What Even Are Riots
“This is the Portland Police Bureau, this event has been declared a riot”
The R-word. It used to make my heart race and panic run down my spine, but after months and months, it barely phases me. It’s almost becoming mundane. Riots are declared across the whole spectrum of praxis; from standing around and vibing too close to A Special Building to throwing some soup for your family at a cop.
In an abstract and sensual way, I know what a riot is. It’s sweat pooling in my gas mask that’s struggling to filter gas-filled air as I gasp for breath, caught in interlinked cells of people grabbing each other’s backpacks in a way to stay safe. It’s the lactic acid building up in my legs as I beg them to keep moving no matter how tired I am. It’s Gatorade gulped down after a medic flushes your eyes with water while police lights illuminate the road a few blocks down. It is horrific episodes of police brutality on back to back repeat as protestors are snatched, brutalized, and kidnapped. It’s the clink of a tear gas canister by your feet, while pepper balls whiz past your face, or slamming into the backs of your thighs. It’s horrible and violent and scary. People get hurt, people are dying. The saying is true, we are in an age of monsters.
However in a legal sense; according to the Oregon Revised Statue 166.015 a Riot, as a crime is when; a person participating with five or more persons the person engages in tumultuous and violent conduct and thereby intentionally or recklessly creates a grave risk of causing public alarm. By this definition, I feel like this would apply to the people in riot armor with guns who keep shooting less-lethal munitions and crowd control agents in the direction they order people to disperse more than the people with homemade shields and skateboard helmets walking around and in the streets. In a 33 day span, the Portland Police Bureau declared at least 23 riots and 22 unlawful assemblies, not counting unlawful assemblies that turned into riots.
The federal government, because there are feds and fed-deputized agents are crawling all over Portland, defines a riot as a public disturbance involving an act or acts of violence by one or more persons part of an assemblage of three or more persons, which act or acts shall constitute a clear and present danger of, or shall result in, damage or injury to the property of any other person or to the person of any other individual or a threat or threats of the commission of an act or acts of violence by one or more persons part of an assemblage of three or more persons having, individually or collectively, the ability of immediate execution of such threat or threats, where the performance of the threatened act or acts of violence would constitute a clear and present danger of or would result in, damage or injury to the property of any other person or to the person of any other individual. Per 18 U.S.C. § 2102
What is tumultuous and violent about standing in the street? Or chanting? Or talking shit to pigs even?[sarcasm] Oh no, we block traffic (but still let people through peacefully as needed), this is just as terrible as the systemic murder of Black people by police [/sarcasm]. It has frequently been the police who act tumultuous and violent conduct in groups of 5+ people. Images of strobing lights of their cars reflecting off their chitinous armor while they charge us, gas us, shoot at us, and worse is seared into my skull. And a riot federally is 3+ people. Which is not a very big riot. And worrying about damage to property, again? Property can be rebuilt. People can’t be. I don’t know how to make it more clear to folks.
No matter how you slice it, any legal definition of a riot has an unacceptable amount of vague wording and wiggle room and depends on what the LEO sees, ore more realistically what they claimed to see. Hanging out with four friends at home depot could constitute a riot if a cop had enough of a stick up their ass. Especially with all the Portland soup cans there. So I can really only come to the conclusion that the declaration of a riot is an arbitrary thing that has no real universal definition.
