[finaliteration]

> Portland has had nightly riots for over a month.

I live near Portland and have many friends and coworkers who live in the city and this isn’t true. There have been mostly peaceful protests, yes, but not nightly riots.

I’m also not clear on how that would make this acceptable or justified even if it were true.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I'm not saying the entire city is up in flames, but I've seen pretty scary pictures every night I checked of the area these two were protesting in. If a crowd of people dressed in all black is tossing stuff at police officers, I'd call that a riot.

I'm just not tremendously sympathetic to people who contribute to such an atmosphere of lawlessness and then report that their arrest wasn't entirely by the book.

[fzeroracer]

What the fuck? The point is that the police officers and the feds are supposed to do things by the book. They're the law. Their job is to uphold the law, and that includes how they police things. Regardless of who is contributing to an 'atmosphere of lawlessness', that does not give them carte blanche to violate the rights of citizens. Especially not when it comes to pulling people off the streets into unmarked cars and then driving away.

Why are you so dead set on downplaying this incident? How do you even know the people in the video are actually feds if they're not announcing who they are and going through proper procedures to arrest someone? What's stopping some jackass in cosplay from pulling the same stunt?

[JoeSmithson]

> "What's stopping some jackass in cosplay from pulling the same stunt?"

The ultimate answer to this is; potentially being prosecuted for kidnap and impersonating police.

Most police powers boil down to exclusive legal defences that non-police can't use.

[jacobush]

So, if you are right wing bent on kidnapping, all you have to do is join the police. Seems to be working pretty well.