I was talking to Randy in Portland this past fall when a group of police officers came up and started to harass him. We were having a peaceful conversation and from what I could see Randy was a bother to no one. It was an interesting situation that was brand new to me. Having my camera in hand I wanted to record, but I am not news media or even a TV producer anymore. I felt if I started to record the officers’ anger would escalate and they would take it out on Randy. Everything I do is to help homeless people so I decided not to record. I did, however, stand right there keeping my camera visible refusing to leave Randy’s side. I wanted the officers to know if they seriously crossed the line I was right there to capture everything. It was an extremely awkward moment as three officers “insisted” Randy leave the area and two other officers kept their attention on me.<\/p>\n
When Randy calmed down a little we did this interview. He was clearly emotional. Randy stated in the last twelve days police have harassed him nine times.<\/p>\n
In my travels, I have met some wonderful police officers who go far above and beyond to help homeless people living on the streets. I have heard and read reports of police harassing homeless people, and when I was homeless there were a few times police “pushed” me along. But this is the first time I have witnessed a homeless person being confronted on the streets by police where I was actually involved. I’ll admit, it was scary for me, so I cannot imagine how stressful it was for Randy.<\/p>\n
I understand the need for security and policing for public safety. But there were other people sitting on the public sidewalk so clearly, these officers were targeting Randy. I also don’t know the back story, yet I can tell you from what I witnessed the officers were very wrong in making Randy leave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false},"categories":[444,230,267,125],"tags":[253,515,508,507,391,20,509],"coauthors":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/videos\/1329"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/videos"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/videos"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1329"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1329"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}