Family and supporters of Patrick Kimmons, a 27-year-old black man shot by Portland Police last month, protested outside the Multnomah County Courthouse today. They were responding to a grand jury’s decision to not indict the officers who shot him.
The protest took place on SW 4th Avenue and, according to the Portland Police Bureau, responding officers urged people to get onto the sidewalk. As they addressed the scene, a 55-year-old man purposely drove into them. Here’s the police statement:
“The officers contacted the demonstrators and requested they move off the roadway and onto the sidewalk; however, the group remained on the roadway, blocking vehicle traffic. As officers developed a plan to divert traffic, officers continued to request the protestors move to the sidewalk. While officers continued to communicate with the crowd and direct them to the sidewalk, the driver of a dark blue Chevrolet 2500 pick-up traveled north on Southwest 4th Avenue into the crowd of people and struck a protester. The protester did not require medical treatment.
Officers located and stopped the Chevrolet truck and driver near the intersection of Southwest 3rd Avenue and Southwest Madison Street. The driver was taken into custody without incident.”
The driver, Mark Dickerson, was put in jail and faces charges of Assault in the Fourth Degree, Reckless Endangering, and Reckless Driving.
I’m not close to the Patrick Kimmons case; but I approach this from a transportation/safe streets journalism and advocacy perspective. What happened today should not be seen as separate from the growing rhetoric around protestors and their use of the streets.
Earlier this month the story about protestors who yelled at and damaged the car of a man who tried to drive around them went viral. The story became fodder for the national narrative of divisiveness and became a provocative example of “Antifa mobs” that had “taken over Portland streets.” This type of rhetoric plays into peoples’ existing political biases and their frustrations about not being able to freely drive wherever they want, whenever they want.
Advertisement
When you are in control of multi-ton steel vehicle with enough power to easily hurt or kill another person, it’s very easy for charged rhetoric to spill over into action.
Last week we reported on two local business owners who made public statements that running people over with cars was an acceptable behavior. When Portlander Mark Holzmann shared his story on his Facebook page about a bike rider who allegedly slashed his tires after a road rage incident, at least one of Holzmann’s friends replied in a comment that the bicycle rider was part of the “Antifa mob.”
This stuff is dangerous. In today’s emotional political climate where protests are common, older white men feel victimized by a rapidly changing society, and hate toward others feels like it’s at an all-time high, we can’t allow our streets to become even more dangerous because people think it’s justifiable to mow protestors down with their cars.
When I put a spotlight on the comments of those two business owners, some people said I should “relax” and “lighten up” and that it was “just a joke.”
As someone who attends street protests and uses our roads without the protection of a large steel box around me, I don’t think it’s funny at all.
I hope today’s incident doesn’t result in a crackdown on street protests and even more heavy-handed tactics from the PPB. The right for the public to assemble and air grievances should have a higher priority than the privilege of driving a large motorized vehicle through our streets.
— Jonathan Maus: (503) 706-8804, @jonathan_maus on Twitter and jonathan@bikeportland.org
Never miss a story. Sign-up for the daily BP Headlines email.
BikePortland needs your support.
Thanks for reading.
BikePortland has served this community with independent community journalism since 2005. We rely on subscriptions from readers like you to survive. Your financial support is vital in keeping this valuable resource alive and well.
Please subscribe today to strengthen and expand our work.
More disorder in Portland and it continues from the poor leadership at the top. The police are merely a joke. How many more of these incidents do we have to have before Ted wales up and smells the coffee? If he needs a fresh cup I’m sure we can find him one.
You would also think that the city would have had a heads up on this ruling and would’ve been prepared for a rally. But no, they’ll continue to claim that they “tried” but it was probably more like they didn’t do enough.
None of this excuses this persons actions but I think the city can do better and continues to sit on their hands role.
Yeah where were the police?!!? Besides moving the protest out of the street, and arresting the guy in the truck! What a joke! Also: Ted Wheeler, somehow! He probably tells the police “Make sure you move any protests out of the street” and “Arrest anybody who commits crimes.” Somebody wake up Ted before the police do pretty much what they’re supposed to again!
