9 ms·

Portland didn't have helicopters that I'm aware of, but at the height of the multi-month riots over the spring, summer and fall, the Air Force was flying one of

by cronix 6y ago

Portland didn't have helicopters that I'm aware of, but at the height of the multi-month riots over the spring, summer and fall, the Air Force was flying one of these[1] Special Operations Surveillance Planes that they denied were doing any "surveilling." It's interesting that the flight paths happened to coincide with the locations of where the riots happened to be occurring that day and Portland had a No-Fly Zone restriction in place.[2] [1] https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/air-force-surveillance-plane-portland-protests/ https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/air-force-surveillance-p... [2] https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-protest-flight-restrictions-drones/ https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-protest-flight-res...

CydeWeys 6y ago
> multi-month riots over the spring, summer and fal There were no multi-month riots this summer. Multi-month protests, yes. But not riots. The riots were much smaller in number and generally only lasted a few days at any one location prior to order being restored (here in NYC we had a few nights of looting that could be described as a riot). Even the infamous 1992 LA riots only lasted a week. Multi-month riots would be downfall-of-society level.
- chrissnell 6y ago
  Not sure what media you watch but before I went to bed, I watched Portland livestreams of very violent "protests". These went on every night for weeks and I watched people throw Molotov cocktails and shoot mortars at law enforcement. Call it what you want, but this shit was happening for over 100 nights in a row.
  - newnamenewface 6y ago
    Mortars or fireworks? That said, I agree that there were certainly protests that consistently became violent at night time for the span of at least weeks, maybe months.
    - ndiscussion 6y ago
      What's the difference when it blows up in your face? Throwing explosives in urban centers is unacceptable and violent.
      - catlifeonmars 6y ago
        Mortars are a hell of a lot more lethal any consumer firework. So, yes there is a difference. Mortars also need to be used at range (100s of meters to kilometers) to be effective. I highly doubt mortars were in use.
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Mortars are a hell of a lot more lethal any consumer firework. Well, some mortars are. Other mortars are consumer fireworks.
        CydeWeys 6y ago
        It's almost like, in the interest of clarity, we should use specific, non-overly-broad words that can't be misinterpreted. The use of the word "mortar" here is clearly causing problems, so how about "aerial firework" and "combat mortar"?
        ndiscussion 6y ago
        Good point, I wasn't thinking of actual military mortars. But I think "mortar" often means consumer firework in modern parlance.
        vcxy 6y ago
        I think there might be a lot of people here (my self included) that literally didn't know that about fireworks in modern parlance. It's because talking about fireworks just doesn't ever come up in my life. But I think "mortar" is commonly known as a military kind of weapon even if you know nothing about fireworks.
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    Here's the best summary I have seen of what happened in Portland last year (at least, up through July): https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/07/20/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-battle-of-portland/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/07/20/what-you... There was definitely some vandalism involved (and e.g. people shooting fireworks at the wall of a fortified building), but federal authorities were incredibly disingenuous in their descriptions of events and justifications of escalation. Most of the dangerous violence was police-on-protestor.
    - generalizations 6y ago
      That site leans left-wing. I wouldn't consider them necessarily a good source. You might as well quote Fox news on a right-wing event. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bellingcat/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bellingcat/
      - wtfiswiththis 6y ago
        Trying to compare Bellingcat, which publishes things like investigations into the downing of MH17, to Fox News. That is terrible. Fox News has entertainment departments, fought in court to have Tucker Carlson lie to his followers with impunity. They republished incitement to ramming attacks. Bellingcat.. They just do investigations. If you want to try to break things down into black and white left vs right, at least try to do it with comparable organizations. Or even better, try to refute the substance of the article instead of going to a media bias site to see how you feel they land on the political spectrum. Even the site you linked has them listed as "left-center" with "high factual reporting." How is this grounds to outright dismiss them? The slightest degree of "leftness" makes you want to exclude sources? Do you have any factual reason to be doing this, or is this your personal bias towards right wing content forcing you to seek means to exclude information you don't like the looks of?
