Roughly a dozen Portland police officers faced off with a small group at a Northeast Portland Fred Meyer on Tuesday after people tried to take food that had been thrown away.
Workers at the Hollywood West Fred Meyer threw away thousands of perishable items because the store, like many others, had lost power in an outage brought on by the regions winter storm.
Images on social media showed mountains of packaged meat, cheese and juice, as well as whole turkeys and racks of ribs that had been tossed into two large dumpsters near the store.
A few people gathered about 2:30 p.m. at the store, 3030 N.E. Weidler St., in hopes of salvaging the food.
But within a few hours, people seeking food from the dumpsters began to report police officers showing up to guard the dumpsters and prevent people from taking the items.
Morgan Mckniff, a prominent activist and outspoken Portland police critic who lives in the neighborhood, said employees were guarding the dumpsters when they showed up to get some of the discarded food. Mckniff began to film the employees and reported staff members threatened to call the police on them for doing so.
The store manager called police shortly thereafter, Mckniff said, and Mckniff began livestreaming the interaction on Instagram.
After that, other people started showing up and asking them, Why are you guys guarding a dumpster? Mckniff said.
Mckniff said about 15 people eventually gathered in an attempt to collect food.
At that point, Mckniff said, a dozen officers arrived at the scene. One officer wasnt wearing a mask and refused to put one on until a supervisor arrived and brought him one, according to Mckniff.
On Wednesday, Portland police said officers were sent to the scene after employees said they felt the situation was escalating and feared there may be a physical confrontation, a police spokesman said in a statement. ... The run-in also came as the region reeled from a winter storm that brought on widespread power outages that left many people unable to salvage perishable items in their refrigerators.
The people who were there werent there for selfish reasons they were there to get food to distribute to hungry people around the city, Simonis said. There are mutual aid groups that have been helping feed people at warming centers, because the city doesnt have enough resources to feed them.
Multnomah County kept emergency severe weather shelters open Monday, taking to social media to ask for volunteers to keep the doors open an additional night. More than 300,000 people and businesses lost power over the weekend, with nearly all of the areas hotels filling up as people tried to escape the cold.
Mckniff said many of the people police threatened with arrest and turned away are regular customers of the store.
I live in this neighborhood. This neighborhood doesnt have power, Mckniff said. And Fred Meyer is telling people in this immediate community who shop here that they cant have these things theyre throwing away. Cheese, pickles, yogurt things that are intentionally cultured and cured.
Simonis said its hard to rationalize the actions by police and the store.
None of this makes sense to me except through the lens of severely ingrained policing and a culture of disrespect for human dignity, they said.
They noted parallels between the Fred Meyer incident and Portland protests.
Simonis, for their part, is one of several plaintiffs in a lawsuit that alleges local, state and federal officers violated the rights of people with disabilities through aggressive police responses to the protests.
Here its not broken windows, its tossed away but otherwise completely fine food, Simonis said. Its not a bad situation or vandalism, its literally the exact opposite feeding hungry people. Yet they still use the same apparatus to prevent anything from being done.