Behind the Bastards - Episode 2: Uprising: A Guide From Portland: We Do This Every Night

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

How did a bunch of angry strangers turn into a movement capable of braving unprecedented showers of tear gas and state violence? In this episode, we learn how a chaotic mass of protesters organized themselves into a unit capable of standing up to the worst violence the cops could throw at them.Link to Series: Uprising: A Guide From Portland Host: Robert EvansExecutive Producer: Sophie LichtermanWriters: Bea Lake, Donovan Smith, Elaine Kinchen, Garrison Davis, Robert EvansNarration: Bea Lake, Donovan Smith, Elaine Kinchen, Garrison Davis, Robert EvansEditor: Chris SzczechMusic: Crooked Ways by Propaganda Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Look for your children's eyes, and you will discover the true magic of a forest. Find a forest near you and start exploring at DiscoverTheForest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. This is Roxanne Gay, the host of the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the bad feminist podcast of your dreams. Each week I talk to an interesting person about feminism, race, writing in books and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics. We can't escape politics. Listen to the luminary original podcast, The Roxanne Gay Agenda,

every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Each week we're going to be recapping whatever housewife is currently airing. Lucky for Tamara, we're going to start... Oh my gosh. I know, with Orange County. Listen to 2Ts and a Pod on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the Portland Police Bureau. Do not interfere with the fence. If you tamper with the fence or fail to obey officer instructions,

you will be subject to use as a force to include impact munitions and riot control agents. Stay back. By the time protests kicked off in Portland, protesters in Minneapolis had burned down the third precinct and several other buildings. But as it turns out, Portland was actually the first city in the country to declare a riot over the protests after George Floyd's death. This has more to do with the way that Portland Police declare riots than any objective standard of unrest. And now, many months later, Portland Police still declare riots on a fairly regular basis. It seems that Portland is set on having the first and last riot of the 2020 protests. So what happened that turned relatively normal BLM actions in Portland, which were happening in every major American city, into a movement that still draws out crowds today?

I'm Robert Evans, and this is Uprising, a guide from Portland. My partners in this series are a team of local Portland journalists. Garrison Davis, Donovan Smith, Bee Lake, and Elaine Kenshin. We wrote this series together, and they'll be handling most of the narration for this episode. You'll be hearing more from me too, as we've embedded audio from several of the live streams I recorded during cop riots. Right now, I'm going to hand the mic off to Donovan Smith. He's reported on politics and social justice for a wide variety of local publications, and he helped produce a documentary on gentrification. Here's Donovan.

After the first night of quote-unquote rioting in Portland, a state of emergency was declared and a curfew was imposed from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. with the express interest of cracking down on mass gatherings of protesters. When asked if the curfew would be enforced if someone was, for example, to go grocery shopping, the mayor's office replied, quote, the city is not interested in citing people who are going about their business, causing no harm, and uninvolved in criminal conduct, end quote. But it didn't require property destruction or criminal conduct for the police to start attacking

and arresting protesters on Saturday, May 30th, even before the curfew. That Saturday, thousands gathered outside the Justice Center, which had to become tradition in Portland. People marched around downtown and occupied the street in front of the JC. The casual name given to the Justice Center. Police came out a few times throughout the day to try and get people off the street with mixed results. This culminated with police and riot gear teargassing the streets and city parks around the JC, while bashing people in the head with truncheons. All in broad daylight, hours before the curfew was set to begin.

