“The majority of those calls are actually unfounded,” Sheriff Craig Roberts of Clackamas County said in a news conference on Monday. He said many of the people going into communities were not looters, but residents or neighbors offering help. But his officers have encountered armed citizens stopping people at gunpoint in an attempt to protect communities from looting he said does not exist. Law enforcement has also had to combat unsubstantiated rumors that the fires themselves are the result of left-wing extremists. In rural Douglas County south of Eugene, the sheriff’s office posted a message to Facebook last week warning that rumors and unfounded conspiracy theories were making a bad situation worse.

Source: New York Times September 15, 2020 12:49 UTC