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After a year in which Portland police and protesters regularly clashed, Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office is spending $15,000 on conflict resolution training for…the protesters.
As WW first reported on June 2, the contract, with a nonprofit called the Portland Peace Team, appears to be an effort to lower the temperature at protests by teaching demonstrators to listen to each other and find common ground. The seven online training sessions, each two hours long, focus on “deescalation and peacekeeping for events including protests, marches and rallies.”
How well this will go over with protesters who cite police use of force as their reason for marching—and who regularly deride “peace police” for trying to restrain property destruction—is a difficult question to answer: Portland Peace Team doesn’t want reporters discussing what’s said by participants in the trainings.
The contractor tells WW that reporters are welcome to attend but they are “asked not to report on the specific conversations or names of the attendees during the training in case anyone shares anything personal about themselves or their experiences, etc. We want to create a safe space for people to discuss conflict.”
The mayor’s office deferred to the contractor’s statement.