And they are deploying extreme violence to do it. Look at this. Throughout downtown, police and white vans targeted the largest crowd of protesters they could find, launching tear gas and stun grenades into the crowd of people. Regular city traffic was engulfed in clouds of gas on streets which had not even been closed. Houses Portlanders sleeping in tents were woken by flashbangs, gas, and impact rounds. As the clock struck 8 p.m. after telling and gassing protesters for the better part of two hours, cops kettled protesters onto a bridge surrounding and arresting the entire crowd for being out past curfew. A total of 48 arrests were made that night.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, upon his return from visiting his sick mother, extended the curfew for yet another day. On Sunday, May 31, the largest crowd yet, 10,000 strong marched across the Burnside Bridge into downtown. As the marches approached the end of the bridge, cops were waiting on the other end blocking their path. Once the sheer size of the crowd became apparent, the police turned tail and ran, high telling it back to the Justice Center. The crowd followed them there, and a tense hours-long standoff followed. Eventually, the crowd thinned out enough that police were able to tear gas and flashbang grenade protesters into dispersing. That night was one of the most terrifying evenings of the entire uprising, with officers hanging off of riot vans and grenading passers-by, seemingly at random.

Mayor Wheeler extended the curfew for yet another day. At a press conference announcing his ascension, Wheeler doubled down on his law and order stance, this time with the help of Governor Kate Brown. I want to be very clear that there are open lines of communications between myself and the Governor personally, as well as between our offices. There is coordination with the Superintendent of State Police, as well as the leadership of the National Guard. I spoke to the Governor three or four times yesterday. I did make the request on all three of those occasions for support from the National Guard. The Governor had alternative strategies that she suggested, including deploying more state police resources. We subsequently asked for additional tools that could be used in the field that was agreed to by the Governor and supported.

Based on last night, however, I agree with what the U.S. Attorney has said, and I agree with what my colleagues in the Portland Police Bureau have just confirmed with me, which is we do need more resources. Come Monday, June 1st, there was a shift in Portland protests. Instead of meeting at the Justice Center, another crowd of thousands gathered on the east side of Portland across from the River downtown at an aptly named concert venue, Revolution Hall. After some speeches, the crowd began to march west toward downtown. The crowd near the fence were the line of riot cops behind the chain link. A young black woman at the head of the march asked an officer if the crowd could march to the JC. The police said no. Eventually, the huge march headed back to Revolution Hall and no tear gas was used. Now, you have to understand at this point, a lot of the crowd had just spent the last three days getting horribly tear gas beat up and chased by the police. The thought of doing a protest in March without being assaulted by the cops felt like a nice change compared to the last three nights.

But that all changed the next day, the day that would become infamously known as tear gas Tuesday. Tear gas Tuesday sucked. Well, I had a full asthma attack. I'd never been subjected to tear gas before. And so I saw a cloud of tear gas and I saw a man fall down in the cloud of tear gas and he was struggling to get up. And so I ran in and I kind of picked him up by his shirt and then grabbed him by his arm and pulled him out of there. And then I immediately had an asthma attack and my buddy picked me up and got us both out of there. That's Chris, a volunteer protest medic in tear gas Tuesday was actually his second night out. The brutality he witnessed is what got him to decide to dedicate his whole summer to helping people in the streets. I saw a girl get hit in the face with shrapnel and that was not OK.

And then everybody's getting tear gas and it was a mess. And that was the infamous tear gas Tuesday. And after that, I just kind of decided that I needed to start coming out with medical supplies because how that was handled, what people were doing to provide medicine in that moment wasn't up to a standard that I knew that I could provide. But let's take a step back. Tear gas Tuesday was a noteworthy shift for Portland protests for a multitude of reasons. It was the first day since riot night with no curfew, with city officials even publicly admitting to the curfew being ineffective now. And it was the first day that the protests noticeably began to splinter. Just like Monday, the day before, thousands marched from Revolution Hall toward the fence, which at this point surrounded several city blocks, including the Justice Center, the federal courthouse, and Chapman and Lowndesdale,

the two city parts which faced those buildings. Only this time, just half the crowd turned back to Rev Hall, with the other half set on chanting at the police behind the chain link fence. The Portland police issued repeated warnings over loudspeakers that protesters were not to touch the fence under threat of riot munitions. As might be predicted, the sanctity of PPV's sacred fence became an immediate source of ridicule, even as police followed through on their threats. And as members of the crowd dared to touch the fence, the PPV once again deployed an outrageous amount of tear gas. And it wasn't even the amount of tear gas that was fired off that night, but how they fired it. Several times, police rushed in multiple directions, all while firing off more tear gas, creating a massive cage of poison. Police are boxing and crowded on several sides and deploying munitions into the crowd.

