• @peteyestee@feddit.org
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    16 hours ago

    It’s not even new. They did this to people during 2020 protests. They drove up in mini vans jumped out, grabbed people and pulled them into the mini van and drove off.

    There used to be footage of it but I haven’t been able to find it. I think it was happening in Portland and Seattle. At the time there was live stream footage. And it usually happened later in the night as people were cooling off and dispersing.

    America hasn’t been what it preaches for half century at least.

    https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/evelyn-bassi-illegal-abudction-portland-protests-1357279/

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/feds-unmarked-vans-portland/

    The video snopes talks about I saw. Possibly even live streaming at the time because I was hooked on watching all that. Iirc it was a bronze gold colored minivan and the sliding door opened and 1 or two guys got out masked and just grabbed the person and pulled the protestor in and drove off.

    • @sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 hours ago

      Am from Seattle.

      Yep, this happened in Seattle and Portland multiple times, just basically black bagging people into unmarked vans by… presumably, plain clothes / “off duty” / half kitted out, face obscured, no visible ID cops.

      They typically did this black bagging to people who had not actually broken any laws, but were so effective at keeping protester morale high, and/or were simply causing overwhelming masses of people to defend them from, in many cases, literally entirely unprovoked police assault/brutality.

      Most of these were the people they wanted to removr but knew that no charges would actually stick because they had nothing, and then release them 24-72 hours later.

      Sometimes they’d black bag / white van people who had actually crossed the threshold into doing something they could actually charge you for, but most of the time, nope.

      I know that in Portland the cops actively decided to act as body guards for fascists, and look the other way when they attacked people.

      In Seattle, … the cops intentionally started so much shit, assaulting nonviolent people, well we uh… we literally forced them to abandon their major police office in Capitol Hill.

      As in, we seiged them. Surrounded the building for days. Eventually they burned a bunch of records and made a stealthy withdrawal in the dead of night.

      That police center is only a few blocks from where the ‘CHAZ’ would be set up.

      Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

      As in, we literally drove out the local police and are thus now autonomous.

      … We’ve still never seen the all the actual communications between the police chief and mayor, other internal police records… because the police destroyed them. They destroyed them because they almost certainly outlined numerous violations of the law in terms of orders issued, tactics used, illegal arrests/detainments, bullshit ‘overtime’ overpayments and other financial shenanigans, crimes committed by the police and probably all the way up to the police chief and mayor engaging in a criminal conspiracy.

    • Yeather
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      15 hours ago

      There were a bunch of theories the people they black bagged were undercover / plainclothes cops. Every video I saw were of younger white guys in good shape getting taken off the streets.

    • Ms. ArmoredThirteen
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      1212 hours ago

      I was in Seattle during this. Word was people got snatched here but I don’t recall seeing hard evidence myself. Portland though they for sure got caught kidnapping protesters