To understand why protesters have taken to the streets of Portland, Oregon, for 80 straight days and counting—and why the Portland Police Bureau continues to arrest and harass protesters—consider how the police have handled two recent noteworthy incidents: The pipe bombs that were hurled at protesters last weekend, and the arrest one night later of “Wall of Moms” organizer Demetria Hester at a downtown rally.
The differences are telling, and help explain why the citizens of Portland are protesting: Namely, they have come to believe that a police force that’s supposed to be protecting and serving them instead not only will not defend them—and especially the targeted minorities in their community—from ongoing attacks by the far-right extremists eager for violence who have been descending on them for the past three years, but have actively taken the side of those attacking them.
The contrasts could not be more stark:
- In the early Saturday morning pipe bombing case, police responded slowly to the scene and—despite having a wealth of information available online about the likely perpetrator—have only announced an investigation into the case, but have apparently not yet contacted several key witnesses.
- In the case of Demetria Hester, they targeted for arrest a respected community leader who was the victim of a notorious hate crime in which a tepid and racist police response resulted in a horrific fatal assault the next day on a Portland commuter train.
A good deal is already known about the man believed to be at least one of the participants in the pipe bombing attempt, identified after video showed him fleeing the scene: Louis Garrick Fernbaugh, 52, a retired Navy SEAL who claims to have been a contractor for the CIA, and most recently co-managed a private business in suburban Portland that specializes in providing tactical training and “threat assessments for schools, businesses, and other venues.”
He was identified after a video shared on Instagram (and then on Twitter) showed protesters chasing darkly clad men out of the park following the blast. Another video, also shared on Twitter, showed one of the independent journalists at the park pursuing one of those men, who was carrying what appear to be night vision goggles, apparently to the man’s car, where he behaved threateningly toward the journalist.
The man recording the incident—Portland videographer Scott Keeler, who said he had observed the man in the park earlier walking away from the explosions—was using a flashlight, and first asked the man to stop as he walked up to him at a car the man appeared to be using. "Why are you throwing pipe bombs at people?" Keeler asked.
"Look man, I'm not the guy you wanna fuck with," the man responded. Keeler again queried him about the bombs, to which the man replied: "I don't know what you're talking about. But I'm not that guy you wanna fuck with. I'm fucking telling you."
Shortly after these videos were posted, a number of antifascists quickly identified the man as Fernbaugh. Fernbaugh deleted his Facebook account, but antifascist internet sleuths were able to find archived versions and created an archive of his posts and comments gathered from various social media platforms.
For the most part, Fernbaugh’s account is full of pro-Trump talking points—accusing Hillary Clinton of criminality, claiming that Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump was fraudulent, and so on—but his underlying far-right extremism lurks throughout, too. A couple of 2015 posts reproduced World War II-era anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda. Others included alt-right memes.
In a video rant he posted on Facebook, Fernbaugh claimed that “leftists” were responsible for “political terrorism” in the United States and was skeptical about the attempted mail bombings of liberal figures in October 2018. In the post’s description, he wrote: “I'm surprised no one has slaughtered these sheep that have grown horns (ANTIFA)."
Fernbaugh claimed in a 2018 Facebook post warning of a coming civil war that “George Soros is known to have paid ANTIFA to instigate rioting and create chaos that has caused millions in damage across numerous cities, but especially Portland, OR.” In a more recent comment on Facebook, Fernbaugh claimed to have “infiltrated ANTIFA” during a downtown Portland protest.
Most of the accounts associated with Fernbaugh were deleted shortly after he was identified. But at a Twitter account linked to his former business, he posted two comments on Wednesday, one a taunt and the other a threat: “ANTIFA had fireworks thrown at them and called the police. hahaha, yeah whatever,” and “Training to shoot commies.” The tweets were deleted shortly afterwards.
The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) promptly announced that it was opening an investigation. However, it has so far been remarkable for its passivity: On Tuesday, a police spokesperson told reporters that investigators still had not heard from “someone who was actually there” early Saturday morning.
“Investigators would like to remind the public that PPB still needs in-person witnesses and/or potential victims to come forward. Detailed in-person witness accounts are crucial in moving this case forward. Those with knowledge who have spoken to the press are encouraged to contact investigators,” PPB’s statement read.
