Ted Wheeler’s Lies Put Lives At Risk

Governor Kate Brown earlier today issued a statement about confrontations between the Portland Police Bureau and local protesters.

I am disturbed by what appears to be a pattern of escalation between the Portland Police Bureau and this group of protestors, and by the Police Bureau’s use of crowd control munitions. Use of force, regardless of its legal justification, will do nothing to solve the underlying concerns of racial justice and police accountability raised by the protests. I strongly urge the City of Portland to be proactive in using strategies focused on de-escalation and dialogue in order to prevent and avoid this senseless cycle of violence.

If she’s looking for escalation, she need look no further than this afternoon’s Twitter thread by Major Ted Wheeler about the clashes, in which he fabricates an incident in which protesters set fire to a building and then locked the doors, trapping people inside.

[Ed. note: This post originally had a screen capture here, but it was lost during a site migration.]

This never happened.

There have been incidents involving fire or fireworks and a separate incident—drawn entirely from a Bureau press release—of protesters apparently tying shut a precinct door with the rope from a flag pole. Even the police didn’t claim a fire had been set inside with people locked in.

I’d initially joked on Twitter that Wheeler’s tweet was like Trump telling a story his friend Jim told him, but the reality is that this sort of disinformation endangers protesters by creating a false narrative about them that only will play into the hands of an increasingly-violent police department.

In the final tweet of his statement, Wheeler concludes with four words: “Lives are at stake.”

They are, Ted.

You’re the one putting them at risk.