Driver was wrong, protesters were wrong. Driver’s illegal actions were more spur of the moment, the protesters’ illegal actions were organized – yet the mayor permits it.
Where in this description is the mayor permitting it?
“The officers contacted the demonstrators and requested they move off the roadway and onto the sidewalk; however, the group remained on the roadway, blocking vehicle traffic. As officers developed a plan to divert traffic, officers continued to request the protestors move to the sidewalk.”
Where does it say anything about mayor charging the protesters who violated several laws and are scamming the driver?
I take pretty much the opposite view: Let protesters block the streets for a while if that helps; route vehicles around them; help people who are trapped by the demonstration get out.
one is civil disobedience, the other is assault.
One is breaking the law. The other is driving carefully along a road with rioters illegally blocking the road and jumping in front of a vehicle and faking getting hit and vandalizing the same vehicle.
Stop conflating civil disobedience and assault with a deadly weapon. They are not even remotely the same.
Which of the two following scenarios would you find more upsetting?
1. Your neighbor stands in your driveway, blocking your car, preventing you from leaving.
2. Your neighbor hits you with their pickup while you are walking to your car.
MotRG loves to champion equivalencies, even or especially when they are patently absurd.
That’s true. I especially enjoy doing that in this forum, when that tactic is used so frequently by others. They can only see the absurdity in the comment from someone else, but not in their own.
“They can only see the absurdity in the comment from someone else, but not in their own.”
There’s your false equivalency, again.
Comparisons of automobiles with guns are especially annoying:
~40,100 people were killed by people driving deathmobiles in 2017. (National Safety Council)
~15,549 people were killed by people shooting deathguns in 2017. (Gun Violence Archive)
If you’re only going to count people shot intentionally with guns, you should only include people killed intentionally with cars, which is two to three orders of magnitude lower than the number of gun deaths you cited.
If you made a fair comparison, you’d find your rhetorical point much diminished.
Thanks for the suggestion:
Number of people “accidentally” killed by people using guns: 505 (National Vital Statistics Reports)
“They can only see the absurdity in the comment from someone else, but not in their own.”
I guess you think that your false equivalencies will draw attention to the falsity of others’ equivalencies. But I don’t think it works as you imagine it. Many equivalencies are valid, reasonable, readily demonstrated. Your admittedly false equivalencies are nothing of the sort. Most here seem to have no problem distinguishing the two categories.
I think you are reading the wrong article. These rioters are nowhere near being neighbors.
“How many more of these incidents do we have to have before Ted wales up and smells the coffee?”
You mean have him close all streets downtown to motor vehicles until they stop hurting people? Right?
No, you mean that he should continue to give the roads over to dangerous motorized private property instead of people.
The police were fully prepared……to do nothing. They claim they were preparing a plan to move the protestors, but if I read correctly, the lanes were blocked for four hours. I think drivers should protest by driving 1 mph through the blockade, maybe led by a few courageous walking citizens. That’s all it would take to open up the streets, and get the polluting cars on their way.
I’m intrigued by the efforts of the police to herd the protesters onto the sidewalk. It’s likely that there were enough protesters that they would block the sidewalk if they all gathered there. It strikes me that the right to travel predates the Constitution and is, in fact, a right. Blocking the sidewalk interferes with that right. Use of the travel lanes of a roadway with a motor vehicle is a privilege, so the PPB was placing the privilege of driving ahead of the right to travel by foot. That seems topsy-turvy to me, but I’m not addicted to using cars so perhaps my bias is showing (again).
The writers of the US constitution of 1787 went out of their way to NOT deal with many major controversial issues, including slavery, property access, education, the military, government land restrictions (including right-of-way), human rights, etc. It’s still remarkable that in spite of the signers various strong religious beliefs, the word “god” is never mentioned anywhere in it.
