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The chief of police in Portland, Oregon, acknowledged this week that the force had misled the public about a deadly attack on traffic-safety volunteers before a Black Lives Matter protest in 2022, by wrongly telling the media that the gunman had been confronted by “armed protesters”.
In fact, as a visual investigation by the research group Forensic Architecture first published by the Guardian last year showed, the traffic-safety volunteers at the 19 February 2022 protest were unarmed, and trying to de-escalate the rightwing gunman when he opened fire.
The mass shooting, which claimed the lives of two people and left three others injured, was stopped by a volunteer armed guard for the protest who rushed to the scene, shot the gunman in the hip and disarmed him.
In a recorded video statement posted online Wednesday, Bob Day, the Portland police bureau chief, issued a public apology for the misinformation about the attack provided to the media by the police. “I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the incredible pain and trauma this tragedy has caused,” Day said. “In addition, I want to recognize the role the Portland police bureau played in exacerbating that pain.”
“Following the shooting, PPB issued a news release calling the perpetrator of this violent act a homeowner, when in fact he was not,” Day said. “Additionally, the victims were mischaracterized as armed protesters when, in fact, they were unarmed traffic-safety volunteers”.
Day acknowledged that, even after police detectives and prosecutors had viewed video of the assault, recorded on the helmet-camera of one victim, and used it in court against the attacker, 43-year-old Ben Smith, the false statement about a “confrontation” with “armed protesters” remained uncorrected on the police website. “We did not clarify that this was an unprovoked attack on an innocent group,” Day said. “We understand the harm this error caused, and for that we are deeply sorry.”
One gunshot victim, June Knightly, 60, died that night; a second, who used the nickname Deg, was left quadriplegic. In July 2024, Deg, 32, exercised her right to die by choosing to stop using the ventilator she needed to breath.
Smith pleaded guilty in March 2023 to murder and attempted murder, and was sentenced to life in prison.
The shooting victims were part of a community of antifascist volunteers that formed spontaneously in 2020 to keep the racial justice protesters who filled Portland’s streets day after day safe by redirecting traffic away from marchers, a role known as “corking”, providing them with emergency medical aid and using principles of de-escalation to talk down aggrieved bystanders.
As the Guardian reported last year, public records obtained by Forensic Architecture revealed that police officers responding to the mass shooting had been told that it was an “anti-police protest”. Officers then treated the gravely wounded survivors of the attack more like suspects than victims of a mass shooting.
The police chief’s effort to correct the record comes before the third anniversary of the attack, in response to pleas from the survivors, their families and community groups.
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In October, the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing (PCCEP), which is empowered by a court to monitor the PPB, screened the Forensic Architecture reconstruction of the attack. The committee met with Day recently and was about to issue a formal recommendation that he apologize when he did so.
The survivors of the attack also fault the mayor at the time, Ted Wheeler, for public comments he made before the shooting, in which he urged Portland residents to take their city back from the racial justice demonstrators, and suggested it was time to “make it hurt them a little bit”.
Before he left office at the end of December, Wheeler met with Deg’s mother, who urged him to issue a public apology for the way her daughter’s reputation, and that of her fellow victims, had been tarnished.
Instead, Wheeler sent her a private letter by email in which he wrote: “Benjamin Smith perpetrated senseless and horrific violence that night at Normandale Park on people who had done nothing wrong. I also recognize that incredible harm was compounded by the early reporting from the Portland Police Bureau and the failure to unequivocally correct the record. Please accept my apology as Mayor and Police Commissioner.”
Before he left office, Wheeler did agree that the city would work with survivors of the attack and people who live near the park to create a permanent memorial to the victims.
