Portland Police Chief Frank Clark said Monday he has reached out to two protest organizers and wants to meet with them to discuss their concerns about police violence.<\/b>
\nPortland Police Chief Frank Clark said Monday he is offering to meet with two organizers of demonstrations that brought hundreds of people into the streets over the weekend protesting institutional racism and violence by police.
Also Monday, Portland\u2019s City Council passed a resolution condemning the recent killings of unarmed black men in other states and \u201call forms of racism and police brutality.\u201d The resolution says city leaders pledge to protect the rights of all people and commits to \u201ccalling out hate and discrimination when we see it.\u201d
Demonstrators marched and chanted through downtown Portland Friday and a large group assembled in front of the police station Sunday evening and demanded to speak with Clark about their concerns over racial bias in policing, although the group left without hearing from the chief.
Clark said he reached out on Monday to activists Hamdia Ahmed and David Thete, who organized marches on Friday and on Sunday. Clark said Thete eventually spoke with city manager Jon Jennings.
Thete has called for another demonstration Monday evening at 7 p.m. starting at the corner of India and Commercial streets. Ahmed is organizing another march Wednesday afternoon.
It was not clear Monday when, or if, the organizers would meet with Clark.
\u201cMy hope was to speak to both of them proceeding the event so we can have some level of conversation, communication that\u2019s not in an atmosphere that\u2019s polarized, emotionally charged,\u201d Clark said during a brief interview Monday afternoon. \u201cWe want to know what their concerns are. We want to work with them and work through things to have a better understanding.\u201d
Clark\u2019s outreach to organizers on Monday came after he did not meet with demonstrators on Sunday outside the police station. Instead, Lt. Robert Doherty addressed the crowd from a staircase, telling them the department shared the goal of keeping people safe.
Doherty asked protesters to disperse for public safety during the coronavirus pandemic. He also asked that they would agree to disperse after Clark spoke, but they refused, and fanned out to neighboring intersections, where they formed human chains and lay on the pavement to block traffic.
Clark did not say whether officers would arrest protests en-masse, as they did in 2016 after Black Lives Matter protesters blocked traffic on Commercial Street on a busy Friday night amidst the bustle of the Old Port. Police arrested 18 people, but the charges were later dropped after a disputed restorative justice meeting fell apart before it could begin.
That demonstration was sparked by the police killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile, outside St. Paul, Minnesota. Castile\u2019s death was captured on a live video taken by his girlfriend, who streamed on Facebook the traffic stop that preceded her boyfriend\u2019s death.
Protests have spread to cities across the country in the past week in response to the death of George Floyd, who also was black, after a white Minneapolis police officer pinned Floyd to the ground by pressing his knee into Floyd\u2019s neck for nearly 9 minutes.
In other cities over the weekend, some police chiefs and sheriffs have embraced protesters and marched with them in solidarity, while other departments, facing severe damage and looting, have resorted to riot-control tactics, using armored vehicles and less-lethal weapons to try to get people to disperse.
No one has been injured or arrested in demonstrations held in downtown Portland since Friday, although protesters have blocked streets and intersections. While blocking traffic is a crime, it\u2019s unclear what consequences the demonstrators will face. The city is largely still shutdown from social distancing protocols put in place to combat the coronavirus.
\u201cThe difficulty has come in the groups moving and blocking various intersections,\u201d Clark said. \u201cWhile those are potential crimes and could lead to arrests under a particular set of circumstances, what we\u2019ve been trying to do is facilitate that (expression of free speech). If people are committing crimes and breaking the law in terms of destruction of property or acts of violence, I expect officers would take appropriate actions.\u201d
Clark said the demonstrations and the police response here is in contrast to other cities, where protests have evolved into fluid, violent encounters, where demonstrators\u2019 rage over violent police tactics have mixed with looters and anarchists who have smashed windows, burglarized businesses and burned buildings and police vehicles.
\u201cWe see our role in Portland is to facilitate these protesters and to provide them a safe ability to express their First Amendment rights, hopefully in a lawful and peaceful way,\u201d Clark said.
But Clark only broadly addressed the conduct of police elsewhere, where officers in riot gear have used harsh tactics to disperse crowds. Multiple large cities across the country have called in the National Guard to restore order, and are imposing curfews.
In some cases, the media have been targeted by officers in riot gear wielding less lethal-weapons, including pepper filled rounds and rubber bullets. Other demonstrators have been trampled by police on horseback, or had police beat and arrest them apparently without warning. In Louisville, police said gunfire erupted at one demonstration and they returned fire; one man was shot and killed, but it\u2019s still unclear who fired the fatal round.
For years, activists in Portland have joined in solidarity and demonstrated against the killing of unarmed people across the country, starting after the 2012 shooting death of Michael Brown, a black teenager from Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer. The activism and demonstrations that followed Brown\u2019s death spawned the Black Lives Matter movement, a broad, loosely organized coalition of anti-racists who demand that police stop killing their friends and relatives.
Since then, protests have erupted across cities following incidents of police violence against black people, especially in cases where the deaths were caught on video, sometimes contradicting the police version of events.
The latest spate of killings include the February shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery,25, who was chased down by a father and son, Gregory and Travis McMichael in a suburban neighborhood in Brunswick, George after they suspected he was responsible for a burglary at a home under construction.
Although Aubrey\u2019s death occurred months ago, video of the shooting emerged only in April, taken by a man who was following behind Aubrey as he jogged. The McMichaels now face murder charges, and the man who took the video, William \u201cRoddie\u201d Bryan Jr., faces a felony murder charge.
Then in March, Louisville, Kentucky police officers executing a no-knock search warrant shot and killed Breonna Taylor as she lay in bed. Taylor\u2019s boyfriend has said he did not know the people barging into his home were police, and after he opened fire on them, officers shot back, killing Taylor, a paramedic.
Tension over police violence erupted after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was caught on a bystander\u2019s video kneeling on the neck of Floyd,46, who they had taken into custody. Police said he matched the description of someone who passed a counterfeit $20 bill inside a convenience store.
Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd\u2019s neck for nearly 9 minutes as Floyd begged for relief, said he could not breath and called out for his mother. Chauvin did not let up, and Floyd slowly lost consciousness and became unresponsive. When paramedics arrived, they found Floyd had no pulse, and he was pronounced dead a short time later at a nearby hospital.
In many communities across the country and especially during the post-slavery Jim Crow era, police embodied the use of state power to reinforce a racial hierarchy and oppress non-white citizens. Although Maine does not have a deep history of Jim Crow-era oppression, black people in Maine still see disparate treatment by police, the courts and in schools, according to the ACLU of Maine.
Black children in Maine face more discipline, expulsions, suspensions and arrests at school than their white peers. Black residents have also documented ill treatment by private businesses, and in March, a 38-year-old Biddeford man was found guilty on federal hate-crime charges for his role in two unprovoked attacks on black men in Portland and Biddeford.
Most recently, black Mainers suffer a far greater impact from the COVID-19 pandemic than white people, echoing a national trend, despite Maine\u2019s relatively small non-white population.
Asked last week how he could ask non-white Portland residents to trust police when officers across the country continue to kill citizens, Clark said he was disappointed that people paint with a broad brush, but understood why they might feel that way.
\u201cHow we treat people, and how other officers across the country treat people will dictate how folks perceive us as a profession broadly,\u201d Clark said Friday. \u201d I think we have to keep being open. We have to keep being transparent. We are concerned. We are part of the community. We don\u2019t want to be seen as a different force.\u201d
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