The press conference
The Portland powers-that-be held a Zoom press conference today to talk about "gun violence." It went on for a little over an hour. The mayor, Dud Wheeler, was the main talking head, but on the call with him were Chief Chuck, the Boy Wonder D.A., and the U.S. attorney, What's-His-Name.
The main focus of this confab was the Normandale Park shootout from Saturday night, in which a right-wing nut with a handgun shot and killed a left-wing protester, wounded several others, and then was shot and seriously wounded by a left-wing nut with what was originally rumored to be a rifle but was apparently a handgun. Today the cops finally confirmed the identity of the right-wing murder suspect. As far as I can tell, the identity of the shooter on the other side is being kept under wraps officially, but is now publicly known.
Anyway, I missed the first half of the Zoom deal, but the Q-and-A I did catch was almost exclusively reporters giving the cops crap for withholding information. The shootout happened at 8 p.m. on Saturday, and there we were late Tuesday morning hearing from the cops for the first time who is suspected of taking someone's life. In any other city, the reporters were saying, this information would have been available a lot sooner.
Damn right it would have been.
Wheeler and the Chief did most of the smoke-blowing in response. They gave the same non-answers over and over. Their big pitch was that the cops don't give out information until they're sure it's correct. Which is both false as a factual matter, and not relevant to this case. The murder suspect had been in the hospital for more than 60 hours as of the press conference, and the police had known his identity with certainty since shortly after the killing happened.
When you watch media events like today's, you realize how hopelessly screwed Portland is with the elected and appointed officials we have running the place. They are all talk, and no meaningful action.
The other thing I noticed was how bad Wheeler looks. The job that he's flunking out of has robbed him of his boyish charm, that's for sure.
This killing was an exception to most of the other murders in town- which sadly usually go unsolved and have a high incidence of gang/drug involvement. I don't know what happened to lead to this shootout, but letting protesters come armed to a public park is asking for trouble. I'm not letting the perp off the hook, murder is murder- but there might have been a different outcome if not faced with people with guns being extremely agitated.
ReplyDeleteAnd just as important, letting one unruly group be the darlings of the town for months on end, while telling everybody else to stay at home and obey, did not exactly go well with the rest of the city dwellers. Good luck getting the genie back in the bottle. Do we even know its' preferred pronouns?
The public has a right to assemble in a public park. There is no right to kill them for it. Dingbat could move if he didn't like the neighborhood.
ReplyDeleteThere is no right to kill anybody. But don't get too huffy defending these protesters. They are not just assembling in a park. They make a lot of noise, block traffic, and usually end the night with destruction of other people's property.
DeleteI am sure there are many, many other neighbors of that park who have had enough of the crap as well. They're just not homicidal maniacs.
Not all protesters are hooligans. I don't know what kind of crowd this was. If they had people peacefully directing traffic, that doesn't sound like a group of destructive hooligans to me. Perhaps you know otherwise?
DeleteWell what I fear now is that “The group that shall not be named” will essentially become untouchable due to this incident. Not trying to downplay what happened, but like Ralph said they were already essentially free to do what they wanted with barely a peep from city leaders. Now they will have the sympathy factor going for them, as well as the already present solidarity of many because you know.......they are against white supremacy and stuff.
ReplyDeleteHeck even my own wife seems to support them, but it is easy to say that from the comfort of LO.