By Steve Pomper
Ousted Cop-Hating Multnomah County (Portland, OR.) District Attorney Mike Schmidt, (MetroEast Community Media, CCA 3.0)
Yet another radical leftist, cop-hating public official has joined fellow Soros disciples, like Racheal Rollins, Chesa Boudin, Kim Gardner, and Kim Foxx, their butts tossed onto the ash heap of Marxist history. Let the trend continue.
As independent journalist Brandi Kruse, host of the unDivided podcast, reposted from End Wokeness on X, “Portland voters fire Soros DA Mike Schmidt by a landslide 15% margin.”
In a 2021 article at The Tatum Report, I wrote, “Portland/Multnomah County D.A. Mike Schmidt has held very few rioters accountable for their violence and destruction, much of it against Portland cops.”
And as the New York Post editorial board recently wrote, “Uber-progressive Portland, Oregon, just kicked its soft-on-crime, cop-hating district attorney to the curb….”
“On Wednesday, Multnomah County DA Mike Schmidt lost to one of his own deputies, Nathan Vasquez — who ran entirely on a return to sanity.”
As I’ve written about at NPA, Schmidt loathes the traditional criminal justice system (you know, the one that works), including, most of all, the police.
Schmidt was DA during 2020 and Portland’s 120 consecutive days of rioting when the mostly peaceful rioters ravaged the city, including assaulting Portland police officers. According to National Review via Yahoo News, Schmidt was more of a defense attorney than a prosecutor holding criminals accountable for the BLM-Saint Floyd devastation.
Here’s something about Schmidt regarding the conveyor belt of Portland riots during the 2020 “Summer of Love” and since. He tried to obscure his resistance to prosecuting rioters by alluding to the Portland police arresting “peaceful protesters.”
Schmidt provided this ludicrous justification: “As prosecutors, we acknowledge the depth of emotion that motivates these demonstrations and support those who are civically engaged through peaceful protesting” (translation: he’s one of them).
Is this supposed lawyer claiming he’s not prosecuting rioters because “peaceful protesters” are intensely emotional about their civic engagement? What has one to do with the other? Or was Schmidt saying the cops arrested peaceful protesters and then fabricated the rioting charges?
Schmidt doubled-down in his official “hands-off leftist rioters” policy, saying, “We recognize that we will undermine public safety, not promote it if we leverage the force of our criminal justice system against peaceful protestors who are demanding to be heard.”
How does arresting rioters leverage the “criminal justice system against peaceful protesters?” Rioters commit property destruction and violence, including against the cops. Peaceful protesters, by definition, do not. Again, Schmidt had accused Portland cops of arresting peaceful protesters?
Schmidt piled on his lie, saying, “[T]he prosecution of people exercising their rights to free speech and assembly in a non-violent manner takes away from the limited resources that we have to prosecute serious crimes and to assist crime victims.”
The barrage of riots were not about people exercising their First Amendment rights. Here’s the issue: Schmidt’s comment imply he sees no distinction between peaceful protesters and rioters?
If the cops arrested people, they were not peaceful protesters. Just because radical elites like Schmidt don’t believe a behavior that they support is a crime doesn’t magically make it not a crime.
The legal parameters are clear for when a peaceful protest turns into a riot. Generally speaking, once the police give several warnings, declare a riot, and then order people to disperse, anyone who remains is considered a part of the riot because, during a riot, the cops don’t have the luxury to discern peaceful from riotous individuals.
The cops know that one tactic groups like Antifa and BLM teach their disciples is to hide within the “peaceful protesters” (who often knowingly hide them). Also, once in a declared riot, any rioter can commit property damage or violence in one moment and then return to “peaceful” in the next. That is why riot laws are written the way they are—so they will be effective.
This criminal behavior is written in law and policies, as in Oregon where participating in a riot is a Class C felony. And the Portland cops know better than most what riots are because they’ve had so much experience. Schmidt may not acknowledge (or care about) the difference, but the Portland police do.
Schmidt’s pro-criminal approach to his job is why Portlanders sacked him. Adding insult to the DA’s defeat, as mentioned earlier, one of his subordinate prosecutors beat him. In the first sentence on the new DA’s website, under “Accountability,” he says, “We must take lawless behavior seriously and enforce our laws.” Now, there’s a genuinely radical concept—especially in Portland.
If the DA-elect means it, it will be refreshing for Portland’s cops and citizens interested in law and order. All I can add is, in with the new and out with the old—Marxist.
And let’s cap that good news with more good news. A recent Harvard Caps Harris poll (Chris Rufo X-post below) shows some promising results for traditional America. The poll, which measured the “Favorability of Institutions,” found the “U.S. Military, the Police, and the FBI are the most favored institutions in the country.”
This is spectacular news, but I’ll add one wager. I bet those favorable feelings are for the rank and file of each institution and not for the upper echelons with their adopting all kinds of “woke” rubbish.
Regardless, the good news is that Americans’ favorability rating (“favorable” or “very favorable”) for the police, who get the Silver Medal, is a whopping 75 percent favorable. The Military took the Gold Medal with 85 percent favorable, and the FBI took third for the Bronze Medal with 57 percent favorable.
You’d never know about this respect by listening only to the mainstream media (MSM), to too many university professors, or too many celebrities, would you?
Still, this is excellent news, especially when contrasted with other groups, which reaped astonishingly unfavorable results. BLM had a 45 percent favorability rating (still way too high, if you ask me; but they did edge out CNN by a point). Campus protesters garnered only 25 percent favorability, while Antifa and Hamas finished dead last, respectively, at 17 and 14 percent.
The poll results also show how out of touch (maybe purposefully) the MSM is in its biased reporting. Watching their reporting, you’d swear someone reversed the results. Still, I smile when I think of the look on their faces when they read, despite their best (worst) efforts, Americans still respect their cops.