Flashbanks and gas. See the anti-pashist flag here. Bought the gas. Two other things stick out from tear gas, too, sir. The first of which was just how many motorists driving through downtown were tear gas by Portland police. They're shooting them down on us from everywhere, from the fucking rooftops. Police firing on all sides, pumping gas into traffic, pumping gas into the crowd. Shooting gas. Look, there's fucking tear gas. There's fucking tear gas in the middle of traffic that was just fired from someone up on a rooftop into the middle of traffic.

Multiple times, people who are blinded by gas while driving panic and lost control of their vehicles nearly hit people as they drove into crowds. Protesters with water bottles and medical supplies rendered aid to drivers who had crashed into the curb. So here we have, look how many cars there are here. All of these people are about to get tear gas by the Portland Police Bureau. Oh boy, they just started arching them down at us from God knows where, maybe on the fucking roof. They're just coming down from the sky, people trying to traffic cone them, trying to kick them away, trying to stop them from gassing traffic. The other thing that sticks out is the crowd's resilience was growing. Protesters started adopting tactics seen in the Hong Kong of rising like placing traffic cones over tear gas canisters and pouring water through the top of the cone to get the burning crannister out. We see people actually very effectively deploying Hong Kong tactics here to stop these tear gas grenades from gassing both protesters and from gassing vehicles.

A chant that became popular in the weeks to come was walk, don't run. Reminding people in times of panic, often the safest way out is just by walking calmly. More experienced organizers are walking calmly through the crowd, putting hands on people and saying do not run, do not run. Because the thing that hurts people in situations like this is panic. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Scary, but it probably won't seriously harm you if you don't panic. And the police aren't going to take any steps to try to avoid a stampede. So the only way to avoid a stampede is again for the crowd to take care of itself. We have seen people get so much better at reforming the crowd after being gassed. That started to really improve on Sunday night. And look, most of the people are still here, still organized, still marching, still many thousands of people. This is the first time we've seen the best job of the crowd staying together and really showing commitment and endurance in the face of police brutality. So this has been a very important and a very impressive night from the activists and the citizens of Portland, Oregon.

Chris, who acquired a gas mask the very next day, sums up his feelings about tear gas Tuesday like this. It was such an odd response to see the police respond to a protest about police violence and brutality with just police violence and brutality. What's up, guys? I'm Rashad Bilal. And I am Troy Millings, and we are the host of the Earn Your Leisure podcast where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance. We hold court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in business, sport and entertainment. From DJ Khaled to Mark Cuban, Rick Ross and Shaquille O'Neal. I mean, our alumni list is expansive. Listen to them as our guests reveal their business models, hardships and triumphs in their respective fields. The knowledge is in depth and the questions are always delivered from your standpoint. We want to know what you want to know.

We talk to the legends of business, sports and entertainment about how they got their start and, most importantly, how they make their money. Earn Your Leisure is a college business class mixed with pop culture. Want to learn about the real estate game? Unclear as how the stock market works? We got you. Interested in starting a trucking company or a vending machine business? Not really sure about how taxes or credit work? We got it all covered. The Earn Your Leisure podcast is available now. Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I literally had to go like Thanos and I don't want to have to be the villain. But when I went and did the Donda thing, Yay returned. And everybody had to sit back and watch The Real Leader.

Check out Drink Champ's conversation with Yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. From Cavalry Audio comes the new true crime podcast, The Shadow Girls. I grew up near the banks of the Green River and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about the victims. He always liked to go in the woods. He was just to all of us kind of strange. Do you know how he feels about prostitutes? Listen to The Shadow Girls on the iHeart Radio App, on Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. After Tear Gas Tuesday, things in Portland started to fall into a pattern. During the day, there'd be massive peaceful marches starting from Revolution Hall led by a new group called Roe City Justice.