      - devindotcom 6y ago
        Honestly, that comparison is very disingenuous just from the information on the site you just linked: Fox News: "Overall, we rate Fox News strongly Right-Biased due to editorial positions and story selection that favors the right. We also rate them Mixed factually and borderline Questionable based on poor sourcing and the spreading of conspiracy theories that later must be retracted after being widely shared." Bellingcat: "we rate Bellingcat Left-Center biased based on story selection and positions that moderately favor the left. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact check record." These are vastly, vastly different forms and scales of "bias." They are nearly incomparable.
  - addicted 6y ago
    Violent protests that did not lead to the death of a single police officer. I mean, how violent could they have been. My personal experience (not as a participant, but rather someone who observed a few protests from a distance) was that they were peaceful until the cops would engage with the protestors to impose the curfews that many cities had established. And then the violence was largely 1 sided.
    - fpgaminer 6y ago
      > Violent protests that did not lead to the death of a single police officer. I did some quick fact checking, just for my own peace of mind. I view the George Floyd protests as overall peaceful, but it's good to question one's understanding. So for what it's worth Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Portland,_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Portl...) lists one casualty. I'm guessing that was the August 29th event, which wasn't a police officer. So yeah, seems you're right, and that's an important fact to keep in mind. 7 months of protests with only one dead, in an area people keep arguing is the worst of the BLM protests.
    - panny 6y ago
      >Violent protests that did not lead to the death of a single police officer. Nice way to move the goalposts. How many people were killed in the protest? Aaron Danielson was ambushed and murdered by antifa Michael Reinoehl in Portland. >I mean, how violent could they have been. The "protestors" were using blinding laser weapons against the police. That's not even permitted in war, there's a 109 nation treaty against blinding laser weapons. Anyway, there's a 22GB torrent of riot videos out there now if you need a memory refresher. The largest file in the torrent is 6.2 GB of Portland videos. Portland was months and months of violent riots and murders.
      - lupire 6y ago
        Those months and months did less damage than 1 day in the Capitol.
        6y ago
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    > and shoot mortars Mortars? Are you sure about that? What kind? Edit: Oh "fireworks mortars". Ffs. Just say fireworks.
    - asguy 6y ago
      They were professional fireworks. They were exploding at street and building level multiple times last year. The most recent was downtown on New Years.
      - CydeWeys 6y ago
        Man if you think that's bad, you should've seen what many neighborhoods in major cities were like every night for a solid month leading up to July 4th last year. Aerial fireworks everywhere. There were even some structure fires as a result. Not protest-related, mind you. Just idiocy-related.
        asguy 6y ago
        I don't think you understand the severity of what antifa was doing in downtown Portland.
  - coffeemaniac 6y ago
    There were a handful of events like what you describe, but the violence was overwhelmingly inflicted upon protesters by police. This came in the form of physical violence, aiming projectiles at protesters' heads, and of course the various chemical weaponry that was used in such quantities that it appeared on NASA weather satellites. They were police riots.
  - drunkpotato 6y ago
    You see what you want to see. Classic confirmation bias. I watched the livestreams, and most of the time it was a lot of running and massive amounts of tear gas, and occasionally police brutally escalating violence against those protesting police violence. I think it's rather telling that you describe fireworks as mortars to try to make them sound more threatening. I haven't seen any videos where a BLM protestor beats a fallen cop with an American flag, or kills a cop. Both of which happened during the violent far-right insurrection on January 6. I have seen many more credible stories about data and studies showing that violence from far-right extremism is a much more dangerous current problem than far-left extremism. I will continue to call last year's protests what they were, remarkably peaceful world-wide protests against police brutality and for police reform. And I will call the Jan 6 event what it was, a deliberately stoked violent insurrection against the US government in an attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election, on the basis of nothing but lies and grievance. We should strive to accurately describe things as they are.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      I agree it's misleading here, but people (in my area at least) commonly refer to the big professional-tier fireworks as "mortars".
