With Portland, don't forget the Federal officers were black bagging people at random in the street away from the buildings...
Which is an absolutely brilliant way of ensuring the protests go on and get worse, as it's not legal for them to do (under various parts of the constitution and their own rules), and basically what failing dictators do, and get criticised for by normal US governments*.
I was reading a comment from a US military officer who was saying something I've seen police from other countries say - the way the US police (especially the federal agents sent in to make a point) have handled the protests in the US is pretty much by going through the handbook of how to handle protests and doing everything that is known to make them worse.
The US police throughout have been instigating much of the violence by doing things like shooting at peaceful protesters, using tear gas on people who have just been sitting/standing/chanting, maiming protesters, attacking news crews, attacking legal observers (who are there in an agreed attire with the agreement of both the City AND Police department), issuing orders to disperse when they've trapped the protesters in tunnels or between buildings so there is no way to disperse, arresting people for "curfew violations" hours before the curfew.
At this point there is a US lawyer who has been collecting and reposting videos of the police and he's up to something like 900 incidents (of which around 100 were in the first couple of days) of the police doing things like drive by shootings of peaceful protesters using pepperball guns/shooing at the windows of normal traffic with rubber rounds, and randomly attacking OAP's (they turned up in one, dismounted and immediately went for an old guy on his own walking with the aid of a stick).
Don't forget right from the start the Police were attacking camera crews live on air - if the police are doing that, what the hell are they doing off camera where they're not being broadcast on the nightly news, and they've made a special point of attacking anyone who looks like they may have been filming them, almost as if they didn't want people collecting anything that could be used as evidence of what was going on that contradicts their reports.
The main reason so many of the protesters have been freed on bail or city mayors etc have been pushing for some of the protesters to be freed is because the Police are in so many cases pushing for charges that won't stick and that are nonsense - things like arresting everyone in an area (including those with press or observer credentials) then basically assigning an arresting officer and making up a charge at the station - as a number of the lawyers have said, that's not enforcing the law, that's working out ways to intimidate people who were not doing anything wrong under the law and trying to stop others from protesting.
*IIRC the acting director of DHS admitted on air they were acting illegally when he tried to brush it off at least one instance as they weren't detaining people, but were simply taking them away for questioning about someone they may have been seen with (one of the US lawyers pointed out how the statement showed they broke various parts of the constitution, with citations to the supreme court decisions, and how it fulfilled the legal definition of an illegal arrest/detention under US law).