Police acknowledged that they had identified the man in the video, calling Fernbaugh a “person of interest” in the case, “and he still needs to be interviewed.” The spokesperson said investigators had “attempted to contact him” but apparently failed, adding that officers “would encourage” him to contact PPB.
On Wednesday, Keeler told The Oregonian that investigators still had not contacted him, as he had earlier mentioned on Twitter.
Face to face with hate
Passivity by Portland police officers in the face of extremist violence features prominently in the case of Demetria Hester as well.
Hester met Jeremy Christian on a Portland MAX commuter train late in the evening on May 25, 2017. When Christian boarded, he promptly announced that he was a Nazi and was looking to recruit others to join him. He shouted that he hated Jews, Mexicans, Japanese, and anyone who wasn’t Christian.
Hester—the only person of color on the train—spoke up and told Christian he needed to keep it down. What she didn’t know was that the large, bellicose white man had, two weeks before, marched with a far-right group called Patriot Prayer, wrapped in an American flag—and had been kicked out for giving a Nazi salute and calling a counterprotester a “white n----r.”
“Fuck you bitch!” he screamed at her, adding that she had neither the right to speak nor to be on the train.
“I built this country!” He shouted. “You don’t have a right to speak. You’re black. You don’t have a right to be here. All you Muslims, blacks, Jews, I will kill all of you.”
As the train pulled into Hester’s stop, she stood up to leave. Christian made clear he intended to get off and began shouting loudly at everyone on the train that he didn’t care if anyone wanted to call the police because he wasn’t scared.
“I will kill anyone who stands in my way because I have a right to do this,” he told them. He looked at Hester and seethed: “Bitch, you’re about to get it now.”
As she stepped off the train, Christian lunged at her with a Gatorade bottle and smacked her above the right eye with it just as she whipped out her can of mace and gave him a faceful. It knocked him down on the platform. She staggered away and awaited police, who finally arrived about 20 minutes later. Hester said the officers treated her as a likely suspect, even though witnesses pointed out Christian—still washing pepper spray out of his eyes—standing feet away.
Christian wound up walking away from the scene and going home for the night. Police later blamed this on confusion regarding who the perpetrator was.
Hester later testified that, when she asked why Christian was being allowed to walk away, a PPB officer told her: “He said he didn’t do it”—even though she and every witness who remained on the scene had told them he had.
The next day, May 26, Christian boarded another MAX train—the Green Line, at the Lloyd Center—during rush hour. This time he had a knife.
Unlike the night before, when he had harassed Hester, this train was full of people. But that didn’t stop Christian. No sooner had he boarded than he spotted two young women of color—one of whom was wearing a hijab—and immediately stood in front of them, shouting about how they didn’t belong in Portland. That Muslims should die, because they had been killing Christians for hundreds of years. That the girl in the hijab should go back to Saudi Arabia.
The girls got up and fled to the back of the train, seeking another seat. Christian followed them, still shouting.
Three men, regular commuters who had been watching the scene unfold, stepped between Christian and the two women. One of them—Rick Best, 53, a Portland city employee—stood closest to Christian and tried using reason: “I know you are taxpayer, but this is not OK. You’re scaring people.” Christian kept shouting that it was about his free speech.
As they neared the next stop, Taliesen Myrddin Namkai-Meche, 23, pleaded with Christian: “Please get off this train.”
Another of the trio, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, 21, recognized Christian from the alt-right march the month before, when he had marched with the counterprotesters and Christian had made a scene. He tried pushing himself between Christian and the women.
“You fucking touch me again and I’ll kill you,” Christian snarled at him. At that moment he lost his balance and fell back; when he came back up, he had a knife in his hand, and he plunged it into Best’s neck, then turned to Namkai-Meche and Fletcher and did the same to each of them. Then he ran from the train and away from the Hollywood station. The two dark-skinned girls fled the train, too, leaving their belongings behind.
Best bled out before help could arrive and was declared dead at the scene. Namkai-Meche, who told everyone who stopped to help that he loved them, died in the intensive care ward at the nearby hospital. Only Fletcher, who remained in the hospital for a month recovering from his wound, survived the attack.
At his arraignment on murder and attempted murder charges—but, mysteriously, no hate-crime charges involving Hester’s confrontation—two days later, Christian ranted behind the glass for the benefit of the press.
