Portland: officers targeted medics with teargas and projectiles, report finds

Law enforcement officers in Portland, Oregon, specifically targeted medics with teargas and projectiles during summer protests in “indiscriminate attacks”, according to a new report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).

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The study is based on interviews and medical examinations involving health professionals, volunteer medics and emergency services personnel. It also found Portland police and fire personnel did not provide on-site medical care for injured protesters, and prevented ambulances from accessing the area of protests.

The PHR described an overall pattern that constituted “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” from Portland police and federal agents, violating several international compacts on the use of force.

According to Dr Michele Heisler, medical director of PHR and one of the authors of the report, “some would argue that it meets the criteria for torture”.

The report covers June and July in the city, which has seen hundreds of protests in the months since the death of George Floyd, which were only briefly interrupted by Oregon’s wildfire emergency. This period included weeks in which federal agents participated in crowd control in the downtown area on the instructions of the Trump administration, and over the objections of local and state elected officials.

The document includes testimony from in-person observers, including a deputy fire chief, who say that “the number and severity of injuries” increased markedly after the arrival of federal agents, who were more likely to shoot “less lethal” ordnance like teargas canisters directly at protesters and medics.

The report says this caused head injuries, severe lacerations, chemical burns and other injuries. It directly quotes a food service volunteer who was partially blinded by an impact round; a participant in the “wall of moms” protest who was struck in the forehead with a similar projectile, leading to severe bleeding; and medics who describe treating facial lacerations that cut to the bone.

Separate reporting by PHR details 14 head injuries caused in Portland by police officers firing rubber bullets or other “kinetic impact projectiles” at civilians, and a national total of 115 such injuries nationwide during the George Floyd protests.

Because police would not reliably allow medical access to the protest site, the report says, volunteer medics stepped in. It quotes several of them, including a neuroscientist, two former EMTs and a veteran combat medic, who say federal agents were deliberately targeting them as they treated injured protesters.

Comparing the police violence to what she saw in separate research in Turkey, after police there brutally responded to the 2013 Gezi Park uprising, Heisler said much of what she saw in Portland was more severe, and that “many of the injuries would have been far more serious if people didn’t have protective equipment”, which was more available than it had been to protesters in Istanbul.

Heisler said that apart from the widespread physical injuries, she expected the events would lead to “widespread collective trauma”, including “disillusionment and a lack of trust” as a result of the violence “being perpetrated by state officials”.

“A lot of people came to believe that officers wanted to hurt people”, Heisler added, and this itself had a chilling effect.

“If the intention was to scare people into not coming out to protest, to some extent it worked.”

In response to questions about the matters raised in the report, PPB’s spokesman, Lt Greg Pashley, pointed to existing policies regarding reporting on the use of force, and directives on crowd control, and said that the use of cameras would be “a budget and a contract matter”.

Pashley added that PPB “is interested in protecting the constitutional rights of all people”, but that the bureau “responds when the safety of human beings is placed in danger from arson or other violent activities, or when vital infrastructure is threatened. Portland police bureau actions are precipitated by criminal activity, not protesting.”

A spokesman for Mayor Ted Wheeler, Jim Middaugh, acknowledged in a telephone conversation that “there is a lot of work to be done to ensure that the whole community feels safe around PPB”, especially communities of color, but added that in current protests, “people are literally fire-bombing the police”, that “taxpayer-funded assets are being burned to the ground”, and that “bad behavior on the part of protesters leads to the use of harsher tactics” by police.

On the conduct of federal officers, Middaugh said that “it’s widely known that Mayor Wheeler has significant differences with the Trump administration” and had always maintained that “when the feds came in, it made the situation significantly worse”.