The Magna Carta of 1215, which is often cited as a major precursor for our constitution, has over 40 major articles, most of which relate to access to “forests”, which has nothing to do with trees, but rather to do with land use controls and who has access rights, who doesn’t, and what rights owners have versus the central government (the king and his barons.) Trail by jury, habeus corpus, and government by parliament all come towards the end as “add ons.”
While we might today view the public right-of-way in a hierarchy with pedestrians at the top, this hasn’t always been the case. Express riders were usually given top priority. Technically, river traffic is at the top in the USA, followed by railroads, then public right-of-way. Even emergency vehicles have to (legally) yield to river traffic and trains.
No God? So, who would you think is Creator?
This is bikeportland. I don’t think we are particularly parochial around here, or sectarian or churched.
Then obviously, the protesters could have protested on a barely used side street. Their intent was to disrupt – that’s a different issue than right to travel.
The freedom of speech is not limited to free speech zones.
The right to assemble is not limited to assembly halls.
Uh, yelling fire in a theater?
You could say the same thing about The Boston Massacre.
The police and the City of Portland want to avoid getting caught between between the right to assemble in the constitution and access to the streets by drivers. Favoring access to the streets for drivers could put them in expensive litigation, so they ask demonstrators to use the sidewalk.
Interestingly, there is a basic right to move about, but there is no such basic right to operate a motor vehicle on the street. However, the police are asking protesters to block the sidewalk instead of the street.
There were 12 “protesters.” Not enough in my estimation to think they could stop traffic. Police need to do better.
Busting more skulls?
Only 12? I bet I could avoid running over any of them.
What I don’t understand is why attempting to run someone over isn’t charged as attempted murder, as it should be.
Read any other minds lately?
You presume the worst (to kill) I presume intent to scare and perhaps harm, but not kill.
If I point a weapon at somebody and activate it then I think it’s safe to say that I wanted them dead.
guessing the reason it might not be charged as attempted murder, and i’m not condoning either side here, is the truck appeared to be moving 5-10mph and cutting thru the protesters like a car cutting thru pedestrians at a busy intersection in NYC. can’t see where anyone was hit by the car unless you count a protester swinging his/her fist at the truck and connecting.
Which video are you using for reference? The only one I’ve seen is that short FB one linked in these comments, which doesn’t show anything definitive except the reaction of the crowd.
the video is short/edited…but it does appear to show about 5 feet before the intersection and 40 feet after. as many have noted, it was a tiny protest so am guessing that any impact likely would have occurred in that range. my assumptions might be wrong, but many on here seem pretty comfortable assuming the guy attempted to run people down in a calculated attempt at murder, the video doesn’t suggest that.
I can’t even be sure this is the right video. Who got hit? I just see somebody slapping a truck and people screaming.
If he was going 10 mph, or even 5 mph, the protestor would not have been talking to the media, unscathed, seconds after the ‘attempted murder’.
whew. Good thing it was a car and not a deadly weapon.
I don’t understand why 12 people harassing a single person is not terrorism.
Maybe because it’s not?
I can’t help you if you don’t understand the definition of terrorism.
?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terrorism
12 people harrassing a single person happens every time someone runs with a football.
Flag!
You can only have 11 men on the field.
Canadian Football League
Consent. The other player signed up for it.
Once I had 24 dozen men harrassing me. That was two gross to describe.
At least charge it as assault with a deadly weapon (aggravated assault). 4th degree assault is only a misdemeanor.
Cars are not considered “deadly weapons”. They are, like baseball bats and hammers, “dangerous” weapons. The two categories are handled pretty differently.
Finally watched the video.
There is no way any reasonable person would call what happened “attempted murder”. The obvious defence will be the driver felt threatened by the protesters yelling and banging on his car. The obvious prosecution line will be he entered the area deliberately, and could have trivially turned before entering the block, as is shown clearly on the video.
Based on what I saw on the video, I’d be willing to bet he isn’t convicted.
The ***name-calling deleted by moderator*** didn’t want to testify and possibly jeopardize his following civil suit. Either way, the video speaks for itself and corrects all the fake victim’s lies and accusations.
