One of the most disturbing sights following a weekend of shootings that left two dead, five injured and two neighborhoods wondering what the hell happened, was watching police Lt. Nathan Sheppard stand by helplessly as Antifa loudmouth Hailley Nolan took over his press conference.
Instead of Sheppard delivering information on what happened Saturday night at a shooting at a Southwest Portland apartment complex and another shooting at a park in Northeast Portland, Nolan walked up to the microphone and pushed him aside. Her Antifa cronies hovered nearby.
A large, jiggly white woman, Nolan screamed about how the cops were not protecting her from white supremacists. Specifically, the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang – a ridiculous assertion.
“I’m not going to stand here and let these cops lie when they are sending Gypsy Jokers to kidnap us,” she shrieked.
Her sidekicks started chanting “A-N-D-Y-N-G-O! Andy Ngo! Andy Ngo!” (Andy Ngo is to Antifa like kryptonite is to Superman. Just the mention of Ngo’s name sets off Antifa.)
Sheppard, a black police lieutenant with a Stanford degree, stood quietly dignified, looking around, his hands folded in front of him. Perhaps a little too dignified.
Nolan harangued Sheppard and the media about how she had been out protesting against police-sanctioned violence for two years. She went on about the death of Sean Kealiher, a white member of Rose City Antifa who was killed in a hit-and-run. Nolan blamed white supremacists for his unsolved killing. (His friends who witnessed the crash have refused to cooperate with police.)
“What is the city of Portland going to do about this?” she wailed.
After several minutes of non-stop berating by Nolan and her agitators, Sheppard threw in the towel and ended the press conference.
“If you guys want to give them a voice, that’s good,” he told the media.
He walked away, got into an unmarked car and left.
This all took place Sunday outside the Central police precinct in downtown Portland. The same precinct where two years ago Antifa rioters started fires.
“I was in our central precinct, which is our headquarters,” Sheppard told John Noltner on the website, A Peace of My Mind. “When protestors broke in and set fires inside, I could smell smoke on the 15th floor. I called my wife. I said, ‘I think everything’s going to be fine, but I just want to let you know, they’re trying to set this place on fire and I’m inside it.’”
For all the national and international publicity that the Portland riots attracted in 2020, Sheppard’s was not a viewpoint that was explored with any depth. Cops were routinely written off as the enemy. The rioters were portrayed as “peaceful protesters” standing up for racial injustice.
The media deserved the Antifa antics on display at Sunday’s press conference. They helped create Hailley Nolan. If the Gypsy Jokers wanted her dead, she would have been dead and disposed of a long time ago.
As it is, Nolan has found a secure home in Portland. She was arrested during the riots of 2020 for resisting arrest. Clearly, she is not afraid of the police.
She is now one of the thousands of rioters who were rewarded by the Oregon state legislature last year when legislators passed new laws removing officers’ authority to declare an unlawful assembly and limiting when police can arrest someone for interfering with an officer.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising then that Lt. Sheppard acquiesced while Nolan hijacked his press conference. He’s a Portland cop. He’s expected to jump through all the hoops that Portland’s progressives, anarchists, Antifas and cop-watchers demand.
Drug dealers, gang bangers, crazy people with guns, angry people with guns – all of them know the Portland score, too. No matter what the cops do, they get a big fat zero. If they pull over a driver who has a gun, and they seize that gun, it was excessive use of force. If the driver was black, it was racial profiling. If the cops fail to stop a shooting, it’s because they’re useless, and the community doesn’t trust them. (Just ask Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty.)
For Sheppard, becoming a police officer was all about serving people.
“In the Army, I got to serve people. I got to do my best to try to keep people safe. My dad was in the Army and his dad was in the Army. So it was just kind of a family of service. That’s the way I looked at it,” he said in his interview with Noltner.
Sheppard is a very different police officer than Derek Chauvin.
