PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — As protests of President-elect Donald Trump entered another day, police in Portland, Oregon, say one person was shot and injured by a man who had gotten into a confrontation with a protester then opened fire.
Portland police said the victim was taken to a hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries and they were looking for a male suspect, who apparently fled in his vehicle after the shooting early Saturday morning on a Willamette River bridge.
The shooting followed rowdy Friday night protests, when police used tear gas in response to “burning projectiles” thrown at officers, police said on Twitter. Hundreds of people marched through the city, disrupting traffic and spray-painting graffiti.
Authorities reported instances of vandalism and assault during a rally that organizers had billed as peaceful earlier in the day.
In other parts of the country, spirited demonstrations on college campuses and peaceful marches along downtown streets have taken place since Wednesday.
Hundreds joined a Friday afternoon “love rally” in Washington Square Park in Manhattan.
Leslie Holmes, 65, a website developer from Wilton, Connecticut, took an hour-long train ride to the demonstration — her first protest since the 1970s, when she hit the streets of San Francisco to oppose the Vietnam War.
She described herself as an armchair liberal but declared, “I’m not going to be armchair anymore.”
“I don’t want to live in a country where my friends aren’t included, and my friends are fearful, and my children are going to grow up in a world that’s frightening, and my granddaughters can look forward to being excluded from jobs and politics and fulfilling their potential, so I’m here for them,” she said.
Evening marches disrupted traffic in Miami and Atlanta.
Trump supporter Nicolas Quirico was traveling from South Beach to Miami. His car was among hundreds stopped when protesters blocked Interstate 395.
“Trump will be our president. There is no way around that, and the sooner people grasp that, the better off we will be,” he said. “There is a difference between a peaceful protest and standing in a major highway backing up traffic for 5 miles. This is wrong.”
More than a thousand protesters took to the streets across California after night fell including downtown Los Angeles, where over 200 were arrested a night earlier. In Bakersfield, where Trump is far more popular than in most of the state, some held signs reading “Anti-Trump, Pro-USA.”
Small protests also were held in Detroit; Minneapolis; Kansas City, Missouri; Olympia, Washington and Iowa City.
More than 200 people, carrying signs gathered on the steps of the Washington state Capitol. The group chanted “not my president” and “no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.”
In Tennessee, Vanderbilt University students sang civil rights songs and marched through campus across a Nashville street, temporarily blocking traffic. A protest also occurred in Minneapolis.
In Chicago, multiple groups planned protests through Saturday.
Nadia Gavino, 25, learned about the rallies on Twitter and protested Thursday evening. Gavino, whose father is from Peru and whose mother is of Mexican and Lithuanian heritage, said she took Trump’s harshest statements about immigrants and Latinos personally.
“I obviously agree that he’s racist, he’s sexist, he’s phobic, he’s misogynistic. He’s all these things you don’t want in a leader,” she said.
Ashley Lynne Nagel, 27, said she joined a Thursday night demonstration in Denver.
“I have a leader I fear for the first time in my life,” said Nagel, a Bernie Sanders supporter who voted for Hillary Clinton.
“It’s not that we’re sore losers,” she said. “It’s that we are genuinely upset, angry, terrified that a platform based off of racism, xenophobia and homophobia has become so powerful and now has complete control of our representation.”
Demonstrations also were planned Saturday in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and other areas.
Previous demonstrations drew thousands of people in New York and other large urban centers. The largely peaceful demonstrations were overshadowed by sporadic episodes of vandalism, violence and street-blocking.
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Associated Press writer Lisa Baumann in Seattle contributed to this report.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
I love Portland and all that it affords those of us living here!
I understand peoples fears and will always support peaceful protests. But a line must be drawn at destroying other’s property. Like most protests the good protesters soon find their efforts co-opted by hangers-on joining in just for a little thrill of the moment. It’s not their fault and little they can do to prevent irresponsible thrill seekers who could care less about their cause from leeching themselves onto their marches.
It’s my hope that these protests will, over time, go from the streets to other productive actions that the n00bs cannot taint or affect. Keep the anger alive and burning and channel it into positive action ahead of 2018 and 2020.
Keep the faith.
Completely agree. I certainly understand the anger and fear, but blocking freeways so people have a two-hour commute does not make allies. Nor does smashing windows. And, I can’t help but notice the dominance of the violence by young, white males, the people with the least to fear from the Drumpf administration. A lot of it is led by the usual Portland demo-goers, the dudes in masks posing as “anarchists”.
Folks need to calm down. I lived the transition from Carter to Reagan and from Clinton to Bush. We had many of the same fears then, but Reagan and Bush left at the ends of their terms.
If people really want to have an impact on America, they will organize and elect progressives in suburban and rural states.Start local, move statewide and then national. Give Republicans something to think about. Stop bunkering down in the urban cores. Take the protest energy and channel it through democracy. We have another election in 2 years.
I guess our local media will be the only source for the news that protesters and their allies spent Friday cleaning up the damage, painting and white washing. And have created a gofundme site that has so far generated about $40,000 to assist property owners and business’s damaged by Thursday night.
https://www.gofundme.com/portlands-resistance-rebuild-fund
Forget about local media. They belong to entertainment companies just like the national media. They are the part of the enemy. Organize using social media. Build internet media groups promoting real journalism. Make the stories real. Get word out via the internet. I am sick of I Heart Radio propaganda, aren’t you?