Portland Officer Jackson: You're at a Black Lives Matter protest, you have more minorities on the police side than you have in a violent crowd. And you have white people screaming at black officers, "You have the biggest nose I have ever seen!"
Reporter: What was it like in that capacity in the first few weeks when the fence was up around the Justice Center?
Portland Officer Jackson: I got to see folks that really do want to see change like the rest of us that have been impacted by racism. And I got to see those people get faded out by people who have no idea what racism is all about. Never experienced racism. They don't even know the tactics they are using are the same tactics that were used against my people. And they don't even know that, they don't know the history. They don't know what they're saying. Coming from someone who graduated from PSU with a history degree, it's actually frightening.
You know they say if you don't know your history, you'll repeat it and watching and watching people do that to other people....
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Portland Officer Jackson: A lot of times someone of color, black, hispanic Asian, will come up to the fence and directly want to talk to me. "Hey what do you think about George Floyd? What do you think about what happened with this?" I go up to the fence, someone white comes up, "F--- the police. Don't talk to him." That was the most bizarre thing because I could see it coming.
I even had a young African American girl tell me, "Why is it you guys aren't talking to us?" I said, "Honestly, this is now the, I think, 23rd day of doing it and everytime I try to have a conversation with someone that looks like me, someone white comes up and blocks them and tells them not to talk." And then right when I said that, this white girl pops up right in front of her and she [rnote: African young lady] said, "He just said that was going to happen!"
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Portland Officer Jackson: Straight up. I said, "You know, I've been called the n-word. She's been called the n-word. Why are you talking to me this way and why do you feel that she can't speak for herself to me? Why is it that you feel that you need to speak for her when we're having a conversation? "
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Portland Officer Jackson: Then when you go to a gentrified community, and one of the first pictures that I saw of one of the businesses that was looted was from a black owned business, I'm like, "they're not even from here, they don't even know what they're doing.
