“After last year’s issues with aggressive hate groups during the rally, we applied for and received a Downtown Program Fund grant from the City of Eugene to support the event with fencing, gated entry and the ability to better control an environment where tensions can quickly escalate. Our intention was to host a street fair with stage programming, including activist speakers and entertainment,” the Eugene Pride Team said in a statement.
“Pride was told on Monday by a liaison with [the Eugene Police Department] that should we not file a parade permit, EPD may not direct resources to support the march, and that if anything happened, it would be on us. They stated that any of our volunteers that were in the street could be viewed by EPD as engaging in disorderly conduct. This, despite the fact that EPD has provided traffic control for at least four unpermitted marches in Eugene this year, including a Charlie Kirk rally and march.”
Eugene resident here. For what it’s worth, I did see a small march go down the street yesterday with chants and signs. Maybe a hundred or so people.
Pride is a protest. Let’s not forget that.
You don’t cancel a protest because the authorities say they won’t protect you.
If they don’t want you to hold your pride march, that is all the more reason to march anyway.You don’t cancel a protest because the authorities say they won’t protect you.
The city leadership, which is fully co-opted by corporate interest, will cancel the march.
And when the people march, the police will arrive to arrest them for parading without a permit.
Then the city leaders can shrug and proclaim “We were very upset to see all these far left radical Tankies breaking the law. That’s not how you show Pride in our city.” Then the police get a budget increase.
And, after that, we get to see how many residents want to keep these hacks in office.
Hear hear!
Collectively… I wish we could come up with a way to determine if a department taking tax money should even be paid if it’s not going to do its job. It would be beautiful if we could just completely fucking cut the cops out of taking taxpayer funds.
“We”? This is happening in a dictatorship. Unless you’re the dictator, you don’t get to be the we.
For the unfamiliar, Eugene is a very blue city, practically the last place you’d expect this to happen.
That sucks. And the double standard shown for other marches doubly so - but why cancel it instead of getting a parade permit?
cops have always been conservative, im surprised it took them this long to not protect them.
Because this is exactly what we mean “Liberals aren’t leftists.” Their double standard is how they empower authoritarians at every turn.
What Mayor Kaarin Knudson should be doing is firing her PD and hiring people that want to support LGBTQIA+. But this doesn’t grant her power over others, so she’ll continue oppressing their rights to protest.I’ve seen a couple of reasons being thrown around - one being that a parade permit requires general liability insurance for at least 2mil. The other is that Pride is a protest and one doesn’t need to permit a protest. And of course the double standard that the police will provide protection for other parades without permits.
police will provide protection for other parades
And arrests for the Pride Parade.
Thanks, those make sense. Systemic injustice hiding in ‘equal treatment’ where police wouldn’t officially guarantee security at Kirk’s march but there wasn’t the same risk of counter-march agitators. Guess these days it makes sense to tiptoe, hopefully not for too long
this is the endpoint of cops at pride.
As many say the police will protect their own. ACAB
Probably carry stain pens to keep their whites clean.
what a genuine fucking tragedy. god damit can americans not have anything nice?