At night, about a thousand protesters would gather at the sacred fence, which now only surrounded the Justice Center and the adjacent federal buildings to inevitably get tear gas and attacked by police for quote, tapering with the fence. Photojournalists and photographer Mariah says some of her favorite moments of the protests were at the mass of marches organized by Roe City Justice in early June. I would say like in the early days, really is some stuff that really is memorable to me, especially with a lot of my favorite photos from this whole movement has come from the earlier days. There was a moment I want to say it was the Burnside Bridge when everyone was like laying down for eight minutes and 46 seconds. And I got some good pictures of that and it was just really great to capture. I think that the moment when Damien Lillard came out, you know, everyone like, you know, had like this love moment in this and I got it. And at the moment actually when he came out, I didn't even know he was out there. So I checked my photos later and I was like, oh snap.

Got him and stuff. Activist and live streamer Max Smith attended both the larger daytime protests on the east side and the night protests at the JC. Here he explains how he became a popular speaker at the Portland protests and the interesting effect of having both the daytime march and a nighttime action on the public. I want to say it was the second or the third that I actually got out in the streets doing the work with the security stuff and helping out with the larger marches on the east side. I have evolution hall things and all that. So I was kind of doing a playing a couple of roles over there with helping with the Guardian folks and doing some, you know, political education at the same time. And it kind of just came natural. I just start talking to people and people start listening to what I'm saying.

And on the night of the fifth, I got arrested downtown at the JC or near the around the area of the JC, at least I got arrested down there. And so that weekend, I ended up giving a speech at Irving Park. And that's kind of where things started. It ended up being like streamed on the news locally. So that's where things kind of started changing for me at that point. And can you talk to me about the night you were arrested? Yeah, as much detail as you're interested in going in. Yeah, that's fine.

It was just a basic arrest. I was actually out there with a couple of people. We had been going down a couple of nights to see what was going on at the Justice Center. Because, you know, I had been, you know, if you're just watching the news, all you see is, you know, it looks like one big march, right? Like it's one huge march. It starts in the daytime. All of a sudden it descends in two madness at night. But quickly I realized that there's multiple things that are going on if you leave your house, you know, off the TV.

There's a lot that's going on in the streets. So I started, you know, going out to see different things. And we were down at the J.C. And things got really gassy. It was one of the nights. So again, it was the first, like, you know, a few days of gassing. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And I had been down there before.

And this time I brought a couple different people that were like, you know, I'm trying to see it, but I'm scared. And I was like, just come with me. I'll show you what's going on. It's not that big of a deal. But we ended up catching up with some other people down there and kind of had like a little group. And there were a lot of, like, teenagers down there. So we were actually making sure a lot of people got out because there were cops everywhere, like circling and pulling people over and stopping people and arresting them. So we were like kind of.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark, and not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me.

About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think folks navigate their way out and then as it got late, there were a bunch of people that were suffering from tear gas and so myself and a medic and I have like a first day to training basic stuff. And so those first nights I was out there with like, you know, milk or the baking soda and water solutions and whatever else just helping folks out. And so we were following the groans of people, you know, coughing and being victims of tear gas and the cops just rolled up with like four cars and eight officers hopped out and I got snatched up. I just got snatched up. I got grabbed by the hair, got yanked to the ground, bruised my elbow, you know, had a crick in my neck for a few days but they arrested me. They drove me around in a squad car for like 15, 20 minutes. They picked up some other guy.

You know, they accused him of drawing on a window with a Sharpie or something and he's like, what? And they were like, you know, they were trying to charge me with a felony. All of our charges got dropped. No one got charged with anything. I got charged with obstructing the police. He got charged with something else. As Mack was inside the police car, he was also able to get a sneak peek of how the police were targeting people for arrest behind the scenes. I thought it was crazy because they had this like thing in their car, like this like a heads up display, like a HUD and it had like an aerial view of the downtown grid and it had like, it was able to track people. And I thought that was, it was like a call of duty display, like when you're like using like, you know, the helicopter or whatever. It was like that. Like you could see like the people and they were like, I represented like as lights kind of there was like a light on them. It was like a, it was like a black and white display. And you could see the things that are moving. But then like with people, it basically lit them up with like lights and circles.

