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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

I am shocked and horrified that it is taking so long to clear those who have breached the Capitol. There is more police efficiency and aggression in a run of the mill BLM protest.

Edit: for example: https://twitter.com/RedR1dngHood/status/1346908557560537091

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The stark difference in the response to these "protests" vs the DC BLM protests:

https://twitter.com/RedR1dngHood/status/1346908557560537091

"Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses"

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b...

I think the people there are looking for a grand narrative with the feeling of a struggle between two sides. My guess is that Washington is attempting to avoid creating that environment to minimize conflict. That's why we see the burglars strolling like tourists guided by red velvet. [1]

As a disclaimer, I'm not American, so take my feelings with a grain of salt.

[1] https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/13469023580061040...

I’m American and that possibility has occurred to me too. The police are trying to manage the situation without inflaming it, and especially without creating some Tienenmann-lite incident of violence.

I think there's a bit of honesty to it as well. I bet the burglars need to see themselves as breaking into Mordor and challenging Sauron to save Middle-Earth. As much as Congress houses difficult things like partisan deadlock and lobbying, it's not a villain's lair in an action movie. I think it was smart of the capitol organizers to ensure Congress was secure, and then stay away from posturing like a James Bond villain.

The police and the fascists are on the same side.

Some of those that work forces Are the same that burn crosses

Now you do what they told ya

Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!

I came to say this in a more ironic way, but this is clearer.

During the BLM protests the police wasn't late at showing up fully armed.

Yep: https://twitter.com/MEPFuller/status/1346909804036386816

“The Police” is an over generalization. We shouldn’t ask the police to both intervene while also calling all of them fascists.

What we probably shouldn't have done was to hire the people we hired to be police in the first place. That was the mistake from which all others followed. If the people you hire to police your laws will only police the laws they want to police, or even worse, will only police the laws against a certain demographic of people, then you don't have a police force. And acting like these people are police inevitably leads to scenes like the one we see today.

We can’t identify a problem and demand a solution?

There are police officers who mean well and also officers who abuse their power; and police forces in different places have different institutional cultures and leadership, some of which are odious and some of which are good. "The Police" is a very broad term

Look, it’s not like the bad apples theory hasn’t been debated to death. If you’re uncomfortable with the “good apples” being tarnished by the “bad apples”, you’ll have a better impact by working to change the pervasive culture of:

- those “bad apples” being almost universally exempt from meaningful accountability proportional to their power and actions

- those “good apples” being unwilling to lead those accountability efforts, or even to just distance themselves from the “bad apples” to set a better example

- the clear and consistent bias overall in favor of these far right/fascist actors, including numerous times being caught on camera actively coordinating and ample video evidence of such bias in plain view

If “the police” don’t want to be viewed as a homogeneous pro-fascist force, they need to not act like one.

You contradict yourself when you identify a problem then ask that problem to kindly solve itself.

This amounts to argument that if cops feelings are hurt, it is ok for them to let things just happen. I mean, we expect more from snowflake sjws.

Yes we should, because both are apt.

There is nothing those protestors would like more than a violent response. Imagine the social media response. The leadership is scared of sparking a bigger fire

> Imagine the social media response

No, this is a key difference between the sides of this issue. The people in DC aren’t looking for a response on social media - they’re looking for a response in real life, with arms if necessary. I think they may well get it this time, too.

The Left doesn’t seem to realize the table stakes are different with this.

They aren't really though. There's nothing particularly special about DC. The same sentators and congress can meet anywhere to do their job, and just ignore these folks

What'll really spark a bigger fire is if the protesters are given time to do what they say they want, and recruit some congressmembers to declare Trump the election winner.

They lose if they do something as distasteful as blackmail congressmembers to take a vote. They would lose support from everybody

This is nonsense, it's not how it works, Congress cannot choose the president unless no candidate gets a majority of Electoral College votes. Trump unquestionably lacks a majority of state certified Electoral College votes. And Biden unquestionably has a majority of state certified Electoral College votes - and per the Electoral Counts Act those certifications made by the safe harbor date, which was December 8, cannot be disputed by Congress.

Everything else going on is a show. And it is working insofar as Trump's sore loser supporters have sent him more money after the election than before the election. They love the lies. They hate the truth. They lack the coping skill to deal with truth, so they sign up for the lies. They purchase lies as a product, that is what Trump sells. It's who he has always been and always will be.

Trump right now: we had an election, that was stolen from us, it was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side...but you have to go home now, we have to have peace.

they took it away from me, from you, from our country

this was a fraudulent election...so many are treated with evil...go home in peace

Translation: We won, but you gotta go home. They stole from me, from you, from the country, but you gotta go home. They are evil, but you gotta go home.

He is unfit for office. He's ill. The proper thing to do is wrap up the counting of ascertained Electoral College votes, declare Biden the winner. And then the House should immediately impeach Trump. And then the Senators can choose to remove him from office and ban him from ever holding public office again. That is the proper way to end this.

Storming the Capitol building isn't how it works either, but it happened! The whole point of a coup is to dictate new rules for how it works, by looking at things you cannot do and deciding to do them. Don't get me wrong, "they come back and finish the count" is the overwhelmingly likely outcome, but we can't ignore coup attempts just because they aren't likely to work.

Trump has been attempting an autogolpe for weeks. That will be his legacy. That will be the legacy of those who have been supporting him since the election.

Whether they are delusional or they want an autocracy, I can't assess and it doesn't even matter. I'd consider both example of mental illness, but this is a country with a culture that persists in not taking mental illness seriously. Including the one manifested by the sitting president. The solution is to remove him from office without any delay beyond the certification of the Electoral College.

