Portland Protesters Turn VIOLENT With Brutal Assault Caught On Video

ABC News has reported exsteivly on this: 

Demonstrations elsewhere in the city have also grown increasingly violent. Early Friday, someone broke the windows of a federal courthouse and threw fireworks that started a fire inside the building.

One prominent Black leader wrote to Mayor Ted Wheeler and said some clashes had unfolded three blocks from his house. He said the problem was with “elements” that were “99% white” and did not represent the Black Lives Matter movement.

“It has nothing to do with helping Black people. These hoodlums are needlessly scaring neighbors and their children,” said Ron Herndon, who has fought for racial justice in Portland for four decades and led a school boycott in 1979 after the city closed predominantly Black schools. “At some point, enough is enough.”

Late last week, some protesters barricaded the doors to a police precinct a half-block from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and set fire to the building, which also houses Black-owned businesses, including an Ethiopian restaurant and a barber’s school. Two nights later, a potluck at a park in the heart of the Black community morphed into another violent clash with police, who unleashed tear gas to quell the crowd of several hundred people.

The New York Postreports: 

An anti-police brutality demonstration involving several hundred people in Portland, Oregon, descended into violence, prompting police to declare a riot in the city for the second time in three days.

The protest late Thursday began with a “couple hundred” people outside the Multnomah County Justice Center, where some demonstrators shot off fireworks as the crowd blocked nearby streets, Portland police said in a statement Friday.

The demonstration then turned violent just before midnight after federal officers moved outside the courthouse to protect the building and were met by protesters who used slingshots to launch projectiles at them, including large rocks and bottles, police said.

Protesters also threw lit fireworks into the broken glass doors of an adjacent federal courthouse, police said.

Officers at the scene warned protesters minutes later that they’d be subjected to use of force, including “crowd control munitions,” if they did not leave the area, department officials said.

As cops broke up the crowd, some demonstrators were “very hostile and violent” toward officers, including someone who threw an open pocketknife at them, police said.

Protesters then started launching mortars towards the federal courthouse, causing a fire to break out inside the building. Several people were taken into custody, but police had not provided an official tally as of midday Friday, The Oregonian reports.