After receiving reports that a man was pounding on a restaurant door with a rock in the middle of the night, police arrived on the scene and attempted to de-escalate the situation. Unfortunately, when officers decided to back off and give the suspect some “space,” things went from bad to worse as employees were quickly the ones forced to run and hide.
Anthony Bellamy, a 38-year-old Portland man, was allegedly pounding on the door of a restaurant in the 1500 block of Northeast 103rd Avenue just before 1 a.m. on a Thursday when he managed to get the attention of staff. Although the restaurant’s dining room was closed, employees were inside, working the drive-through. After being subjected to Bellamy’s threatening presence, they called the cops.
When Portland police officers responded to the report of someone pounding on the door of the restaurant, they arrived at the scene to find a man — later identified as 38-year-old Anthony Bellamy — creating a disturbance. The cops, along with an Enhanced Crisis Intervention Team officer who specializes in crisis communication, tried talking to the man, but to no avail.
As Bellamy remained uncooperative, despite the de-escalation techniques deployed by officers, the Portland police decided to back off, give the suspect some space, and watch from afar. “The ECIT officer used de-escalation techniques including giving the man time and space,” the police wrote in their report, according to The Blaze. “He remained uncooperative, so officers backed out and monitored from a distance.”
Unfortunately, their efforts were all in vain. Rather than calming down, Bellamy continued to pound on the door, eventually breaking the glass with a rock “roughly the size of a grapefruit.” As the suspect gained assess to the inside of the restaurant, staff members were sent running for cover. As Bellamy then made his way into the establishment, employees hid in a freezer room, hoping to get away from the obviously unhinged man.
Cops pursued the suspect, chasing after Bellamy as he went into the restaurant, but he was able to make his way to an employee break room, where he barricaded himself inside. Meanwhile, officers evacuated the employees and then got back down to attempting to negotiate with the suspect, according to the police report. “After a lengthy communication period, an officer used a sledgehammer to break a window to allow another officer to deploy pepper spray,” the report recalled.
At that point, the suspect surrendered, according to the police. At least one officer was cut with broken glass during the incident. He was treated and released from the hospital. Bellamy was also treated medically before being booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center on charges of second-degree burglary and first-degree criminal mischief — both felonies. In addition to the felony charges, Bellamy was also charged with a misdemeanor of second-degree disorderly conduct.
Although the suspect was eventually taken into custody, the incident left social media users disgusted with the Portland police and our justice system, which saw Bellamy released by court order the same day with no bail. “The police in Portland are useless,” one such commenter said on Twitter while another declared, “Criminal privilege,” and yet another mocked the police report’s description of the officers’ tactics, suggesting that “Americans should slowly back away from paying taxes.”
Plenty of others took issue with the cops coddling the suspect by giving him space as he pounded on a place of business with a threatening weapon — in the form of a large rock — in the middle of the night. “Give him ‘space’?” a perplexed commenter wrote. “This is the police force that the moronic leftists want. Counselors to use the warm, fuzzy approach to hardened criminals. Even if they are forced to arrest them, they have a fund to pay their bail. What nation can survive without LEOs to enforce its laws?” That’s a damn good question.
