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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

That videos shows people being let in to where a bunch of people already are.

I’m not sure I see anything wrong here?

Is this just crowd flow control in action?

Given what happened today, it’s clear that this action was either malicious or incompetent. There is no possible way to justify their actions as “crowd control” given that they totally lost control of the crowd and let them riot throughout the capital building. Tear gassing the inside of your own legislature is pretty high on the “we fucked up” scale.

What makes it particularly unforgivable is that all of this was predictable. Both respectable commentators and shadier internet boards have been talking about this for weeks. For the same city that was ready to cover every step of the Jefferson memorial with armored troops at the hint of a BLM protest to be caught flat footed by the most predictable violence in the past year is inexcusable. Heads need to (metaphorically) roll.

Oh, so because some people are already there, they get to just abandon the idea behind their job? What juvenile take on responsibility.

I think the comment you are replying to is saying that the area the cops let those people into was either already over run and they were moving to a different place to keep people out. Or that it was area the people were allowed to be in, hence the other non cops in the area and so it’s not a problem that they were let it. Not that the cops were just abandoning there job and letting people into an area they shouldn’t have.

I have no context for where this is and if it’s true but I think you are misrepresenting the above comment.

This is the perimeter barricade around the capitol building. Today, this was a do-not-cross line for anyone not working in the building... or it was supposed to be.

Six policeman are unlikely to be able to hold a crowd like that back. They were probably told to fall back to concentrate their forces elsewhere. Removing the barriers prevents injury to the crowd.

The Capitol Police seemed to be very ill prepared to deal with events today, which is quite sad given that the protest at least was no surprise.

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