Original post, 12:40pm:

Video emerged today on the Food Fight! blog of an incident alleged to have happened outside the Scamps pet store in the Lloyd Center yesterday. From Food Fight:

"The Radical Cheerleaders for Animal Rights performed today in front of Scamps store inside Lloyd Center Mall to bring attention to scamps history of selling puppies from puppy mills. After "the performance, an activist is aggressively detained by mall security resulting in angry shoppers expressing their disgust with the security guards. "

The video, which we've clipped to focus on the alleged incident, shows a security guard in conversation with an activist who strongly resembles Matt Rossell from Portland's In Defense of Animals—although it should be made clear that Rossell is yet to return a call seeking confirmation on whether the man in the video is him, so it could well be another person. The man is taken to the ground by two Lloyd Center security guards, and then hauled off in restraints.

INCIDENT: Excessive force?

Lloyd Center security manager Mark Hansen is yet to return a call seeking comment.

Update, 5:03pm: According to jail records, Rossell was indeed arrested yesterday for disorderly conduct and trespass in the second degree.

ROSSELL: Focuses on 'outreach and education' in his activism...

Update, 7:38 pm. Rossell speaks:

"This was an education and outreach opportunity for the radical cheerleaders," says Rossell. "They wanted to try out a new cheer. But the mall security have been a little out of control. I did nothing more than just talk to customers, or even just people at the mall, people standing there by the puppy, I was having a conversation with them."

"Actually the first time that this happened, it was because the person who was bottom-lining the demo didn't bring signs, so we decided to walk inside the mall, and KGW did an investigative report on Scamps earlier that week, interviewing some families who were devastated by buying sick or genetically defective puppies there. There's a huge long history that we have with Scamps including whistle blowers, puppies dropping like flies, and their having this reputation of selling puppy mill puppies," Rossell alleges.

"I was just standing there talking to people in the mall saying did you see the recent KGW story, and the security guard came up to me saying I can't protest, and I said I'm not protesting, but I left very quickly and complied. Another time I was outside at a protest, and I walk through the mall with my two-year old, because it was cold, and the security guards, apparently, had identified me, because they were following. And the one security guard who tackled me, in particular, seemed to have a problem with me, and so I had my daughter on my shoulders, and I went up to the window, and I said, literally, 'hey, look at that puppy mill puppy in the window,' and that one guard in particular just jumped out of nowhere and yelled 'you need to leave the mall!'. So this one guy has been super-aggressive."

"This time, I said, do you realize that Scamps sells puppy mill puppies?" Rossell continues. "And then I walked over to where my wife and daughter were, and then that supervisor came up to me and said 'we're going to arrest you,' and he never asked me to leave or gave me an opportunity to leave, he said we excluded you, we told you that if you ever came back here again you'd be arrested, and I said, you never said any such thing at all, he didn't give me an opportunity to leave, and the next thing I know I'm being tackled."

"And I get wrestled to the ground, my back is still hurting from it, I'm going to the doctor tomorrow, but the most upsetting thing to me was the fact that my daughter witnessed the whole thing, because she was just traumatized. I fully expected the security to behave the way they had before. If they wanted to exclude me, they had every opportunity to put it in writing. They're now saying that I was excluded verbally. But I would have very long conversations with the security at the protests in the past, very civil conversations, and they had every opportunity to write out an exclusion if they wanted to, and I certainly would have obeyed it if they had. But I would never have invited my daughter into a situation where I felt I was risking arrest, I certainly don't feel I deserved to be treated that way, and I'm going to challenge it in court."

"There are situations where activists choose to get arrested," he says. "But this wasn't one of them."

"The police officer who took me down to the situation was totally sympathetic with me," Rossell continues. "When I got down to the sheriff's office, I said I wanted to see the nurse because my back was in pain, and the officer said I didn't shoplift, and at the end of that conversation, the cop was like, 'I think I'm kind of on this guy's side,'," says Rossell. "He was a really nice guy and I thanked him, and said, you know, it's security guards like that who need role models like you, because you act so professionally."

"I've spent some of my life as a security guard," Rossell continues. "And I know what it's like to be a security guard, and I know that there are types of security like this guy who are in it for the wrong reasons and have a chip on their shoulder, and he definitely has a chip on his shoulder for me, because he made it pretty clear that he didn't like me, when we were out of sight of the cameras."

Rossell feels the security guard who tackled him should be fired.