WARNING! VIOLENT CONTENT: Literal Battle Zones Are Erupting All Over America

Portland police said their response to the assault was “complicated by a hostile group.” (source)

Shockingly, only one person has been charged in the attack, 25-year-old Marquise Love.

It’s important to note that Portland’s new district attorney, Mike Schmidt, has refused to prosecute protesters that commit criminal acts. The New York Times reports that since he took office on August 1 of this year, he has dismissed charges against half of the more than 600 people who have been arrested for crimes like interfering with the police, disorderly conduct and trespassing. Charges that involve assaulting officers will “require closer scrutiny, with prosecutors taking into account in filing charges whether the police fired tear gas into crowds.”

Unsurprisingly, local law enforcement believes that Schmidt’s policies are making matters worse.

Mr. Schmidt said Portland police leaders told him that they were concerned the directive would lead to more police injuries, though he said nothing prevented officers from making lawful arrests they deemed necessary. (The Portland police chief, Chuck Lovell, said the force “will continue to do the job the community expects of us.”)

The sheriff, Mike Reese, warned Mr. Schmidt in an email that some protesters were bent on “starting fires, damaging property and assaulting police, community members,” adding, “They may feel even more emboldened if there is a public statement that appears to minimize their activities.” In response to one of the sheriff’s concerns, Mr. Schmidt said he revised the policy to greenlight prosecutions for rioting in cases where a defendant was accused of serious offenses.

The Oregon State Police also took a parting shot at Mr. Schmidt as troopers pulled back after a two-week deployment at the protests this month, saying they preferred to put resources in “counties where prosecution of criminal conduct is still a priority.” (source)

The violence in Portland shows no sign of relenting.

Seattle, Washington

Seattle has been the site of some of the most destructive and violent riots in the country – and considering everything I’ve just written about – that’s saying a lot. Riots began back in May when George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis.

A group of protestors took over a six-block area near the Capitol in Seattle, initially naming it the CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) and then changing the name of the area to CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupy Protest) – a move that some have considered extremely meaningful. Riots have taken place on a regular basis and the hands of responders have been tied by the local government.

Initially, the local government in Seattle agreed to slash the police budget by 50% in response to the riots protests, but interestingly, most of the politicians have walked back their initial statements.

In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, and widespread police brutality and anti-racist protests, a veto-proof majority of council members voiced their support for defunding the police, slashing 50% of the department’s budget.

But since then, they’ve faced a series of logistical roadblocks and clashed with other city leaders, and ultimately all but one of them have walked back their statements.

The council instead voted for a much smaller round of cuts, including reducing the salaries of Carmen Best, who is Seattle’s chief of police, and members of her command staff as well as trimming about 100 of the department’s 1,400 police officers. (source)

Two days ago, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan vetoed the cuts, but this didn’t stop Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best from announcing her immediate retirement. It’s possible that part of the reason Mayor Durkan changed her tune is, hypocritically, that hundreds of angry protesters arrived to protest in her own neighborhood.

That march prompted the mayor to ask the City Council to investigate Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who took part in the June demonstration. Because Durkan’s address hasn’t been publicly disclosed due to her background as a former U.S. attorney, she said the march was organized with a “reckless disregard of the safety of (her) family and children.” (source)

At the time of publication, protests and riots have been ongoing in Seattle for 87 days.

Chicago, Illinois

Chicago has long been the site of carnage and gang violence, but things have escalated to an entirely different level. On August 10th, an upscale shopping district was pillaged after this shooting occurred.

Hundreds of people swept through the Magnificent Mile and other parts of downtown Chicago early Monday, smashing windows, looting stores and confronting police after officers shot a suspect in Englewood hours earlier.

The mayhem marked the second time since late May that the city’s upscale shopping district has been targeted by looters amid unrest, reigniting the debate over policing as city leaders continued to point fingers and downtown again was shut down overnight heading to Tuesday. (source)

The response sounds positively medieval – Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot locked down the city by raising drawbridges to prevent looters from accessing the area. The move has been deeply criticized.

