This situation in Portland is getting utterly ridiculous.
I remember years ago, I was helping a younger member of the family shoot a student documentary for school around the time of the Occupy protests. It was such a pitiful sight watching these people protesting and not even really knowing why.
Eventually, though, people need to understand that there is only so far throwing things and destroying property will take you.
“Several dozen” additional federal officers will deploy to Portland, Oregon, according to local reports, with agents looking to expand the scope of the Portland offensive and investigate groups organizing and supplying the nightly riots taking place in the several blocks surrounding the city’s federal courthouse.
Portland’s public radio station also suggests that officers are looking to move beyond non-lethal forms of crowd control, but the outlet cites only unnamed federal law enforcement sources on the issue.
Violence in the area surrounding Portland’s federal courthouse has ramped up in recent days after the Trump administration announced that an elite unit of the Customs and Border Patrol would be assigned to protect federal property under attack in the city.
Although the city experiences daily, largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in the same vicinity, at night, after those protests disperse, more aggressive groups appear to confront federal officers protecting the courthouse, setting fires, tossing incendiary devices, and staging attacks on the chain-link fence surrounding and protecting the federal property.
Sunday night, amid some of the worst violence the city has seen in the 60-day unrest, Portland police officers reportedly found a bag, potentially left for rioters, containing improvised explosive devices and several loaded rifle magazines, per ABC News.
“The discovery came just hours after two people were arrested following reports that a shot was fired in the same park,” the outlet reported. “Officers responded just before 7:30 p.m. A person believed to be the gunshot victim arrived later at a hospital via a private vehicle with non-life-threatening injuries, police said.”
Officers did not explicitly say whether the weapons or the shooting incident were connected to the riots.