The Portland (Oregon) Police Bureau, who behavior during protests was particularly heinous, including collusion with right wing terrorists is in the news again, this time for including Proud Boys memes in their training material.
And you were wondering if the PPB was one of the most corrupt and brutal police departments in the nation?
A Portland Police Bureau training presentation on protests ended with a PowerPoint slide listing a prayer for a “dirty hippy” and the promise to send “my humble servants” with hats and bats to “christen” their “heads with hickory” accompanied by a photo of a helmeted officer raising his arm to a woman.
The last of the 110 slides in the presentation showed the “Prayer of the Alt Knight | Based Stickman” meme. “Based Stickman” refers to Kyle Chapman, the founder of a group called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights that formed as the “tactical defense arm” of the Proud Boys, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. He’s a far-right Trump supporter and street brawler who earned the nickname “Based Stickman” after a video showed him hitting an antifascist activist with a wooden sign post in Berkeley in 2017.
“I am disgusted that this offensive content was added to a training presentation for our police officers,” Mayor Ted Wheeler, who serves as police commissioner, said in a statement Friday. “As soon as I was made aware of the incident, I reached out to Chief (Chuck) Lovell, who shared my deep concern and assured me that a thorough and complete investigation was underway.”
I believe that Wheeler, who ran a campaign largely based on "Support the Police" is disgusted ……… not.
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The mayor said it’s unclear who drafted or added the slide to the training material or if it was used in training. An initial investigation suggests it may have been created in 2018, “though further investigation is needed to confirm,” according to the mayor’s office.
An initial inquiry also suggests the training material was intended for multiple agencies that provide officers to serve as members of the bureau’s Rapid Response or Mobile Response crowd control teams.
The mayor said the training slide wasn’t made public earlier “to protect the integrity” of the early part of the police internal inquiry.
Attorney Juan Chavez, one of the lawyers representing Don’t Shoot Portland, said the slide “is only coming to light because plaintiffs stood up to the City and sued them.”
Yes, Wheeler is just as dedicated to getting to the bottom of this and making the information public as Rahm Emanuel was in finding justice for Laquan McDonald.
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Police Chief Chuck Lovell said in a statement: “The message on the training presentation slide was contrary to PPB’s values and what we are trying to achieve as an organization.’’
The chief said the content and message in the slide “is not representative of the Portland Police Bureau and it is disappointing to all of us who work so hard to earn the community’s trust.’’
No, the problem is that it IS representative of the Portland Police Bureau.
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A further slide says negotiated management to de-escalate confrontations “does not work with anarchists or radical groups who refused to negotiate with police” and “does not work for a spontaneous public disorder/riot.”
Who knew that PPB stood for Proudboy Police Bureau?
The PPB is not an extraordinary outlier in terms of racism, right wing infiltration, and brutality, and that is depressing, because it means they are a pretty typical big city department.
Policing in the United States is profoundly broken.
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