Over the last week, for the second time in three months, Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered most of the bridges up at night to limit access to the Loop, Gold Coast and surrounding areas after an outbreak of property destruction and unrest.

The move was among a number of measures the mayor announced to protect businesses and reassure residents. But it was the image of the bridges being raised that offered the clearest symbol of Chicago’s divisions.

In a time of crisis, in one of the most racially and economically segregated places in the country, the bridges connecting north and south and linking east and west — sides of town that serve as proxies for wealth versus disinvestment — were made uncrossable, like drawbridges over a castle moat.

Longtime Chicagoans say they can’t remember any other time the bridges were raised in the name of crime prevention or public safety. “You’re basically saying you’re protecting one part of the city from another part,” veteran political strategist Delmarie Cobb said. (source)

The most enlightening thing about the loot-fest in Chicago, however, is the justification. According to a Black Lives Matter activist and organizer, Ariel Atkins, it was just “reparations.” Atkins believes that anything the looters wish to damage or steal is owed to them. She made the radical statement at a solidarity rally in front of a Chicago police station, where people were gathered to support those who had been arrested.

“I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci’s or a Macy’s or a Nike because that makes sure that that person eats. That makes sure that that person has clothes,” Ariel Atkins said at a rally outside the South Loop police station Monday, local outlets reported.

“That’s a reparation,” Atkins said. “Anything they want to take, take it because these businesses have insurance.” (source)

At a time when more people than ever in the United States were willing to get on board and protest police brutality and racial violence, entitled statements like the one made by Atkins have served to return us to a place of absolute division.

New York, New York

New York City has been labeled a “warzone” as violence escalates rapidly. The violence in the Big Apple isn’t directly tied to protests or riots, but instead, appears to be a deadly new way of life.

This brings NYC to more than 1,000 total shooting incidents across the city year to date, already double all of last year, and the summer is not even over — a summer which ironically has witnessed a supposed heightened consciousness and awareness of police shootings of black Americans given the ongoing George Floyd and Black Lives Matters protests.

But in the case of New York City’s explosion of gun violence, people are being killed with the police far away from the scene, though in one instance over a week ago, it was a black police officer shot in Queens while looking for a parking spot merely a mile from his home.

And this weekend, according to local PIX11 News:

Citywide, there were at least 25 shootings that injured 31 people on Friday and Saturday, police said. Officers responded to 16 shootings on Saturday and nine on Sunday.

At least three of those shootings happened within just blocks of each other in Coney Island, according to police.

Among these, there were seven deaths between Friday and Sunday morning, according the NYPD, including a 25-year-old mother of three children.

Priscilla Vasquez was described in local reports as shot in the back of the head by an unknown gunman in the early morning hours of Saturday while standing on a sidewalk in front of a public school, just around the corner from her Bronx home.

Underscoring the senseless and often random nature of much of the violence, her friends and family don’t think she was the intended targeted, also given the gunman appeared to fire wildly and haphazardly. (source)

Police released the following footage of a shooting in Brooklyn.

And it isn’t just shootings and assaults. So many windows have been smashed on NYC subways that the MTA can’t keep up with replacing the glass.

Things aren’t calming down.

If you aren’t already prepared for civil unrest in your own backyard, it’s high time you began to do so. To learn more about surviving riots and civil unrest, check out Selco’s course.

It is not an exaggeration to say that any act of violence by police officers, whether justified or not, is the potential spark for an explosion of unrest. While I certainly agree that the police should be held to very high standards of behavior, it’s unfortunate now that the first thought of most people isn’t, “Why did this shooting occur?” It’s now, “Oh, crap, how close am I to this looming riot?”

I don’t foresee this situation calming down any time soon. In fact, as we draw closer to the election, I expect we’re going to see this type of violence and wholesale destruction reaching smaller and smaller population zones. There have been many rumors about protesters being bussed to smaller towns. It begs the question, are they just testing the waters to see what kind of response will occur when they’re out of urban population centers?