The real cops hold back for fear of changing ‘the demeanor of the crowd for the worse.
Excerpt: The mob later occupied a busy intersection. When a middle-aged man driving a car with North Carolina plates stopped in confusion, the agitators descended on him. “You white little f—er!” shouted one white man. “You are a little white supremacist. Go back to North Carolina where you came from.” The driver phoned police for assistance. Nobody came.
The crowd targeted other drivers. “You’re lucky you didn’t hit me. I would have beat your a—,” yelled a demonstrator at another driver. One person punched the back of a passing car whose driver dared to honk. In downtown Portland, law-abiding drivers were at the mercy of marauding street thugs.
A block away, police officers looked on passively. Why didn’t they respond? The department told me in a statement that it feared intervention would “change the demeanor of the crowd for the worse.”
Full column: Wall Street Journal