After hours of largely peaceful demonstrations, violence escalated late Friday in downtown Portland, as hundreds of people gathered to protest the Minneapolis police killing of a black man.
The death of George Floyd has triggered a wave of national outrage that culminated into a chaotic night of vandalism and fires in downtown Portland.
A little after 11 p.m., demonstrators broke windows and set a fire that eventually died down inside the Multnomah County Justice Center, which houses a county jail and police headquarters. Online video shows people in an office space tossing computers, phones and furniture.
Portland Police labeled the event an “unlawful assembly" and began to move in toward the crowd. “If you do not go home now, force will be used to disperse you,” police said on Twitter.
Police officers in riot gear arrived around 11:15 p.m. Police used tear gas, pepper balls and stun grenades to attempt to break up the protest.
But protesters spread out, and the chaos continued through downtown.
Some people spray painted buildings and smashed windows at a nearby Apple and Microsoft store. One man threw his skateboard into a nearby Starbucks window, shattering the glass. Around 11:30 p.m., people broke the glass doors of the closed Pioneer Place mall and went inside. Several people left with items from stores.
Mannequin parts lay strewn across Yamhill Street near the mall.
Nearby, several people emptied a dumpster and set pallets and cardboard on fire, blocking the intersection of Southwest Fourth Avenue and Alder Street. A police officer could be heard on a loudspeaker declaring the event an unlawful assembly and warning the crowd to leave the area or risk officers using force against them.
Police surrounded the flames and waited for firefighters, who extinguished the fire before a second one erupted at the same place minutes later. Around downtown, some cars were set aflame.
Around 11:50 p.m., police declared the situation a riot, telling people to leave immediately or “be subject to force.”
Hundreds of people remained downtown. Police continued to use tear gas and stun grenades. The police agency also tweeted that it was shutting down nearly all of downtown, from Naito Parkway to 13th Avenue, to traffic. Several officers in riot gear guarded the Justice Center, where the protest first escalated nearly two hours earlier.
As the violence devolved, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler tweeted a plea to protesters to remain peaceful.
“Portland, this is not us,” he wrote. “When you destroy our city, you are destroying our community. When you act in violence against each other, you are hurting all of us. How does this honor the legacy of George Floyd?”
About an hour later, Wheeler tweeted that he was leaving his dying mother to return to the city due to the carnage.
“I am with family to prepare for her final moments,” the mayor wrote. “This is hard, this is personal, but so is watching my city get destroyed.”
Until late Friday, police had remained distant from the protests. But tension escalated as marchers made their way toward downtown from Peninsula Park in North Portland, where an evening vigil attracted thousands of people. Some windows of businesses along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. were shattered, and other buildings were tagged with spray-painted messages.
An Oregonian/OregonLive photographer saw a man on a skateboard hit by a car after the car drove toward marchers near the intersection of Northeast Shaver Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The pedestrian who was hit walked away from the collision, and the car drove away.
The vigil and march were organized by activist network Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front. Some members of the group have been holding constant vigil outside the Justice Center. Earlier Friday afternoon, demonstrators spray-painted messages memorializing Floyd and supporting Minneapolis protesters onto stone columns outside the Justice Center.
Protests in downtown Eugene Friday night also led to debris being burned in the streets and inside dumpsters as well as vandalism.
Mark Graves and Dave Killen of the Oregonian/OregonLive contributed to this report, which will be updated.
-- Molly Harbarger
mharbarger@oregonian.com
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