It would circle us if we were in groups. And when the groups got small enough, they would like turn green and the cops would just to go and arrest people. The group of protesters gathered at the fence were quick to make a distinction between, quote, peaceful protests and nonviolent protests. While the massive Roe City Justice marches remain peaceful, the crowds at the JC would engage in nonviolent actions such as shaking, tearing down and cutting apart the chain link fence. Most of what people did at the JC was just standing in the street in parks while chanting demands and slogans. But it didn't require people to tamper with the fence or throw half drunk water bottles for the police to respond with force as this protestor can attest. I was downtown and it was back at the original fence. And I, you know, there was probably, I probably estimate like 500 people there and everyone was really spread out. And there was no police on the ground. It was raining that night and they had their floodlights like pointed at us. And one shot got fired from one of the, like the little balcony areas, the one that's farther to the right.

And it hit me in the leg. It was just one shot and it hit me at the, like the very top of my left thigh. And I was just standing there with a group of friends, like I had, there was a beach ball in the crowd that night. And it said, don't gas me bro. And I picked it up and I started riding on it. And one shot got fired and it hit me in the leg. And that was what I would consider to be at least like protest related my first encounter with the Portland Police Bureau. No one was doing anything. No one was, you know, pushing on the fence or knocking on it. And they just fired a shot into the crowd and it hit me. We croak it. Learning new skills is the mental equivalent of pumping iron.

Listen to Before Breakfast wherever you get your podcasts. Adoption of teens from foster care is a topic not enough people know about, and we're here to change that. I'm April Dignity, host of the new podcast, Navigating Adoption, presented by AdoptUS Kids. Each episode brings you compelling real life adoption stories told by the families that live them with commentary from experts. Visit adoptuskids.org slash podcast or subscribe to Navigating Adoption presented by AdoptUS Kids. And to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families and the Ad Council. You could, I don't know, start a podcast with Spreaker from iHeart and unleash your creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff you love

and maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your irritating bosses you quit and walk off into the sunset. Hey, I'm no settler. I'm an explorer. Spreaker.com. That's a S-B-R-E-A-K-E-R. Hustle on over today. Next, you're going to hear from Garrison Davis. He was just 17 when Portland's BLM protest started, and for weeks he was out virtually every night, filming some of the most intense police violence and posting some of the most viral videos of the entire uprising. Here's Garrison. Every night, the fence at the Justice Center seemed to grow larger.

The city doubled up some sections of the chain link and stacked pieces of fence on top of one another. Eventually, concrete barriers were added to make it harder to knock over the fence. The divides between protesters began to widen as well. Some of the more radical leftist BLM activists in Portland criticized Rose City Justice and their insistence on, quote, peaceful protest over direct action that might damage police property. Gregory McKelvie, vice chair of Oregon Dems Black Caucus and former organizer, pushed back on some of that criticism. Gregory was also organizing on a new front now. As protests gained steam, he was in the home stretch of leading a grassroots-style campaign for political newcomer Sarah Ionarone

to take down incumbent mayor Ted Wheeler. Many Portlanders felt Wheeler had failed on his promise to deliver fundamental change on issues of housing and police reform. Instead, Wheeler became a symbol of big money in politics, more of the same. Gregory's candidate, Ionarone, ran to the left of Wheeler, dubbing herself an, quote, everyday anti-fascist. So, you know, we had a situation where tens of thousands of people were marching every day, and if you're at those events, they're just beautiful. And yeah, they're way more liberal. They're way more moderate. But those people are being marched along, pun intended, towards a more radical place.

