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Sporting royal blue vests, the Portland Peace Team has been among the crowds of various Portland demonstrations for nearly a decade.

At past LGBTQ Pride parades, climate change marches, rallies for immigrant and refugee rights and Black Lives Matter protests, the peacekeepers act as witnesses.

A neutral presence, members of the Portland Peace Team say they observe and monitor peoples behavior, listen for disagreements -- and sometimes, intervene.

Now, theyre spreading their philosophy of non-violence through a partnership with the city of Portland.

Earlier this month, Mayor Ted Wheeler announced his office would fund de-escalation training sessions to any Portlanders who want to learn peacekeeping tactics for protests, marches and rallies. Founded in 2012 by Tom Hastings, a conflict resolution professor at Portland State University, the Portland Peace Team is contracted to provide the training to free via Zoom, and the mayors office will fund the $50 per person.

The cap is $15,000 from the mayors office, which would allow 300 people to take the training. The Portland Peace Team consists of about a dozen members, and the training is not necessarily for recruiting members, but for spreading an anti-violence philosophy.

Portlanders are passionate about peacefully practicing their First Amendment rights, and many want to do their part to keep events safe, Wheeler said in a news release. This is an opportunity for community members to learn proven de-escalation techniques that help achieve that goal.

The initiative comes after a year of frequent protests and clashes between demonstrators and police that have often turned violent, and as Wheeler has condemned ongoing property damage in downtown Portland. In recent months, a small group of protesters clad in black has continued to protest and has often started fires, broken store windows, painted graffiti and targeted police facilities.

Asena Lawrence, a senior policy director for the mayors office who helped organize the partnership, said the city wanted Portlanders to express their First Amendment rights, because the goal is not to silence people, we just want grandparents and children to be a part of these movements and for it to be safe, so families can feel like they can demand change from the government in a way that will not escalate.

Not everyone feels like the the initiative is the right approach. As June marks one full year of racial justice protests in Portland, some on-the-ground protesters say they wonder why the city is asking for the public to learn de-escalation in an environment where police have been witnessed escalating violence at protests.

Why cant that money be used to expand the Portland Street Response Team or other social services? said Rabbi Ariel Stone, a leader of the Portland Interfaith Clergy Resistance, a group that has actively supported the Black Lives Matter movement.

The partnership between the city and the Portland Peace Team is not official, Hastings said -- its an experiment at this point, and not funded from the city budget. The seven training sessions, which are being conducted via Zoom through the summer, are a small effort to get back in touch with Portland demonstration culture.

Hastings argues that the small group with anarchist burn it down tactics dont represent the broader public opinion in Portland.

The idea is to make [protests] productive again, Hastings said. If the goal is to change public, corporate or institutional policy, some people are kind of stuck on stupid. Or, at least they are not being strategic in terms of getting something accomplished.

A long time activist and peacekeeper, Hastings said this wasnt the first time Portland has had an outside reputation for social unrest. In the early 1990s, he recalled former President George H.W. Bush and others referred to Portland as Little Beirut because of its history of protests.

Hastings said that during years of anti-Iraq war protests in the early 2000s, he and a handful of other pro-peace demonstrators confronted the groups who were perpetrating the violent elements of protests.

We didnt change their worldview or how they operated, but we did convince them to stop hijacking our large, family-friendly events, Hastings said. The dynamic now, though, is pretty dysfunctional. Twenty years ago, we did this work by devoting ourselves to going out and having conversations directly with organizers who used different tactics.

The gaping divide in demonstration culture is in some ways the definition of violence and the different belief in tactics.

To Hastings, violence is the threat or action of bodily harm. But he understands his definition is not shared by the greater Portland community.

But violence is in the eye of the beholder, and if the average citizen thinks graffiti and window-smashing is violent, the tactics then become counterproductive to the cause, Hastings argues. The general public will start to drive away, or even lean towards the other side.

In a recent Oregonian/OregonLive poll, 47% of residents who took the survey said they did not approve of how the city was handling protests.

We believe in nonviolence, so we dont carry weapons, Hastings said. So when we ask questions, its taken as a sincere inquiry. When police ask questions, people are scared of being interrogated. Its a whole different dynamic, which means that police need really radically different training in de-escalation than unarmed civilians.

Patrick Nolen (back left) Soriah Hamide (back center) with Jennifer Tinorio (middle left), Pat Adams (middle), Adam Vogal (right) and Tom Hastings (front center) attend a demonstration as peacekeepers.

Jennifer Tinorio, a member of the Portland Peace Team since 2014, used to be in law enforcement.

