Portland Police Chief Danielle Outlaw is deeply dangerous, and every member of this community should call for her immediate resignation. If she won’t quit, the Mayor should fire her.
To be clear, I don’t think either is remotely likely to happen, given the Mayor’s continued support for deploying aggressive tactics, as well as chemical and ballistic weapons, against antifascists. But Outlaw has to go. Just a few reasons:
- She seems to delight in telling antifascists that Portland police “kicked your butt,” while calling those who spoke up about the fact that PORTLAND POLICE ALMOST KILLED SOMEONE “whine[rs]” for having the audacity to challenge her. And note her framing here: she is explicitly saying that the police were there to defend and support white supremacists against antifascists;
- She has claimed that antifascist demonstrators had guns on August 4th, without evidence and despite multiple eyewitnesses reporting that they saw no antifascists toting guns;
- She made the final decision to sweep demonstrators from the Occupy ICE encampment without seeking the Mayor’s approval — that is, she made a unilateral decision to deploy a heavy-handed response against demonstrators who bravely stood up to the federal government’s deportation machine;
- On a similar note, she refused to defend Oregon’s sanctuary law as it’s under right-wing attack, even as weak as that law is;
- She and her spokespeople have falsely claimed that antifascists attacked police on August 4th, which is why the cops decided to start attacking a crowd, a lie which even the Oregonian has debunked;
- Her spokesperson has falsely claimed that antifascists planted weapons among the alt-right crowd on August 4th as a way to explain why the only weapons the police confiscated were covered with Confederate flags and images of Pepe the Frog. Seriously, that doesn’t even pass the smell test;
Speaking as someone who’s been attacked by pepper balls, stun grenades, LRADs, and tear gas a least a half-dozen times in the last few years — and watched comrades get beaten, grievously wounded, arrested, kettled, and harassed — I know perfectly well that the top cop in Portland is never going to be some paragon of antifascism. I mean, they’re a cop, after all. But why do we have someone who DELIGHTS in this sort of pro-right-wing bullshit, and heads over to Lars Larson’s show to celebrate it?
