything, it’s that vandalism and violence or not the answer,” said Tymchuk. “Talking in conversation, working together is the answer.” 

I’m not sure he knows his history. The anarchists made plain their reasoning:

But the most inexplicable target has to be First Christian Church nearby. I noticed they’d boarded up maybe a month ago, despite being a very pro-gay church focused on feeding the homeless. Today is Tuesday and the Chauvin verdict has just come down. A large caravan of police vehicles, federal and local, split freeway traffic heading east out of Portland with sirens blaring.

I’m confident antifa has actions planned regardless of the favorable verdict.

Oregon Lawfare Beat April 14: And the Walls Came Down

Nearing a year into our “racial reckoning” there is no prospect of political opposition to the progressive juggernaut in Portland, and police abolitionists continue advancing their primary goals of limiting police authority, tactics and contact with the public, especially blacks, as well as ending qualified immunity and union rights. The new trope of “reimagining” law and order (under any other name; “law and order” now falling out of usage in correlation with law and order falling out of practice) sounds like the sort of airy hyperbole to come out of an ad campaign, but is unfortunately as earnest and as stupid as it sounds.

To that end in Portland they’re bringing the police department and eventually its budget under the control of a newly created Community Safety Transition Director, and strengthening the fervently progressive District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who’s above all dedicated to alleviating the problem of “mass incarceration”, which is the Holy Grail the left sees within its grasp, the problem of too many blacks behind bars. With the media manufactured momentum of last summer still strong and the Derek Chauvin trial intensifying the general angst, police reformers and abolitionists continue making progress toward reducing the number of black men behind bars by any means, with disregard for the impact on public safety–“reimagined” public safety is lessened public safety, and the slogan seems almost designed to prepare us for that.

There also appears to be no opposition at the state level to this project. The Oregon Legislative Assembly, declaring an emergency, just passed out of committee a slate of police reforms that come like a strafing run on law and order: a law limiting riot control measures almost entirely to the judicious use of pepper spray and taking away the authority to declare an unlawful assembly (which should make this summer interesting); a law making it illegal for cops to not snitch on their partners; another limiting arbitration and bringing police discipline statewide under a newly created bureaucracy; one mandating a detailed statewide use-of-force publicly available database to include “threats to use force” and the race, gender, age, in that order, of presumed offenders, as well as names of all present; a law mandating police applicants be investigated for racism and pass through psychiatric evaluations and a “racial sympathy test” to that end; another, bigger database mandate placing in the public record all “complaints, allegations, charges, disciplinary proceedings” against public safety employees, and lesser humiliations.

Mike Schmidt enthused, citing George Floyd. He, unfortunately, still has to prosecute the occasional crime, and there are many contending for attention. He drew the automatic ire of the police abolitionist left when charging a persistent out-of-state antifa rioter with attempted murder on April 5 and he’s signed on to a plan bringing the ATF and FBI in to collaborate with federally deputized local police to investigate and prosecute gun crimes, some at the federal level. Federal deputation of local police was a controversial tactic used last summer when the city hamstrung police with rules on use-of -force (which will become state law if the bill above passes) that don’t apply to federal facilities or agents, and the District Attorney was quick to point out

Because the purpose of this collaboration is to interdict gun-related harm in our community, local law enforcement deputized under this new agreement will play no role in enforcing immigration law nor perform any crowd management duties at First Amendment demonstrations or events.

If it’s to work at all the effort works against the greater goal of keeping black men out of jail at all costs. But Schmidt at the very least still feels compelled to respect the potential wrath of the public (as opposed to “the community”, which is a disingenuous name for the activist/grifter community), maybe even a sense of decency, and long sentences resulting from federal charges are a sure-fire way to stem the bleeding. If he, Mike Schmidt, doesn’t have to prosecute them himself so much the better.

As the weather warms and antifa stirs–recently setting fires at local and federal targets–and with the prospect of increased arrests and charges against black criminal suspects, with the expected new state laws limiting riot control and police authority and the ever-present steady drumbeat of dead black suspects I fear we’re in for one long hot summer in Portland.