“I don’t want to say there was a personal shame because I’m not going to be ashamed of what somebody else has done. I’m not that person, and I live my life in a different way, but there’s definitely a shame for the profession. … I’ve definitely had to wrestle with that. It hasn’t made me want to stop being a police officer, though, because there are still people out there getting hurt. There’s still people out there who are begging for help, and I think I can give that to them.”
The shootings at the park in Northeast Portland were apparently related to a protest march about to begin. An armed homeowner and armed protesters squared off. The march was apparently related to the police shooting of a black man in Minneapolis, but it encompassed other shootings involving black suspects – particularly Patrick Kimmons, who was killed by Portland police in 2018 after he shot and wounded two other men.
It’s revealing how often media accounts of Kimmons’ death avoid mentioning that he shot two others. It’s also revealing how often Portland’s political leaders are quick to show sympathy with protesters.
“Devastated by the news about protestors being shot at in Normandale Park, resulting in 5 injuries and 1 death. We must make no mistake that aggressive anti-protest rhetoric is responsible for inciting this kind of violence, and we must speak out against it whenever we can,” tweeted Candace Avalos, who calls herself a “Blacktina” and chairs the Citizen Review Committee, which handles complaints against police. She offers not even a pretense of objectivity.
Likewise, State Sen. Akasha Lawrence Spence, who is black, quickly deduced that the problem is guns: “No one should fear that gathering for a redress of grievances might end in gun violence and fatality. I have and will continue working to tackle both the upstream and downstream solutions to ending rampant gun violence in our communities.”
Lawrence Spence did her part upstream last year when, as a state representative, she voted for all of the various police reform bills.
While she and Avalos aligned themselves with the protesters, Sheppard can speak with authority about what it’s like to be on the receiving end of all that “free speech.”
Portland was hit with roughly 170 days of protests beginning in 2020 and into 2021. Then-President Donald Trump denounced city leadership for its weak defense of the federal courthouse (there is still fence up to protect it). Federal agents were sent to assist.
“I don’t think they were invited,” Sheppard told Noltner. “Them being here didn’t really have anything to do with the Portland Police Bureau. I will tell you personally, I was happy to see them, but not for the reason that most people might think.
“After days and days, weeks and weeks and months of having rocks thrown at you, having balloons filled with feces and urine thrown at you, slingshots with ball-bearings, lasers aimed at your eyes, at some point you just need a break.
“For the first 40 days, days off were canceled. We came to work every single day, and we were attacked physically, verbally, psychologically, emotionally, every single day. So with the arrival of the federal forces, just on a personal level, it allowed us to have a break.”
As Sheppard points out, if all the protesters did was make their voices heard, the cops wouldn’t need to be around. But rioters take over. They are not marching for racial justice even though they may be yelling “Black Lives Matter.” They want conflict and a fight.
The 170 straight days of protesting were a singular experience for a police department.
“No police officer really has gone through what the Portland police officers have gone through,” Sheppard said on A Peace of My Mind. “And it’s really a shame in my opinion, because the Portland Police Bureau has consistently tried to be the police agency that the city wants. I’ve been a police officer for 15 years, and there has not been a time in that 15 years that we haven’t been changing our training, that we haven’t been looking at new laws and trying to mold ourselves around that.”
Well before George Floyd, the bureau had black youths come in and talk to officers during annual equity training.
Sheppard compares the situation of the Portland Police Bureau to the box that black men like himself are placed in because they are perceived as dangerous simply for being black and male.
In Portland, police are in a box.
Not HER again? God, she’s such a tedious basket case, loud mouth, whiny tool. I despise Antifa. I wrote a long essay on them, loaded to exploding with sources/links, and said everything I’d ever wanted to say about those unwashed hooligans. Spammed it to Kingdom come, too. Several of them threatened me, and went after me on Twitter. The actual TRUTH about those mental cases is what they fear the most.
I was listening to this Victor Davis Hanson discussion with Heather McDonald. As this marvelous article has not been weighed down with comments I'll throw this out there.
It is a commercial ienterprise so recall that you can drag and hop past the adverts:
https://podcasts.google.com/search/The%20Victor%20Davis%20Hanson%20Show