“Free speech or die, Portland!” He shouted. “You got no safe place. This is America! Get out if you don’t like free speech!
After hearing the official charges being read, he shouted again: “Death to the enemies of America! Leave this country if you hate our freedom. Death to antifa!
“You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism!”
The police take a side
“Free speech” was, as it happened, the radical right’s battle cry nine days later, June 4, when Patriot Prayer—which denounced Christian and claimed he was never a member, pointing to his earlier ejection—held what would be the first of many right-wing rallies in downtown Portland over the next few years, ignoring the pleas of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler to postpone the event so soon after the MAX murders. The rally featured a number of notable alt-right and “Patriot” figures, including Proud Boys cofounder Kyle Chapman, Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.
However, their modestly large turnout of several hundred supporters was dwarfed by the thousands of protesters—including groups from local unions, peace activists, and various leftist and antifascist organizations. For the bulk of the afternoon, the scene remained peaceful if contentious, with police generally keeping both sides separated.
But there was disturbing behavior by the police throughout. At one point, uniformed officers made an arrest of a man being detained by a “Patriot” militiaman, with his assistance. Late in the afternoon, police became aggressive against the counterprotesters, kettling antifascist demonstrators who had marched downtown at the rally’s end. Some 14 people were arrested, all counterprotesters.
The message was clear: Portland police were eager to protect the “free speech” rights of the assembled far-right extremists, yet had no compunction at all about trampling the free speech rights of the people who turned out to protest them. It was self-evident at the scene that the police had taken a side in the conflict—aligning themselves against ordinary Portland citizens with the extremist out-of-towners whose questionable insistence that their “free speech” was under attack had just inspired a horrific hate crime.
This established what became a routine pattern over the next few years. Patriot Prayer and its leader—a onetime “doomsday prepper” from Vancouver, Washington, named Joey Gibson—began organizing a seemingly endless series of “protests” in the Portland and Seattle areas that continued for the next two years and more, many of which produced clashes between protesters, counterprotesters, and police. At each of these events, arrests of counterprotesters became common, while only handfuls of arrests of the right-wing extremists involved in the violence occurred.
The ostensible causes for these protests were highly mutable and opportunistic, depending largely on whatever was the right-wing cause célèbre of the moment: One event was held to protest Portland’s “sanctuary city” status for immigrants. Another rally at which Patriot Prayer was a violent presence, in Seattle, was titled a “March Against Sharia.” An October 2018 protest was called a march “for law and order.” There was even a “Him Too” protest defending men’s rights, held shortly after televised hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court amid a flurry of sexual harassment and abuse accusations.
The point of the events wasn’t the controversy du jour: the point was the violence. As the ranks of the Patriot Prayer rally-goers filled with Proud Boys and other thuggish street-brawling elements, it became clear that the main reason most of the men—the vast majority of whom did not live in the city—out marching in Portland’s streets were present was that they were eager to provoke violence with “antifa” and the counterprotesters. And it frequently was very violent indeed, particularly a June 30, 2018, event dedicated to “cleaning the streets of Portland” of leftists.
The culmination of all these protests was the Aug. 17, 2019, Proud Boys march through downtown Portland, which drew hundreds of the street brawlers from around the nation—and yet was still badly outnumbered by thousands of antifascists and their supporters. There were relatively few confrontations between the Proud Boys and counterprotesters, largely because police maintained rigorous security around the marchers, and even provided personal escorts for some of them.
However, police again behaved very differently toward the counterprotesters. They arrested 13 of them, the majority under dubious circumstances, including a woman arrested for revving her motorbike in the vicinity of Proud Boys marchers. Another was a woman named Hannah Ahern, who was arrested for spitting on the street in front of officers: “I wanted to express my general disagreement with what was going on,” she told the Portland Mercury later. “I felt compelled to show disgust.”
She was speaking for many Portlanders. By then, the PPB’s chummy behavior with the Patriot Prayer contingent had gone beyond mere impressions from the rallies—the problem was substantiated when Portland journalists uncovered texts and emails between Gibson and a police liaison demonstrating the latter’s eagerness to help the group organize and even how to avoid the arrest of one far-right activist with an established record of violence. The disgust became even more tangible when PPB’s internal investigation of the matter completely exonerated the officer and the department.