Jonathan, this certainly makes your criticisms of the two business owners seem prescient.
Can’t believe (well, actually I can) it only took a week for an actual incident to happen.
Details are important. It appears the officers in Kimmon’s shooting were found justified in their actions. We live in a city that no longer finds it acceptable to label known criminals involved in gang activity as gang members. I’m sure Kimmons family is distraught, and I’m very sorry for their loss, but it appears his actions were in serious question.
Now, let’s look at this horrible story…
Peace out everyone.
He shot two people and then ran at police with a gun. Regardless of the outcome, why are they defending this guy?
It’s not really relevant to the issue of the guy driving his car into them.
Hear hear, Jonathan!
Almost sounds like stereotyping when you say “older white men feel victimized “. As an older white male I embrace progressive change.
any better video than this out there?
https://www.facebook.com/MarjaKPTV/videos/283648275591005/
Driving is a privilege, protesting (free speech) is a right
Sure, but you can’t exercise your rights anywhere you want. I can’t carry a weapon into a courthouse, can I?
You can drive on one of the several streets parallel to the one that was blocked.
Not if you already turned onto a one-way street not knowing protestors were blocking it; then no backing up or turning around. The news video showed him slowly progressing through.
Under the circumstances, no one could have blamed the driver for slowly backing up. The police should have helped organize the effort.
You can’t even go into a courthouse without them violating your 4th amendment rights.
Odd that you have so many rights taken away from you if you need to go have your rights upheld.
#False equivalency? Jeez. What is it with your outlandish comparisons?
This is antifa car drivers?
I always PayPal 2 bucks when comments like this come up.
Who benefits from your largesse? Antifa?
I think it would be much better if we articles like this did not fuel the country’s divisiveness with racist statements such as “older white men feel victimized by a rapidly changing society.” Earlier this year, as Streetsblog has reported, a driver named Alana Ealy purposely ran into and severely injured an individual who was protesting a horrifying hit-and-run that took the life of a bicyclist in Los Angeles. And Alana Ealy is very much a younger (19-years-old at the time) black woman who presumably did not run over a protester because of her feeling about societal changes.
Haha racism against whites doesn’t exist. Also, we’re replacing and dehumanizing white people 24/7, and that’s a good thing.
– the left
Except it doesn’t. Your thinking that it does is a fundamental misunderstanding of what racism is.
I think we could all avoid a lot of pointless argument by referring to racism as “racism” and institutional racism as “institutional racism”. Those are different things, and using the same term for both just muddies the conversation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
White people are the only racial group is it legal to discriminate against on the basis of race when hiring for a job. White people are told by every mainstream institution, be it media, news, higher education, etc, that they and their culture are uniquely terrible, and must be suppressed, disempowered, and ultimately replaced. White people are told they have no culture, didn’t have to work as hard for what they’ve earned, and are loudly proclaimed to be evil bigots filled with hatred when they have the gall to question whether or not mass immigration from Latin America is a beneficial thing.
I am tired of hearing people ceaselessly denigrate me and my history. I am tired of seeing my country and economy stagnate under the unceasing waves of immigration, legal and illegal. And I am not alone. If you think white people are racist now, then I hope you clutch your pearls as tight as you can because I fear it’s going to get so much worse.
Looking in the mirror can be uncomfortable.
Yeah, let’s not look.
I don’t think you’re a bad or stupid person but this sort of smug, canned response to a genuine expression of concern for the future of this country is a shining example of how frighteningly out of touch the urban left is.
“a genuine expression of concern for the future of this country”
If that was your expression of genuine concern, what would an angry, xenophobic rant look like?
Your world you live in sounds horrible.
It’s like you are standing on the train tracks with concrete shoes, pointing and laughing as the bullet train approaches. You have absolutely no idea what’s coming; you think it’s all just going to blow over and go back to normal when Orange Cheeto Hitler is out of office, but you’re horribly wrong. People are right when they say, “This time it’s different.” No amount of smug quips from you or anyone else is going to help prevent what is coming in the next few decades. I hope everything will resolve in some peaceful way.