And, you know, Malcolm X said more eloquently than me that basically, you know, everything you know, there was a point where you didn't. And so these people are on their journey just as everybody else. And just because they're not anarchists yet does not make them agents of the state. And I really think that those protests are what effectively got us the 20 million defunded from the police. I mean, we had a moment where there were mass protests, and Damien Lillard was at the front of a protest that was encapsulating the entire city. Now, if you're wondering, yes, he is talking about that Damien Lillard. Five-time NBA All-Star and Portland Trailblazer superstar point guard Damien Lillard. Yeah, he was out there too.

Yeah, they weren't burning stuff down. And also some of their rhetoric was not, you know, as far left as maybe I would like or anything. Certainly that some people at the Justice Center would like. But I actually do think those protests were more effective and they certainly have far more support from the broad public. And we were getting people at these protests who had never protest before. Like, I don't think the Justice Center protests should have stopped and I don't think that they're ineffective per se. But I think they're certainly much more effective if in tandem there's also the other protests going on. So if I'm at home watching like Channel 268 or 12, which I had to watch a lot for my job, they're not making a difference between which protesters or which protesters.

They're just saying, protesters marched and Damien Lillard joined them. Later in the night, protesters were gassed and beaten. That way of explaining things is really helpful for all the protesters because they see that protest with Damien Lillard and they're like, oh, I support this. And then they see what they think is the same people getting gassed that night and they're like, no, no, no, no, no. And that helps us move the conversation towards defunding. Once those massive protests go away and we only have protests that Damien Lillard is never going to be seen at. Now they have no support from the broad public. Early June is also when most of Portland's 2020 police reforms were achieved under large pressure both locally and from the nationwide BLM movement.

The Portland Public Schools Superintendent decided to end the school resource officer program, opting instead for an increased spending on social workers, counselors, and culturally specific mentors for students. Also, a historically racist Portland police unit was also disbanded. Here's more on that from Gregory. We got rid of that specialty unit. We defunded 20 something million dollars from the police, which sounds like a lot, but we were defunding from a lot of different bureaus because of the pandemic and the budget shortfall in general. Alongside those small reforms in early June, Portland also saw some negative change on the road to police accountability. The officers responding to protests were told they were allowed to cover both their name tag and badge number. Amid fears officers would be, quote, doxxed. Lawyer Alan Kessler explains this in greater detail.

So there's a directive that says that the police shall display their name on their uniform unless they get special dispensation from their commander to not do it. And the police are supposed to give you a business card if you ask. They're supposed to identify themselves and they're supposed to give you a business card which has their name and badge number on it. It's not supposed to be a secret police force. And there are several directives that are kind of about that interaction with the public. It turns out that very early in the protests, there was an email that was sent out that told police that it's OK for them to cover their badge and then replace it with their... It's called their personnel number or PERNER, spelled either P-R-N-R or P-E-R-N-R. And it's a weird choice.

The only thing it was used for before that was payroll. It's in their accounting system. Oh, and also historically it's been used on some internal investigations of police officers alike in internal review reports. But the reason they picked it, like, I kind of guess this at the time, but it was too silly to be true, was there is a... There aren't a ton of things that are exempt from the public records law in Oregon. But one thing that is exempt is numbers on an ID badge. So somebody thought this through. Somebody who is really familiar with the public records law thought this through and said, OK,

if we use the number from the ID badge as the cop's badge number, then if anybody asks for the list, we'll say, no, those are secret numbers that are... We have to keep them secret for the cop's protection. Which is nuts because they're wearing it out in public on their chest. But... There's like no way to trace it back in a digital format. No way for us to, for sure. I assume they have some way.

