These Invisible Wounds

If an officer beats you in the middle of Portland, and no one is there to see it, did it happen?

Laura Jedeed

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“I don’t know why I feel I’ve got to tell you this.”

Like most Portland protesters, she’s young and fully committed to fixing the broken world we’ve handed her. Brave enough to take to the streets despite the brutality of Portland Police and federal agents alike. She’s been protesting from the start.

Let’s call her W.

Protesters stand in a line on the street and hold up umbrellas as shields. It obscures their faces
Photo by Laura Jedeed / CC BY

It is early August and I am not doing well. Four hours of sleep is a luxury I barely remember. It’s not nightmares exactly, just a failure to fall asleep and waking up wide-eyed three hours later. Benadryl isn’t working anymore and I’m reluctant to try stronger stuff. It feels like weakness. Not that this is strength, drinking beer at one o’clock in the afternoon and squinting at the computer screen.

W wrote me initially with a strange thing a cop had said to her — a response to a question I’d asked on social media about the police’s slipping veneer of professionalism. What I remember months later, however, was the way the conversation immediately, organically shifted to the night the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) broke her nose and snapped her wrist.

Or, more accurately, the strange and unjust way in which they didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong — W’s nose and wrist were broken, and the people who broke them were police. Factually speaking, there’s no question about what happened.

And yet, no record of the incident exists. The PPB did not, to our knowledge, report it. In a world of ubiquitous surveillance — of cameras on every street corner and in every pocket — we have no footage of the assault. No consequences will ever befall the officers who did it. We will never even know their names.

If an officer beats you in the middle of Portland, and no one is there to see it, did it happen?

Federal agents beat a protester with truncheons. They are illuminated in blaze of blue light
Blue lights flash as federal agents beat a protester with truncheons. Photo by Laura Jedeed / CC BY

Sometimes Portland itself seems to flicker in and out of reality. We suffer invisibly one week, then find ourselves flooded with cameras the…

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Laura Jedeed

Freelance journalist, filthy pleb. Politics mostly. Find my work at NYMag, Politico, Rolling Stone, New Republic, and Substack: https://laurajedeed.substack.com