Portland Medics Arrested and Injured in Protests Say They Were Specifically Targeted by Police

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

and Federal Agents

Chris Wise didn’t plan on showing up to Black Lives Matter protests as a medic when he first started attending Portland’s demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death. That changed when he kept seeing people getting hurt — in particular, a young woman who was hit in the face with a piece of shrapnel. Seeing her wounds, he realized that he needed to start coming out with medical supplies. “When you can help somebody, I feel like you kind of have a moral obligation to help somebody. You can’t see stuff and just ignore it,” he says.

Street medics in Portland and around the country—many of whom are activists themselves—have been injured by law enforcement and arrested amid the chaos as they perform their duties.

Wise and several other volunteer street medics in Portland, with the help of the ACLU, sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Marshals Service and the City of Portland last month for “targeting and attacking them at Portland protests against police brutality.” Two medics who are plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit shared their experience with TIME in a July 25 interview. Shane Grannum, a Perkins Coie attorney representing plaintiffs, said in a statement that federal officers and Portland police “violated the constitutional rights of our clients to protest and lend medical services, supplies and treatment to protesters.” Portland protesters say that police brutality from local law enforcement was a problem long before the feds came and continues to be one, especially at protests.

Rights groups have said law enforcement is targeting street medics at protests nationwide. Human Rights Watch highlights police shoving medics and destroying their supplies in North Carolina, police firing “so-called less lethal weapons” at medics in Texas and a police officer pinning down a medic with his knee before arresting and detaining him in a crowded cell in New York.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/portland-medics-arrested-injured-protests-192918238.html

[gratuitous]

1. If it happened on foreign soil, it would be a war crime to target medics

But in the United States under Donald Trump, it's just another day. I seem to recall that when Trump wanted Lafayette Park cleared for his vanity op with the Bible that the troops who materialized to shoot and gas the demonstrators arrived in vehicles marked with the red cross insignia.

[malaise]

2. THIS

madness