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - subsubzero 6y ago
      .
      - ryandrake 6y ago
        This thread is a great example of how totally isolated news bubbles create totally different realities, each honestly and sincerely believed by their proponents. How do we get out of this?
        rpz 6y ago
        stop consuming media, and focus attention on our own communities
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago
  There were 30 riots declared by police in Portland alone between May and November (and many more since then). They have a detailed breakdown of riots, fires, projectiles thrown , arrests, ect. https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/article/765145 https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/article/765145
  - devindotcom 6y ago
    Lot of riots got "declared" here in Seattle too, usually after the cops rushed a stationary peaceful group, and many breakdowns of projectiles and aggression by protestors were publicized by police. But a huge amount of it turned out to be fabricated, exaggerated, or embellished.
    - j_walter 6y ago
      These were not fabricated events in Portland. In fact the mayor restricted what the police could do and how far things had to escalate before the police could do anything. Lasers, fireworks, fires, bricks...not much was off limits to the rioters every single night for months. You can claim the group was stationary and peaceful...but there were agitators mixed in and causing problems. There are tons of videos showing the violent tactics being used by rioters...but usually the only ones to make the MSM are when the police responded. Antifa...yes they exist...were well organized and restricted journalists from documenting everything unless they wanted them to. Even the local news reporters were harassed and assaulted by them.
      - Forbo 6y ago
        There were also instances found where the agitators turned out to be agents provocateurs.
        dev_by_day 6y ago
        Source? I have not seen any confirmed incidents of agent provocateurs. The news would have went batshit crazy if such a thing was actually confirmed.
- adolph 6y ago
  Portland doesn't sound like a very nice place. The push to change how the city responds to violence came after dozens of people vandalized businesses on New Year’s Eve, spray-painting buildings and breaking windows. At least three people were arrested and police declared the event a riot. https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2021/01/mayor-ted-wheeler-confronted-reportedly-punched-while-dining-in-nw-portland.html https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2021/01/mayor-ted-wheele... Wheeler was five minutes into a dinner at Cafe Nell with a friend when a small crowd began yelling obscenities at him and soon pushed their way into the outdoor tented area where he was seated, according to Jim Middaugh, the mayor’s communications director, who was briefed by the mayor on the incident. https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2021/01/mayor-ted-wheeler-confronted-reportedly-punched-while-dining-in-nw-portland.html https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2021/01/mayor-ted-wheele...
  - pengaru 6y ago
    It was quite nice the last time I visited, but that was pre-covid and pre-george floyd.
- milkrocks 6y ago
  How about that one day protest at the capitol?
nabilhat 6y ago
The PPB were renting N50TV (FOX livery and all) for a while and using it to hunt people walking home for enhanced harrassment. The owners of that helicopter didn't feel great about being associated, so PPB moved on to other rentals out of Port Orchards, WA. Through the summer it was possible to watch C172's on ADSB squawking as IDAHO33 and IDAHO44, circling at 3000ft. They haven't been visible on ADSB in months. I have a great view of the areas they often circle over. They're still active, they're just not squawking. As recently as yesterday afternoon, in fact.
- therockspush 6y ago
  I noticed the police helicopters in the bay area were only showing up as mlat reports on adsbexhange a couple months ago as well. Easy to spot but weird how they suddenly stopped squawking. Are they exempt now?
bryzaguy 6y ago
I live in inner southeast Portland. There were helicopters flying above my place many nights during the protests. Unsure how low they were flying given how really loud they were.

