Portland cops broke own policies by spraying dangerous amounts of tear gas toward protesters

Travis Gettys
April 17, 2023

Portland had seen more than three months of sometimes violent protests against police brutality and racism

Portland police indiscriminately blasted tear gas toward demonstrators during the George Floyd protests in violation of their own policies.

The research agency Forensic Architecture, which investigates human rights violations, analyzed hundreds of videos from June 2, 2020, along with internal police files and other evidence, and found the Oregon city's downtown area was blanketed with tear gas in amounts more than 50 times above levels considered to be "immediately dangerous to life or health," reported The Guardian.

“Teargas is a form of violence that is formless and shapeless and to a certain extent invisible,” said Lola Conte, an advanced researcher with Forensic Architecture. “Visualizing allows us to understand the massive scale of the spread, and I hope this makes the harm unignorable and shows that something is failing on so many levels with the use of tear gas.”

The findings strongly contradict the police department's claims in internal reports at the time, when officers defended their actions as heroic and restrained, but instead show police sprayed chemicals considered to be a weapon of war toward hospitals, freeways and other facilities before eventually reaching the nearby Willamette River.

“If tear gas is a war crime among soldiers, why is it appropriate to use on your own people?” said Juan Chavez, civil rights project director at the Oregon Justice Resource Center. “And the Portland police department doesn’t care about the effects of long-term consistent exposure to teargas. To them, it’s an inventory issue: ‘Do we have enough teargas and how much more can we use?’”

A number of protesters -- and downtown residents who didn't even participate in the demonstrations -- describe painful and disturbing symptoms after they were gassed, and one woman says her persistent menstrual issues and respiratory problems improved after she moved outside the city.

“There was a burning while I was breathing that was gone once I moved,” said 42-year-old Liv Vasquez, who didn't directly attend the protests.

Forensic Architecture reviewed internal records that suggest the Portland Police Bureau knew officers did not track how much tear gas they were spraying or whether the levels were above Occupational Safety and Health Administration thresholds for dangerous exposure.

“It’s disturbing that this is so much higher than the standard, and yet it’s completely normal for protests everywhere,” said Dr. Rohini Haar, an emergency medicine physician and adviser for Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).