On Friday night, a homeless person who was sleeping in their regular spot next to the Justice Center was jolted from that campsite in the first few waves of tear gas shot at street level that night.
The camper staggered into the street before running away, leaving a sleeping bag and backpack behind.
A video taken Tuesday night shows a thick cloud of tear gas blowing through a row of tents along Southwest Naito Parkway, as five Portland police officers walk away.
It is unclear whether the police deployed the tear gas on the tents, but homeless people living in downtown Portland are increasingly caught up in police tactics intended to disperse protesters.
Homelessness outreach workers have canvassed downtown after each protest to offer medical help and supplies to people living on the streets as needed, according to the Joint Office of Homeless Services.
As of Monday morning, no one had raised an issue, said spokesman Denis Theriault.
Then social media revealed several instances of homeless people who were caught in the clouds of tear gas or shocked by flash bang grenades.
Neither police nor the city’s camp cleanup crews have required people to leave downtown, even as nearly six nights straight have seen widespread use of tear gas, flash bangs and rubber pellets.
Theriault said that the Joint Office has offered spots in shelters as they come available to people who want to leave, but will let people make their own decision whether to stay outside.
Some outreach workers, such as those with Cascadia Behavioral Health, send campers to safer spots they know won’t be in the crossfire. Several campers have chosen to leave the downtown area by this point.
Stephanie Herro, the homelessness liaison for the Portland Police Bureau, said that she learned Wednesday morning that a few officers from Central Precinct’s neighborhood response team had rolled through downtown before 20,000 people gathered at Pioneer Courthouse Square to warn people camping nearby that there would be another protest that night.
However, it appears that police don’t have a strategy to avoid homeless people who might get caught in their crowd control munitions.
“It’s challenging in situations like this that are so dynamic to really predict how the wind is blowing and all the things we know are happening where people are getting inadvertently getting caught up in this stuff,” Herro said.
Herro said that she has talked with community organizations about trying to steer the protests away from Old Town, where there are some of the largest homeless encampments in the city. Those camps have grown larger since the city stopped moving people in mid-March, in response to public health coronavirus guidelines.
She worries that there could be significant unintended impacts to people in those camps if they end up in the protest zone.
“People are just so vulnerable right now already before all of this because of COVID-19 and, before all that because of experiencing homelesness,” Herro said. “There’s this stacking of anxiety.”
Portable bathrooms meant to provide hand-washing and sanitation amenities for people living outside have been destroyed in the protests.
The city’s office that provides those bathrooms has not indicated whether they will be replaced.
-- Molly Harbarger
mharbarger@oregonian.com | 503-294-5923 | @MollyHarbarger
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