Concerning the violence of the demonstrators, the following words from Portland student/reporter Jim Desyllas paint a picture rather different from the one given by the mainstream media:
Sunday and Monday, there was no violence. None. The people were aggressively non-violent; they were self-policing. Up until Tuesday at 4pm there was one window broken in the whole city – a McDonald’s window. This compares favourably to the typical rock concert.... I want to emphasise, these protesters were not violent people. They were the most non-violent people I have ever seen. Even [later in the week, after the scene had turned ugly] when I was screaming at a cop, this girl came up to me and said, “Do not scream. This is non-violent.” These people were too much to believe. They must meditate all the time, I don’t know....
Sunday and Monday they had young cops, using them to block the streets. These were trainees. But Tuesday they had the real cops; none of them were young. They were trained to attack people. A small group, maybe 100 people total, struck back. Then these cops herded that group around the city, making sure there were plenty of photo ops of “violent protesters.”
A number of times they had these 100 or so protesters caught between buildings and walls of police. They could easily have arrested and detained this small number of people and gotten it over with. Instead they would gas them and let them go, then trap them again, gas them again, and again let them go. The cops made no arrests that I know of until late Tuesday night though the skirmishing was going on from three till 9:30. The cops would blockade three or five blocks of an area, give the angry kids room to operate, and keep gassing them – when you gas a person, let me tell you, it gets them fighting mad.
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