The recent public statement from Portland Mayor Kate Snyder, interim City Manager Danielle West and interim Police Chief Heath Gorham, issued following the killing of Tyre Nichols, displays a callous indifference to Black pain and death.

I was shaken to my core when I read the brief statement due to several factors, but the top ones are: zero mention of condolences to Nichols’ family and community; framing of a brutal attack by law enforcement officers charged with murder as a “police-citizen encounter”; and, most of all, using the occasion to publicly fawn over the Portland Police Department and law enforcement as an institution.

Could it be that our mayor and her cadre are so devoid of human sympathy for Nichols’ family, and so numb to the relentlessness of Black suffering at the hands of state forces that they no longer feel any emotion at all?

The authors of this statement are presumably educated individuals who are familiar with the history of policing in this country and its roots in enslavement, and at the very least have read about horrific police murder after horrific police murder of Black people for the past several years. Yet, they still saw fit to use this moment to make a broad claim about the supposed values of “American law enforcement as a whole.”

This statement is shameful, and no one who authored it deserves to hold public office.

Cait Vaughan
Portland

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