Why 'the debate over Portland is important'

The clash between federal agents and protestors in Portland is raising important questions about the role of the government in local policing.

“There was a lot of talk after 9/11: Should there be a federal domestic security agency? Congress said: No,” Walter Olson, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think thank, told Yahoo Finance’s The Ticker (video above). “Because... we’ve never had that, and the Constitution reserves that kind of policing to the states and the cities — not the federal government. But we also worried about countries that have that kind of thing, what could happen if they went wrong… [or] turned into a political tool.”

So “the debate over Portland is important that way,” Olson added, “not just because of the things that happened in the past few nights, but to draw the line about where it might go in the future.”

Donald Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to reinforce local police in Portland, where protests against racial injustice arose after the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25. DHS which oversees law enforcement agencies including Border Patrol, Immigration Customs and Enforcement, the Federal Protective Service, and the U.S. Marshals Service, began sending various officers to Portland around July 4 weekend.

“How do you know that they are legitimately federal agents? It can be very hard to spot them,” Olson noted. “They are not wearing badges the way police often do, so lots of dangers of people wondering whether they’re allowed to use self-defense when someone who isn’t well-identified is trying to arrest them.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/portland-police-protests-expert-154126734.html