On Wednesday, every single police officer on the city of Portland’s Rapid Response Team (RRT) submitted their resignations from the team, according to the Daily Caller.
All 50 officers from the RRT will continue to serve as regular police officers, but will no longer lend their services to the volunteer division that was aimed at combating riots and other forms of widespread unrest. In a press release announcing the resignations, the RRT described its “primary role” as being “to provide public safety at crowd events when there was a threat of harm to the community.” Its members were all trained in “crowd psychology and behavior, team formations and movements, the use of enhanced personal protective equipment, use of force, de-escalation, and arrests.”
The most likely motivation for the mass resignation was the recent indictment of one member of the RRT, Officer Corey Budworth, who faces a single charge of “assault in the fourth degree” after using force to stop a violent rioter in August of 2020.
The city of Portland has become an epicenter of far-left domestic terrorist violence, carried out by groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Mayor Ted Wheeler (D-Ore.) has repeatedly refused to crack down on riots that have burned businesses and seen dozens of innocent civilians assaulted, due to him agreeing with the politics of the terrorist groups.
For over a year, the terrorists have tried to destroy the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse, with federal forces being brought in to defend the building. Earlier this month, in a slight change of direction, over two dozen members of Antifa were finally charged in connection to last year’s riots.