A gunman killed and injured protesters at a BLM march. Why did police blame the victims? [View all]

[erronis]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/19/blm-march-portland-shooting

Survivors of a mass shooting have publicly shared video contradicting police claims that victims were armed and part of a ‘confrontation’

This is sickening. And the Portland Police Department continues to say that the shooting was provoked by armed BLM people. Good investigating - wish more of the media would stay on top of these serious issues instead of flitting to the latest absurdity.

The linked video is said to be very graphic.

Two years after an attacker shot five volunteers before a Black Lives Matter march in Portland, Oregon, killing a 60-year-old woman and leaving one of her young friends paralyzed, a new visual investigation of the attack reveals that the assailant tried to provoke a stand-your-ground situation, daring three women to fight him, before suddenly opening fire when they refused.

Research agency Forensic Architecture collaborated with survivors on a reconstruction of the attack, analyzing helmet-camera video recorded by one of the victims, police radio traffic obtained through public records requests, and the testimony of 11 witnesses – including the volunteer armed guard who stopped the rampage by shooting and disarming the gunman.

The accumulated evidence flatly contradicts what Portland’s police chief told the public and city council staff in the days after the attack: that the gunman, 43-year-old Ben Smith, had opened fire only after he had been confronted by “armed protesters”.

That false characterization of the unarmed victims as aggressors, which was repeated in dozens of local and national news reports, remains uncorrected on the website of the Portland police bureau (PPB) even today, as the survivors mark the second anniversary of Smith murdering their friend, June Knightly.