The early marches had been absolutely enormous, but almost everyone there fell into the simple category of protester. There were some very overworked medics, but Portland lacked the sheer variety of specialties among activists that allowed Hong Kong's protest movement to persist for so long. That changed over the first few weeks of the uprising, as people who never thought of themselves as particularly radical fell into new roles. There were no longer just street medics, but shield-bearing frontliners, people armed with traffic cones and water to douse tear gas, other activists provided food and equipment, and a handful of Portlanders began learning the trade of the conflict journalist, while Portland's professional press got used to packing body armor alongside their camera and notebook. As in any mass movement, there was bound to be disagreements in infighting. People had differing opinions on everything from looting to dumpster fires, to how much fence shaking was acceptable,

and the usefulness of large marches that stayed completely peaceful. Despite those differences, people did keep coming out, day after day, night after night, for the entire first half of June. Some of those people are still coming out even now. Yeah, I was kind of me personally expecting just for people just to be protesting a week, not much, and then quote-unquote back to normal life. Yeah, and then it's been now five months at it. I kept going with it because I just felt really strongly to keep going, especially with what I was doing as for photographing at all. I just had this passion that I was like, okay, I gotta keep going, so yeah, I haven't stopped. As June wore on, the number of people out at Nightly Demonstrations began to drop.

Crowds of thousands became crowds of hundreds. A certain mania took over the increasingly hardened core of the Portland BLM movement, who seemed to feel the need to confront police every single night without pause. It exhausted many protesters and journalists. Koska describes the feeling well. Yeah, I mean, it was every night and it was nonstop. And I remember once when they had the double fences up in front of the Justice Center, I remember some people walking away from it and they were telling me that the protest was canceled.

And I said, there's no such thing as canceling this. To me, I even said it on one of my videos and it probably sounds kind of cheesy, but this feels like the energy for this rebellion is coming from some unknown place. I said it felt almost supernatural because it was pushing people beyond their human limits. For me, I'm not the kind of person that will interrupt my sleep schedule for almost anything, but I didn't really sleep or eat or drink as you're supposed to for almost two months because I was so wrapped up in what was happening. And then I didn't know that for a while I didn't know that other cities were still protesting for a long time because I didn't even have time to check the news because it would take me some time older.

It takes me longer to recover from that. So the whole, you know, I would be recovering the whole time not protesting while I was not protesting. I'd be recovering from protesting. That's pretty much all I did for almost two months. Looking back on the early days of the uprising, you can see all the little things that happened in order to transform this into more than just a regular protest. Every day, the brutality from the previous night rekindled people's desire for change. Repeated tear gasings forced the crowd to get good at reforming after being dispersed, as the days turned into weeks, protesters started mirroring Hong Kong tactics more and more.

Established activist groups provided support for new activists with new ideas. On June 17th, inspired by Seattle's Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Portland protesters announced plans for an autonomous zone of their own. This AZ was limited to a single city block in front of Mayor Ted Wheeler's luxury condo, where protesters set up tents, ate pizza, and played dance music late into the night. The Portland police ousted the occupation early the following morning, but protesters were clearly learning valuable lessons. Drinks, pizza, medical support, and a speaker system arrived within the first hour of the occupation.

Barricades went up soon after, followed by the arrival of the Autonomous Zone's very own porta-potty. By the time the police swept through in the early morning, a surprising amount of infrastructure had been set down in a very short amount of time. That action ultimately failed, but as protests continued through the city, infrastructure would spring up again and again. Throughout the first half of June, a framework was put in place that would transform Portland's Black Lives Matter protests into a movement that could hold on and dig in for more than half a year.

Some heroes unsung and some monsters get monuments built for them, but ain't be all a little bit of monster, we croak it. Man, your heroes are worthless and man can show tribe, but only God gives purpose, you croak it. I'm John Gonzalez, the host of SI's new podcast, Sports Illustrated Weekly. Sports Illustrated has delivered some of the best storytelling in sports for 70 years, and now that continues on our shelf. Each week, we'll dive deep into the best stories from around the sports world.

Sports Illustrated Weekly is available every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe now. The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls. You know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is a podcast about deception, greed, and forgery in the art world. I just walked in and saw this bright red painting presuming to be a Rothko.

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