The right-wing protests became infrequent and sporadic after that, including a planned Ku Klux Klan rally at which no klansmen actually showed up, though there was once again a large crowd of counterprotesters. When the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown measures first hit in mid-March, protests vanished altogether—until the May 25 murder of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests, including in Portland.
Most of these protests lasted one or two days; however, in Portland, where police brutality issues had taken on an extraordinary edge, the protests became a daily affair—one that has now surpassed 80 consecutive days. By early July, most of the protests had become quiet and nonviolent, with only sporadic violence and vandalism, with the notable exception of an arson attack on the federal courthouse downtown—which is about the time that federal agents under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began showing up, wearing anonymous military gear, arresting protesters on the streets, and spiriting them away in unmarked vans.
Over the next few nights, they clashed with protesters in the area around the courthouse, using flashbangs and munitions to disperse the crowds. One protester was shot in the forehead by an “impact weapon” round that caused him brain damage. Another protester—a Navy veteran who was attempting to speak with the DHS officers—was brutally beaten with batons, breaking his hand.
That was when the scene exploded. On the night of July 24, thousands of Portlanders took to the streets to protest the arrests. The protest was entirely peaceful—drum circles, groups of teachers and nurses, a marching band, a “Wall of Moms” wearing yellow shirts—until the DHS officers began unleashing tear gas on the crowd. A brigade of “fathers” arrived with leaf blowers and blew the gas back at the officers.
The escalated protests continued nightly. DHS officials called the protests “criminal violence perpetrated by anarchists targeting city and federal properties.” It brought in reinforcements on July 28, even though many of these officers lacked proper training, and both Mayor Wheeler and Gov. Kate Brown—along with both of the state’s senators—demanded the DHS police be withdrawn. Eventually, they negotiated a phased withdrawal, and the DHS arrests ceased.
The protests went on, though at a lower level of violence. However, once again dealing with Portland police, protesters found themselves frequently assaulted and faced with aggressive new tactics by police, including slashing the tires of vehicles containing protesters and marching double-time in phalanxes down city streets to clear them of protesters, often with brutal results. An American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit points out that police targeted journalists and legal observers as well as protesters.
“As the national media focuses on the unconstitutional abductions of protesters from the streets of Portland and the nightly litany of assaults on protesters, the much longer and more persistent history of local police engaging in some of the very same attacks is lost,” Lewis and Clark College professor Elliott Young, a witness to the violence, remarked in a Houston Chronicle op-ed. “Since the George Floyd protests erupted in Portland, the local police have been using tear gas, pepper spray and flash bang grenades to disperse crowds of peaceful protesters.”
The police aggression now appears to have been picked up as a green light by right-wing extremists. Following the previous weekend’s pipe bombing attempt, Proud Boys marched Saturday in downtown Portland, and were involved in numerous violent brawls with counterprotesters. It culminated with police declaring the protest a riot; afterward, one of the Proud Boys marchers was recorded firing two shots from a 9 mm weapon in the direction of protesters as he exited a parking garage in a car. The shots did not strike anyone, but witnesses recovered shell casings at the scene.
The man firing the weapon was identified by antifascists as Skylor Jernigan, a Patriot Prayer member and regular participant in far-right protests who, in 2019, had posted a video rant on social media warning antifascists that “you’re going to be getting knives put into your throat, you’re going to be getting bullets put into your head, if you don’t stop this shit with us.”
So far, Portland police have only told The Oregonian that they “are aware of the allegation that shots were fired and will investigate.”
Witnessing against hate
Demetria Hester was a key witness in Jeremy Christian’s trial in early 2020, detailing her ordeal for the jury at length. She was questioned by one of Christian’s defense attorneys about the testimony she gave to legislators in June 2019 regarding a state Senate bill to expand Oregon’s hate-crime laws.
“Why do you feel so strongly about speaking out about this?” Hester was asked.
“There are a lot of hate crimes in the world today and they need to be stopped,” she replied.
Christian was convicted by unanimous verdict in February on multiple counts of first-degree murder and hate crimes for his threats against the two young women. At his sentencing in June, Hester again testified, and turned her moment on the stand into a condemnation of police inaction when dealing with far-right violence.