I don’t know what concrete shoes are, but I see several trains approaching. I’m under no illusion that the future will be a smooth extrapolation of the recent past. But what is unfortunate for purposes of discussion, of learning from each other, is that your first(?) post here was so full of misplaced resentment. How to proceed? Find something to talk about?
It will, as long as you keep your white nationalist buddies from committing acts of domestic terrorism.
The weird thing is, my comment, “Your world you live in sounds horrible” could be viewed as sympathetic as easily as it could have been viewed in any negative way. You know nothing about my race, gender or anything else.
Yet you immediately took it as a “smug quip”, then blasted off into your dramatic “concrete shoes…pointing and laughing” characterization. All inspired by a fairly benign comment.
Could it be that that’s what you do on a larger scale, interpreting neutral or even sympathetic comments and actions of others as attacks on you? It would explain a lot.
Dude, I’m white a man and I have no idea why so many of you other white guys are getting your panties in such a twist. Being white has been freaking glorious for me. All this whining about how white people are a poor, discriminated-against underclass??? It’s bull. I have seen not one bit of evidence. I got no problems being white. My life has been an endless parade of doors getting opened for me. You know what, though, I’ve got students who are poor (white, brown, etc), and them, they’ve had a rough go of it. Maybe what you’ve experienced is not reverse discrimination, but rather the effects of right-wing economic policies that prioritize benefits to wealthy people. It’s an old trick, and LBJ summed it up nicely: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
“older white men feel victimized by a rapidly changing society.”
While I agree that it’s a broad statement that doesn’t apply to all, it seems to be mostly accurate according to my own accounts.
The person this article is about is an older white male. The one mentioned from earlier in the month is an older white male. Both business owners referenced are older white males.
It seems to me that older white males are more prone to act violently on perceived injustice caused by societal change.
You’re welcome to submit an article that mentions all the women of color that have intentionally run down pedestrians with their vehicles.
Fortunately the deliberate use of cars to run down pedestrians is very rare, so deriving meaningful trends from them is difficult. But if you want non-white male examples, Google Alana Ealy or Sayfullo Saipov. Both left their victims in far worse shape than did Dickerson.
If you had thrown such generalizations at a protected group (say LGBQ or black women), your comment would have been deleted in a New York minute.
Are you unsure why some groups at least on paper are accorded modest protections? VRU? The fake equivalencies floated in the comments here recently are kooky.
I nearly get sick watching these “protesters” disrupting our daily lives in the formerly great city of Portland. Placing one’s body in the road in front of a killing machine is just daring someone to hurt you. Mark Dickerson could have easily killed someone, but instead he chose to push someone out of the way. I think he should have been given an award for his restraint. The pendulum has swung too far.
Why is “protesters” in quotes? Is it because it’s a made up word?
What would you name your award?
I’m kind of scared that this comment received 3 likes for congratulating someone for not killing anyone.
“Why is “protesters” in quotes? ”
i think there is really some fatigue in the general public beyond old white men or whatever phrase JM thru out. is proud boys v antifa round#10 really a protest or just a city sanctioned series of brawls. I understand the man shot and killed by police was a father, but its possible to look at the video of him shooting 2 men at point blank range and then turning and running gun in hand toward 2 police officers and think “what exactly were they ‘protesting’ yesterday?” without being a sociopath.
Yes, America would be a fare greater and more democratic country if protestors were confined to little fenced in ” free speech zones”. I mean. how dare that MLK and the civil rights protestors take up an entire road on the way to Selma Alabama. I mean can you believe the disruption of property rights and commerce when the colonists dumped British Tea in Boston harbor.
Why didn’t he just back up? The police should have cleared the street behind him and directed him out of the area.
The police should never have allowed the street riot.
You are a sociopath.
oooh! slander!
No more slander than the admin of this site deleting comments is a violation of the first amendment. You’re really having to reach lately to try and make a point, aren’t you?