She was a border patrol agent in El Paso, Texas. She says it taught her skills that translate to peacekeeping: confidence, self control and a commanding presence. She can read body language and knows how to respond with compassion and empathy.

One of the things Ive learned in making that transition from law enforcement officer to peacekeeper is that cops automatically escalate a situation by carrying a gun, Tinorio said. Ive seen cops escalate unnecessarily, and Ive seen protesters do things to intentionally provoke or put a cop in a compromised position.

In the Portland Peace Team trainings first session in mid-May, 15 people from different backgrounds and generations joined the Zoom call, many expressing concerns about the shift in protest tactics, the damage to property downtown and the diminished image of Portland.

They meditated together and discussed nonviolent peacekeeping ideology. The training is centered around a global standard for de-escalation called the CLARA method (Calm and Center, Listen, Affirm, Respond, Add). CLARA was created in Portland in the early 1990s by Reverend Cecil Prescod, Bonnie Tinker, and Love Makes a Family, Inc.

Its rooted in the practice of empathy and understanding, of approaching people with different ideologies as humans first.

Methods like CLARA should be the first thing taught to law enforcement, Tinorio said.

Seeing humanity first should be the priority, but thats not what were taught in law enforcement, she said. Youre taught to secure the scene or put someone in handcuffs before youre taught to give them a glass of water.

But the Portland Peace Team is not trying to replace police, Tinorio said.

We dont expect people to come to a two hour Zoom meeting and then go to a black bloc protest and somehow stop violence, she added. But there are so many beautiful ways to practice non-violence and make an incredible statement.

Like on June 2, 2020, Tinorio said, when thousands of people laid on Burnside bridge for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in silence, in remembrance of George Floyd who was murdered by Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin.

Or in 2017, at a protest of former President Donald Trumps travel ban on predominately Muslim countries, when there was an approved protest at the Portland International Airport where the Portland Peace Team was invited. There were speakers, music, children dancing and, to everyones surprise, counter-protesters, Tinorio said. One of them pointed at a woman in a hijab and shouted into a megaphone she has a bomb, Tinorio remembered.

We stood in front of the man who was saying hateful things to the people on stage, so he couldnt get any closer, Tinorio said. Peacekeeping is about protecting the person who is being targeted by verbal violence, with the goal of keeping it from escalating to physical violence.

Protesters took to the streets of Portland, Ore., for the 11th consecutive day of demonstrations on Sunday, June 7, 2020. The calls for change started after the May 25 death of George Floyd.

Ariel Stone called the mayors partnership with the Portland Peace Team another big, ugly Band-Aid.

Its the police that should be trained in de-escalation because they are the ones escalating not citizens, Stone said. Telling citizens to take a de-escalation course is exactly the wrong focus because its not the citizens who are dangerous and its not addressing the real problems. Stop militarizing the police, and fund the social services needed in Portland.

The Interfaith Clergy Resistance is a group of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Wikkans and other religious leaders who first organized in 2017 over their concerns of police brutality at gatherings during inauguration weekend. They were dismayed, surprised and outraged at the police tactics of rubber bullets, kettling, teargas, and beating people with sticks.

We wanted to pray not with just our words, but our bodies, because we care about the first amendment right to assemble and speak freely, Stone said. Were there because we believe that the holy voice that cries out for justice is in the streets. And confronting injustice sometimes means, as my Christian colleagues would say, You have to overturn the tables.

Unlike the Portland Peace Team, the clergy are not a neutral party, nor do they see themselves as peacekeepers, Stone said. They come in support of the movement so that when police or the mayor push a particular narrative about whats going on, we have credibility and authority, and can either vouch for that narrative or point out our different perspective.

And when it comes to Wheelers equivalence of broken windows and violence against human beings, the clergy group rejects that, Stone said.

We believe that there are people on the streets who are expressing a larger existential problem in our society. They are not the problem, they are a symptom of a much larger problem.

The de-escalating training initiative comes just a few weeks after Wheeler asked the public to help un-mask self-described anarchists after a group of about 80 people gathered in Northeast Portland and some smashed windows at the Blazers Boys & Girls Club, causing nearly $20,000 in damage to the club in early April. Wheeler asked residents to note the license plates of people who wear all black clothing and grab shields or weapons from their cars.

Former mayor Sam Adams, who now works for Wheelers office, said the mayors been consistent in asking the community to help solve crimes.

People have a right to be passionate and express their opinions, Adams said. Our job is to protect and promote that, but its also our job to address criminal acts.

--Savannah Eadens; seadens@oregonian.com; 503-221-3423; @savannaheadens

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City will fund training for Portlanders to learn how to keep the peace at protests - OregonLive