As a general matter, the crime of “obstruction of justice” is one of those vague charges too often used as an excuse to arrest someone for doing nothing more than annoying a cop, whether by not following an unlawful command or just being there when a cop decides to flex his inadequacies. But then, that doesn’t mean obstruction doesn’t happen.

It might not come on the radar of people who aren’t part of the anti-police activist community and/or don’t live in Portlandia, but the protests persist out west. Part of the “mostly peaceful” protests includes doing whatever they can to impede the police in the performance of their duty, from swarming on a cop car to body-checking officers, things that once brought down the understandable wrath of police but now barely register.

A Portland police officer drove a motorcycle into a protester who was blocking his path and pushed the person for some distance after what had been a largely peaceful demonstration against police violence Friday outside an East Portland law enforcement building.

A video that captured the incident shows an officer attempting to get away from a crowd of demonstrators by driving into the protester as she stood in his way.

The video is yet another litmus test of who does what to whom. The motorcycle cop had pulled over two cars for blocking the road. Presumably, the cars belonged to protesters, as the protesters weren’t swarming upon them, destroying the vehicles and beating their drivers for violating their seizure of the road.

They were described as “blocking the street to protect the crowd,” which might otherwise be described as blocking the street to prevent anyone else from using a public street. Instead, the protesters went after the cop who pulled the cars over.

A motorcycle cop pulls over two vehicles that were blocking the street to protect the crowd. Protesters swarm him and both vehicles drive off. Two protesters block the motorcycle as it drives off, knocking them both to the ground. pic.twitter.com/eDM83XjZ4G

— Sean Bascom (@baaascom) October 3, 2020

After one car took off, the officer addressed the remaining car as protesters surrounded the cop. While he ordered them to back up, the second car fled to the cheers of the crowd. Whether the cop’s seizure of the car was proper is unknown, though there’s nothing to suggest that it wasn’t and that the officer’s exercise of authority wasn’t facially lawful.

Not that the crowd of protesters cared. When the car took off, and the protesters cheered the flight, the motorcycle cop got on his bike and . . . was immediately confronted by someone with a “shield” while another person, a woman apparently, decided to place her body in front of the motorcycle in order to obstruct the cop from going after the fleeing driver.

As the driver of the car was one of the protesters, serving the protesters’ purpose, it’s not surprising that they were on his side. They tend to be more accommodating of police when the driver they’re dealing with isn’t one of their own, such as when they try to use a public street that the protesters have decided they own to the preclusion of any lesser resident of Portland.

And so the description of the cop as driving “into a protester” as opposed to a protester engaging in the monumentally foolish endeavor of trying to use her body to block a police officer on a motorcycle from doing his job ends up as the lede in the local papers.

As “independent photojournalist” Sean Bascom, the person who filmed the incident, explained, this was entirely on the cop.

“No one ‘jumped on the motorcycle,’” Bascom told The Oregonian/OregonLive Saturday. “The protesters planted their feet in front of it and were driven into.”

Bascom said police were citing drivers who had been protecting demonstrators from “vehicular attacks,” and felt the officer could have avoided pushing the protester with the motorcycle.

“He could have gone up [47th Street] instead of Couch [Street], or simply not accelerated at all and called in other patrol vehicles like they did when the white van took off moments earlier,” Bascom said.

Of course, the question remains who dictates what the police and people of Portland can and cannot do. Do the protests, and protesters, rule the streets? Do they dictate what roads their fellow citizens can travel? Do they get to shut down streets by blocking them with cars because they’ve decided that they are in charge?

And are they now empowered to prevent a cop from doing his job? They believe so, and perhaps they’re right, as there are no consequences for deliberately obstructing a police officer from the performance of his lawful duty other than the potential of planting their feet in front of his motorcycle and being run down.