The capitol building doesn't make decisions though. The building grants no legitimacy. Just because there's people on the capitol building, doesn't mean anyone will listen to them.

If congress wants to meet on zoom, they can

They are armed. You can't use tear gas against weapons but guns. Using guns will lead to deaths either way, so I think they are taking the correct stance.

Several people have claimed this, but none of the news sources mention it

CSPAN reporting at least one law enforcement officer transferred to the hospital with a gunshot wound.

That sucks. I hope they are okay

I haven't found a picture of a protester carrying a gun, but there are certainly vandals with clubs and bulletproof vests inside the Capitol, and some of them have broken into offices:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/06/us/washington-dc-pro...

You can still use tear gas.

If countries weren't afraid of other gasses being used in war, they'd use tear gas on the battlefield

BLM took over an entire section of Seattle for weeks.

The cops pulled out before that happened, and it was quite peaceful there while that was going on. It's really not the same situation.

I'm not defending what's going on here, but CHAZ/CHOP had a higher murder rate than Somalia because of unelected volunteer "private security". Not sure how you see that as peaceful.

Source, please. For both parts of that claim.

I'm sure that was hyperbole, CHAZ/CHOP has 2 deaths and 4 wounded in a 24 day period.

So the murder rate is 2/24=0.0833_

Somalia had a murder rate of 599 deaths in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

599/365=1.641

That being said, at least 1 of the killings at the CHAZ/CHOP was by the self proclaimed security forces. As far as I know no one has ever been identified or held accountable. If the idea is that you do not need police/ want to hold them to greater accountability because they are violent and kill innocent people but your replacement does the same thing...then what is the point?

Murder rates are typically reported on a per capita basis, not per day rate.

Siri is reporting CHAZ had a population of 80(??) and Somolia a population of 15MM. The respective per capita rates would be 0.025 and ~3.99e-5

I apologize, some how I misread the parent as saying that there were more murders per day....

I am not sure how I misread that.

No reason to apologize, just trying to add some context/clarity

Murder rate is a per capita statistic. Larger populations have more of all types of crime, almost by definition.

I know that, for some reason I had misread the parent as saying that more murders occurred per day. My brain may have translated rate as change over time....

At least one of them was also by a cop's buddy, who drove in, shot somebody then wandered over to the cops for a high five and to be arrested.

> and it was quite peaceful

and also quite illegal and a complete breakdown of rule of law

It was peaceful. Very few people got murdered.

Quite peaceful? There were four shootings in ten days and at least two people killed [1]. I personally went there and within a span of an hour or so that I was there I saw a woman screaming about how she had been raped and I saw a mob of people violently ejecting a street preacher.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone#S...

In comparison to the violence that was going on before the cops pulled out of their precinct, it was definitely more peaceful. It was also many orders of magnitude more peaceful than the current situation at the Capitol.

There were somewhere between 1 and 10 thousand people living in the zone. If we assume it was 10 thousand, and there were 2 murders inside of 10 days, then that works out to a rate of 73 (2*36.5) murders per year per 10k people, or 730 murders per 100k. That's approximately 7 times the rate of the most murderous city in the world[1].

I don't know what the murder rate in the neighborhood was prior to the occupation, but I'm pretty confident it wasn't nearly that high.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate

What? More people were murdered there than at the capitol.

I lived a block away from the CHAZ/CHOP and while it was mostly peaceful during the day, it was angry, aggressive, and deadly at night. I took video of a mob of people brutalizing (pushing to the ground, pinning on the ground) a Christian street preacher in broad daylight because they didn't like his annoying speech. At night, for days at a time, there were gunshots and people getting shot. If you think it was "quite peaceful" there, then you're getting your information from a severely biased source. I lived there and spent more time there than probably any of your sources.

My source is me, I live 3 blocks from it. Things were for sure a lot quieter at night with CHAZ/CHOP going on than they were in the week prior to it.

Are you saying it was "quite peaceful" in absolute terms or relative to other extreme events? I took it to mean absolute terms, but I want to give you the benefit of the doubt. If you lived there as I did, I don't see how anyone could look at the CHOP and say it was "quite peaceful" in absolute terms (eg, relative to an average day).

Bit of both.

The week before the CHOP started was full the sounds of helicopters overhead, flashbang explosions, and "less lethal" rounds being fired. The week after CHOP started was quiet. Comparing the shift from yesterday to today in DC's Capitol Hill against the shift from June 7 to June 8 in Seattle's Capitol Hill, the CHOP was extraordinarily peaceful. That's mostly the comparison I was making by initially saying it was "quite peaceful": the day before and the day after in those two locations.

But even then, the CHOP compared to the same location today (for example) is honestly pretty similarly peaceful. It was certainly a relatively violent time for that street, but I didn't feel at all at risk walking through it. I also didn't have any problem living 3 blocks away from a place that many news agencies tried to construe as violent anarchy.

Seattle is a place where people can throw each other off of overpasses into traffic just fine.

CHOP wasn't significantly different

And during that time they surrounded a federal courthouse... where people were free to come and go and court remained in session...

I like the original better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_General_Strike

It's being live streamed on Twitch by people inside too. They locked them inside.

So you think they will be cleared?

Police are standing back and standing by.

https://twitter.com/jazmineulloa/status/1346898566703435779

https://twitter.com/igorbobic/status/1346902299466203145

https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1346920198461419520

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