“I blame the system for creating and facilitating people like Jeremy, and then we the community have to deal with him,” she said. “In my case, the white supremacist got special treatment from the police officer reacting, believing the assault was made against the assailant. He didn’t believe me or the two Trimet supervisors.” She ended by telling Christian to “rot in hell.”
Her comments set off Christian, who tore off his face mask and began screaming at her: “I should’ve killed you, bitch!” He was carried out of the courtroom. The judge sentenced Christian to life in prison with no chance of parole.
The next month, Hester became heavily involved in helping to organize the “Wall of Moms” brigade that began showing up first at the protests against DHS officers, and then at the protests involving the PPB that followed. The original group dissolved amid internal debate over its largely white leadership, and Hester assumed leadership of the group that replaced it: Moms United for Black Lives.
She told Oregon Public Broadcasting that the intent remained the same: “The same idea that was there before: moms uniting for Black Lives Matter, and being on the front line to show the unity that we have as moms, period, to come together for Black Lives Matter because that’s what matters. And the moms come out there and support and they’re diehard, and that’s what we need.”
Hester helped lead the Moms brigade at protests beginning in late July. However, on Aug. 9, she was arrested by Portland police, a day after the police union headquarters was vandalized. Officers walked into a group of people at what had been a peaceful protest and told her: “You’re under arrest.”
The PPB claimed she was arrested because someone threw a “mortar” at officers. Hester was charged with disorderly conduct and interfering with a police officer.
However, the next day, Hester was released as the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office announced that its was dismissing the charges, saying it “was in the interest of justice upon reviewing the police reports in this matter.”
Hester spoke to a crowd of supporters outside the courthouse. “This is about our future, this is about peace,” she said. “Our peace of mind to walk down the street and care for each other again. Peace to go to your neighbors and say, ‘I love you. What do you need?’”
Hester’s release, however, was only part of a larger official rebuke handed to PPB for its handling of protest-related arrests by the district attorney’s office. The next day, it announced that it would not prosecute over 500 cases involving charges brought by police related to the protests.
“As prosecutors, we acknowledge the depth of emotion that motivates these demonstrations and support those who are civically engaged through peaceful protesting,” the office said in a prepared statement. “We recognize that we will undermine public safety, not promote it, if we leverage the force of our criminal justice system against peaceful protestors who are demanding to be heard.”
The shift came about under the auspices of new management in the office: District Attorney Mike Schmidt was elected in May on an agenda promising sweeping reforms in the criminal justice system; he garnered over 75% of the vote against an establishment candidate who had been avidly supported by the Portland Police Association. The message in that outcome was unmistakable—but then fully ignored by the police afterwards.
There are many possible explanations for the obdurate culture of police forces in places like Portland and Seattle that seems to encourage outright contempt for the citizens they are ostensibly serving and protecting. These attitudes were summed up in a recent video on social media capturing a protester’s conversation with a Seattle officer who drove onto a sidewalk full of protesters at high speed, after which he described with relish how the protesters on the sidewalk scattered like “cockroaches.”
Some of the problems originate with the longtime drive by police forces around the country to emphasize their “professionalization” during training—which also has the effect of conditioning police officers to see themselves as separate from the communities they serve. Other problems include the increasing trend of urban police officers living in suburban and exurban places distantly removed culturally and otherwise from the communities in which they serve—which is notably the case in both Portland (where only 18% of police live inside the city) and Seattle.
But the heart of the Portland situation—the invisibility of right-wing extremist violence to police officers as a serious community threat—is one that infects police forces throughout the nation. And until that failure—a massive one for any urban area with both minorities and white supremacists in the mix—is addressed, the conflicts between police and the people they serve will continue, both in Portland and elsewhere.
As Hester, reflecting on how Christian’s attack affected her, told Oregon Public Broadcasting: “I couldn’t believe we were in 2017 because I’m from Memphis, Tennessee, where they do burn crosses, and they do drag you out of your house — the KKK, which are the police. That Portland, Oregon, allows people like Jeremy Joseph Christian to spew hate to everyone and to then back him up.
“That’s what pushed me, because the night of the incident, the police knew who he was, allowed him to do what he did, treated me like the assailant, wanted my ID, had no compassion. I asked him [the police officer] why he wasn’t pursuing him, and he said ‘He said he didn’t do it.’ Those types of things, being a victim and then having to be revictimized by the system.”