Tired of daily activities being disrupted by daily activities?
Don’t want the government to add chemicals to your drinking chemicals?
I’m tired of the killing machines interrupting daily life.
I don’t want the old Portland. It was scary and unsafe. Old white men want the old Portland. I like being able to walk and bike to where I need to go without worrying about being mugged. Ask women and minorities which Portland they like. Their answers will surprise you.
I don’t know what “women” want, but I do know what many people who are women want. Same with “minorities”.
People are not their demographics.
“Mark Dickerson could have easily killed someone, but instead he chose to push someone out of the way (with his truck). I think he should have been given an award for his restraint.”
I think I showed equal or better restraint–cases where I could have killed someone for doing something equal or worse than slightly delaying me–17 times today.
I can’t believe how readily people want to throw away their rights to protest because it impedes their imaginary unassailable right to run someone over with their two-time weapon in the name of el hefe, car-culture.
“Two-ton”.
Maus how would you feel if your family was trapped in a vehicle downtown with a mob surrounding and threatening them for nothing other than just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Get off your throne and stop pandering.
Burnham I would feel terrible if that happened to my family and I would hope they would use any means necessary to protect themselves, including violence with their car if they felt it was the only thing that would keep them from being hurt themselves.
I am all for defending myself if someone is threatening me, people I love, or my property.
But this isn’t about that. The decision to defend oneself is very serious and requires clarity of thought that’s all but impossible when bias and anger and stereotypes and irrational fears are mixed in. The idea that all protestors are hell-bent on hurting innocent people is BS. Many people are using that narrative to justify their existing biases. It’s complete BS and it’s dangerous to the functioning of a civil society.
And by the way, you don’t know me at all. I have no idea why 99.9% of your comments seek to call me out and/or are entirely unproductive or mean toward other people on this site.
I’m not on a throne. If I was I wouldn’t spend so much time moderating your comments and comments from lots of other people I don’t know — including many that disagree and/or are critical of me and/or things I believe in. On the contrary, I’m here in the comment section with everyone else because I value your input as much as I value the words I type in my own stories. That has always been my way of doing things. I’m trying to run a business and part of that business is to help us all discuss important issues in a productive way so that our lives can be improved.
I’d love for you to continue to be a part of this and I welcome your contributions.
Maybe you should get off your throne, open your eyes, watch the video, and get your brain working. Unless you look forward to this happening in your neighborhood, which, of course, you support wholeheartedly.
“if your family was trapped in a vehicle downtown with a mob surrounding ”
Your scenario, far fetched though it seems to me, brought to mind the elegant shoppers we saw in downtown Seattle on November 30th, 1999, stepping over us with their oversized paper shopping bags. 50,000 protesters from around the globe, tanks, tear gas, police some of whom were clubbing people and others who were crying, the WTO cheeses, all crammed into a couple dozen blocks, but these folks were absolutely determined to buy that evening gown or pair of shoes on that day!
If you watch the video, that is clearly not what happened here.
Did you watch the video?
If it was me in that situation, I would stop as soon as I realized there were people in the street, turn off the engine, set the brake, roll down the window, say ‘hi’ and ask what’s going on. That has worked for me in real life.
Ageism, sexism and racism all in one post. The stereotyping is dangerous. Very. Bad form.
Identity politics is a losing battle.
Wow, Jonathan. “The right for the public to assemble and air grievances should have a higher priority than the privilege of driving a large motorized vehicle through our streets.” Let’s rephrase what you said to clarify for what is seen on video: The right for the public to violate multiple laws in the middle of an open vehicle road and air grievances about their disagreement of a police action by blocking open vehicle roads and screaming and yelling and assaulting and vandalizing a moving vehicle that had no connection with the case they are protesting with sticks and signs should have a higher priority than the lawful passage of driving a government approved and registered vehicle through the streets that were designed for the same vehicle.
Help with justice. https://www.gofundme.com/Unjust-arrest-due-to-man-faking-getting-hit?