The Portland Police Bureau announced this week it's permanently moving six officers to its Gang Enforcement Team to "address rising gun violence."

"Recent gun violence has gravely impacted our community and is a reminder to police that we must remain fluid in our response. As with other spikes in gun violence," wrote Chief Lawrence P. O'Dea, III in a news release. "We must respond with additional officers to help reduce incidents."

But the two men—activist Marcus Cooper, 26, and rapper Loren Ware, 23, who performs as Glenn Waco—who were arrested last week following a shooting (neither man was involved in the actual shooting) at an unsanctioned Last Thursday celebration on Alberta Street near 20th Ave. say that's a bullshit claim.

"This is a crime scene," Ware says. "I'm not talking about (the shooting) last Thursday. I'm talking about this: Alberta (Street). We walk in what used to be our neighborhoods and get looked at as if we don't belong."

Read more after the jump.

Cooper, Ware, Renee Lopez (who shot a video of the two men being arrested and was interviewed by police as a witness to last week's shooting), and about two dozen supporters on Wednesday gathered in front of Don Pancho Taqueria in the first of what Cooper says will be at least two protests.

"It's crazy how (incidents in) our area are 'gang related,' and yet we're getting kicked out of our own area," Cooper says. "So whenever we show up to our area, we are the gang."

Both men spoke about the gentrification happening in Northeast Portland. Cooper talked about having to be home "by the time the streetlights came on" when he was a kid, saying that if he didn't make it on time other neighborhood moms would shoo him home where he was supposed to be. It's not like that anymore, he says. As the demographic changed and outsiders moved into what used to be a predominantly black neighborhood, that sense of community faded.

"If a community has no unity there is no identity," Cooper says.

Neither Cooper nor Ware spoke directly about the incident or the criminal charges they face, but they had a lot to say about what they see as police injustice and a fragmented neighborhood.

"If Mayor Hales feels like he and his crew can patrol the streets, harass and terrorize our communities, then we have the right to question the police every time they set foot in our communities and approach one of us," Ware says. "Blacks make up roughly 6 percent of the population, but 40 percent of the traffic stops," he says. "Do you see and issue?"

Here's the full video of Cooper and Ware speaking (video courtesy of Benji Vương):