Results of a survey taken after the Portland riots of 2020 and 2021 have just been tallied by a cop-watch organization and the conclusion is that un-woke cops – not actual rioters, protesters, rabid communists, and looters – are the reason they were so bad. Mayor Ted Wheeler says he’ll treat the survey seriously and the city council will consider adopting its suggestions.
Yeah, about that survey …
KOIN TV reports that the suggestions come, in part, from a survey by community activists in a cop-watch group called “Portland United Against Hate.” Activists “used a crowdsourcing tool called “ReportHatePDX to gather ‘first-hand testimonials from citizens engaged in First Amendment activities over the summer of 2020.’”
Among the more alarming suggestions was to “assess” the current crop of cops and any new hires for “harmful biases.” The report asserts, “This bias assessment procedure should go beyond what is already available through the Employee Information System. It is essential that PPB have a clear, consistent, zero-tolerance policy to detect and address harmful biases held by members of the force.”
Considering that everyone who doesn’t agree with these activists is considered a “fascist,” one can only imagine what would pass for mere “harmful bias.” Maybe using the wrong pronouns could get a cop fired? Who knows? What day is it?
Activists also want police to undergo critical race training to stamp out real or perceived biases.
Here are a few of the other suggestions that the activists had for wrangling those pesky, riot-inducing cops:
- Making police less scary looking by getting rid of riot gear, which conveniently also makes cops more vulnerable to injury
- Outlawing the use of CS gas for crowd control and “indiscriminate use” of tear gas and other less-than-lethal munitions
- Halting crowd control when “few individual actors” – rioters – are making trouble
- Recognizing that responding to a riot is itself an “escalating act.”
Now back to that survey’s… ahem… methodology, as it were.
You’ve got to give the survey-takers a few points for honesty. They admit that they treated some responses differently than others.
The deadline to complete the survey was publicly stated as September 14th at 5pm, but we neglected to set the survey to automatically close when that time came, and as a result, people were able to submit responses after the deadline had passed.
Prior to the 5pm deadline [10:45 am] Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty posted on Twitter to encourage her followers to submit their feedback …
They provided a photo of the tweet, sans the time stamp.
Here’s the live tweet. Notice there’s no deadline mentioned for the survey.
Citizen Review Committee's Crowd Control & Use of Force Workgroup wants your input if you experienced or witnessed the exercise of crowd control tactics by the PPB at any event in the last three years, but especially within the last few months: https://t.co/ugKVhmya8i
— Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty (@JoAnnPDX) September 14, 2020
Hardesty’s tweet linked to a Mailchimp notice for a September 16, 2020, Zoom meeting. There was no mention of a deadline for the survey on that link.
The cop-watch group says that at the deadline for the unscientific, crowdsourced survey received 223 responses.
And then reporter and author Andy Ngo amplified Hardesty’s tweet and the numbers grew to 1,324 responses. The report claims that put the group “in the tough position of deciding whether to consider survey responses that were submitted after the deadline.” So they separated the responses and only considered the results that came in before Ngo’s tweet as legitimate.
The self-selected survey-takers, who engaged in protests and riots, seem convinced that if police hadn’t been doing police-y things that everything would have been fine.
By their lights, if only cops hadn’t existed, the Apple store wouldn’t have been set on fire – twice. Louis Vuitton wouldn’t have been looted, and the Mark O. Hatfield federal courthouse would have sat pristine and unmolested.
There wouldn’t have been a shootout on the downtown streets and the assassination of Trump voter Aaron “Jay” Danielson would not have taken place.
If not for cops’ bad behavior, a makeshift church set up to feed the homeless would still be ministering to the needy.
Portland’s downtown core area, as well as other parts of town hit by protesters and rioters, has reeled from the rioting and fear associated with going downtown. At one point, business in the riot area was down 80%. That must be the cops’ fault too.
Portland continues to play footsie with the violent Leftist antifa and BLM gangs while ignoring the basic rights of other citizens and equal treatment under the law. But you wouldn’t know it based on a survey that’s about as reliable as a Twitter poll or survey of Facebook friends.
And that’s exactly the way they want it.
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