by cronix 6y ago

CydeWeys 6y ago

> multi-month riots over the spring, summer and fal There were no multi-month riots this summer. Multi-month protests, yes. But not riots. The riots were much smaller in number and generally only lasted a few days at any one location prior to order being restored (here in NYC we had a few nights of looting that could be described as a riot). Even the infamous 1992 LA riots only lasted a week. Multi-month riots would be downfall-of-society level.

chrissnell 6y ago
Not sure what media you watch but before I went to bed, I watched Portland livestreams of very violent "protests". These went on every night for weeks and I watched people throw Molotov cocktails and shoot mortars at law enforcement. Call it what you want, but this shit was happening for over 100 nights in a row.
- newnamenewface 6y ago
  Mortars or fireworks? That said, I agree that there were certainly protests that consistently became violent at night time for the span of at least weeks, maybe months.
  - ndiscussion 6y ago
    What's the difference when it blows up in your face? Throwing explosives in urban centers is unacceptable and violent.
    - catlifeonmars 6y ago
      Mortars are a hell of a lot more lethal any consumer firework. So, yes there is a difference. Mortars also need to be used at range (100s of meters to kilometers) to be effective. I highly doubt mortars were in use.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Mortars are a hell of a lot more lethal any consumer firework. Well, some mortars are. Other mortars are consumer fireworks.
        CydeWeys 6y ago
        It's almost like, in the interest of clarity, we should use specific, non-overly-broad words that can't be misinterpreted. The use of the word "mortar" here is clearly causing problems, so how about "aerial firework" and "combat mortar"?
      - ndiscussion 6y ago
        Good point, I wasn't thinking of actual military mortars. But I think "mortar" often means consumer firework in modern parlance.
        vcxy 6y ago
        I think there might be a lot of people here (my self included) that literally didn't know that about fireworks in modern parlance. It's because talking about fireworks just doesn't ever come up in my life. But I think "mortar" is commonly known as a military kind of weapon even if you know nothing about fireworks.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  Here's the best summary I have seen of what happened in Portland last year (at least, up through July): https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/07/20/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-battle-of-portland/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/07/20/what-you... There was definitely some vandalism involved (and e.g. people shooting fireworks at the wall of a fortified building), but federal authorities were incredibly disingenuous in their descriptions of events and justifications of escalation. Most of the dangerous violence was police-on-protestor.
  - generalizations 6y ago
    That site leans left-wing. I wouldn't consider them necessarily a good source. You might as well quote Fox news on a right-wing event. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bellingcat/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bellingcat/
    - wtfiswiththis 6y ago
      Trying to compare Bellingcat, which publishes things like investigations into the downing of MH17, to Fox News. That is terrible. Fox News has entertainment departments, fought in court to have Tucker Carlson lie to his followers with impunity. They republished incitement to ramming attacks. Bellingcat.. They just do investigations. If you want to try to break things down into black and white left vs right, at least try to do it with comparable organizations. Or even better, try to refute the substance of the article instead of going to a media bias site to see how you feel they land on the political spectrum. Even the site you linked has them listed as "left-center" with "high factual reporting." How is this grounds to outright dismiss them? The slightest degree of "leftness" makes you want to exclude sources? Do you have any factual reason to be doing this, or is this your personal bias towards right wing content forcing you to seek means to exclude information you don't like the looks of?
    - devindotcom 6y ago
      Honestly, that comparison is very disingenuous just from the information on the site you just linked: Fox News: "Overall, we rate Fox News strongly Right-Biased due to editorial positions and story selection that favors the right. We also rate them Mixed factually and borderline Questionable based on poor sourcing and the spreading of conspiracy theories that later must be retracted after being widely shared." Bellingcat: "we rate Bellingcat Left-Center biased based on story selection and positions that moderately favor the left. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact check record." These are vastly, vastly different forms and scales of "bias." They are nearly incomparable.
- addicted 6y ago
  Violent protests that did not lead to the death of a single police officer. I mean, how violent could they have been. My personal experience (not as a participant, but rather someone who observed a few protests from a distance) was that they were peaceful until the cops would engage with the protestors to impose the curfews that many cities had established. And then the violence was largely 1 sided.
  - fpgaminer 6y ago
    > Violent protests that did not lead to the death of a single police officer. I did some quick fact checking, just for my own peace of mind. I view the George Floyd protests as overall peaceful, but it's good to question one's understanding. So for what it's worth Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Portland,_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Portl...) lists one casualty. I'm guessing that was the August 29th event, which wasn't a police officer. So yeah, seems you're right, and that's an important fact to keep in mind. 7 months of protests with only one dead, in an area people keep arguing is the worst of the BLM protests.
  - panny 6y ago
    >Violent protests that did not lead to the death of a single police officer. Nice way to move the goalposts. How many people were killed in the protest? Aaron Danielson was ambushed and murdered by antifa Michael Reinoehl in Portland. >I mean, how violent could they have been. The "protestors" were using blinding laser weapons against the police. That's not even permitted in war, there's a 109 nation treaty against blinding laser weapons. Anyway, there's a 22GB torrent of riot videos out there now if you need a memory refresher. The largest file in the torrent is 6.2 GB of Portland videos. Portland was months and months of violent riots and murders.
    - lupire 6y ago
      Those months and months did less damage than 1 day in the Capitol.
      - 6y ago
- alkonaut 6y ago
  > and shoot mortars Mortars? Are you sure about that? What kind? Edit: Oh "fireworks mortars". Ffs. Just say fireworks.
  - asguy 6y ago
    They were professional fireworks. They were exploding at street and building level multiple times last year. The most recent was downtown on New Years.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      Man if you think that's bad, you should've seen what many neighborhoods in major cities were like every night for a solid month leading up to July 4th last year. Aerial fireworks everywhere. There were even some structure fires as a result. Not protest-related, mind you. Just idiocy-related.
      - asguy 6y ago
        I don't think you understand the severity of what antifa was doing in downtown Portland.
- coffeemaniac 6y ago
  There were a handful of events like what you describe, but the violence was overwhelmingly inflicted upon protesters by police. This came in the form of physical violence, aiming projectiles at protesters' heads, and of course the various chemical weaponry that was used in such quantities that it appeared on NASA weather satellites. They were police riots.
- drunkpotato 6y ago
  You see what you want to see. Classic confirmation bias. I watched the livestreams, and most of the time it was a lot of running and massive amounts of tear gas, and occasionally police brutally escalating violence against those protesting police violence. I think it's rather telling that you describe fireworks as mortars to try to make them sound more threatening. I haven't seen any videos where a BLM protestor beats a fallen cop with an American flag, or kills a cop. Both of which happened during the violent far-right insurrection on January 6. I have seen many more credible stories about data and studies showing that violence from far-right extremism is a much more dangerous current problem than far-left extremism. I will continue to call last year's protests what they were, remarkably peaceful world-wide protests against police brutality and for police reform. And I will call the Jan 6 event what it was, a deliberately stoked violent insurrection against the US government in an attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election, on the basis of nothing but lies and grievance. We should strive to accurately describe things as they are.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    I agree it's misleading here, but people (in my area at least) commonly refer to the big professional-tier fireworks as "mortars".
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - subsubzero 6y ago
    .
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      This thread is a great example of how totally isolated news bubbles create totally different realities, each honestly and sincerely believed by their proponents. How do we get out of this?
      - rpz 6y ago
        stop consuming media, and focus attention on our own communities
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
StanislavPetrov 6y ago
There were 30 riots declared by police in Portland alone between May and November (and many more since then). They have a detailed breakdown of riots, fires, projectiles thrown , arrests, ect. https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/article/765145 https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/article/765145
- devindotcom 6y ago
  Lot of riots got "declared" here in Seattle too, usually after the cops rushed a stationary peaceful group, and many breakdowns of projectiles and aggression by protestors were publicized by police. But a huge amount of it turned out to be fabricated, exaggerated, or embellished.
  - j_walter 6y ago
    These were not fabricated events in Portland. In fact the mayor restricted what the police could do and how far things had to escalate before the police could do anything. Lasers, fireworks, fires, bricks...not much was off limits to the rioters every single night for months. You can claim the group was stationary and peaceful...but there were agitators mixed in and causing problems. There are tons of videos showing the violent tactics being used by rioters...but usually the only ones to make the MSM are when the police responded. Antifa...yes they exist...were well organized and restricted journalists from documenting everything unless they wanted them to. Even the local news reporters were harassed and assaulted by them.
    - Forbo 6y ago
      There were also instances found where the agitators turned out to be agents provocateurs.
      - dev_by_day 6y ago
        Source? I have not seen any confirmed incidents of agent provocateurs. The news would have went batshit crazy if such a thing was actually confirmed.
adolph 6y ago
Portland doesn't sound like a very nice place. The push to change how the city responds to violence came after dozens of people vandalized businesses on New Year’s Eve, spray-painting buildings and breaking windows. At least three people were arrested and police declared the event a riot. https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2021/01/mayor-ted-wheeler-confronted-reportedly-punched-while-dining-in-nw-portland.html https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2021/01/mayor-ted-wheele... Wheeler was five minutes into a dinner at Cafe Nell with a friend when a small crowd began yelling obscenities at him and soon pushed their way into the outdoor tented area where he was seated, according to Jim Middaugh, the mayor’s communications director, who was briefed by the mayor on the incident. https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2021/01/mayor-ted-wheeler-confronted-reportedly-punched-while-dining-in-nw-portland.html https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2021/01/mayor-ted-wheele...
- pengaru 6y ago
  It was quite nice the last time I visited, but that was pre-covid and pre-george floyd.
milkrocks 6y ago
How about that one day protest at the capitol?

nabilhat 6y ago

The PPB were renting N50TV (FOX livery and all) for a while and using it to hunt people walking home for enhanced harrassment. The owners of that helicopter didn't feel great about being associated, so PPB moved on to other rentals out of Port Orchards, WA. Through the summer it was possible to watch C172's on ADSB squawking as IDAHO33 and IDAHO44, circling at 3000ft. They haven't been visible on ADSB in months. I have a great view of the areas they often circle over. They're still active, they're just not squawking. As recently as yesterday afternoon, in fact.

therockspush 6y ago
I noticed the police helicopters in the bay area were only showing up as mlat reports on adsbexhange a couple months ago as well. Easy to spot but weird how they suddenly stopped squawking. Are they exempt now?

bryzaguy 6y ago

I live in inner southeast Portland. There were helicopters flying above my place many nights during the protests. Unsure how low they were flying given how really loud they were.