Capitol Police, a department shrouded in secrecy: not subject to FOIA requests | Hacker News Reader

Capitol Police, a department shrouded in secrecy: not subject to FOIA requests

rollcall.com

54 pointstony10124 comments

No comment on the FOIA angle. In general if I were a lawmaker I would be very shook right now. The people who are supposed to protect me are either incompetent or untrustworthy. Hindsight is 20/20 now but with more organization today could have been a major attack. My guess is that we'll see a purge followed by an increased militarization / professionalization of the force that protects lawmakers. The Secret Service is well known, yet I haven't heard of the Capitol Police until this incident.

Edit: Or maybe it'll be a wakeup call for lawmakers to investigate whether they actually have the allegiance of the various law enforcement agencies that were present or absent today.

At an even more general level one key institution (the presidency) has just passively (actively?) supported a major bodily threat to the most powerful people of another key institution (the lawmakers) so I imagine we'll see the full force of America's checks and balances in play now.

Probably should be though; they've not exactly covered themselves in glory today. Perhaps a bit of sunlight might help.

Talk to Congress on that one.

If I had my druthers, Congress would have a lot to answer for. But sadly not a lot of people are interested in my opinion in this area.

"Why have you given the president unilateral authority to do so much" would be pretty close to the top of the list, for the record.

That would top my list actually. Second on the list is the C-SPAN cameras.

I’ll add it to the list of grievances. The list is long.

I fail to see how, they fought valiantly to defend congress while heavily outnumbered by an angry armed mob.

The real question here is: where was the national guard or the various other law enforcement and military personnel that seemed so available during other disturbances?

This act of insurrection was well telegraphed, a casual look at a site like thedonald.win would have revealed the plans for the rally and the intent of its attendees. There hundreds (and many more upvoting) of people concurrently promoted the event and outwardly said that the states, congress, and courts failed them, so they were going to pick up arms and forcefully take power.

Surely, the federal government with its vast resources should have had a guy checking such a prominent website, right? I'm sure there were have darker parts of the 'Trump media'-verse with even more explicit calls to arms, if such a thing were possible.

Well for one, they murdered an unarmed woman today. We've heard all year from the Democrats and the mainstream media how property destruction and trespassing isn't worthy of a death sentence. So there's that.

A) It may not have been the Capitol Police, there is some speculation that it may have actually been the Secret Service

> A witness described the shooting incident to WUSA-9, saying: “We had stormed into the chambers inside. And there was a young lady who rushed through the windows. A number of police and Secret Service were saying get back, get down, get out of the way. She didn’t heed the call and as we kind of raced up to grab people and pull them back, they shot her in the neck.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/vid...

B) While she may have been unarmed, the people that shot her could not be certain of that. Multiple firearms (including concealed ones) were confiscated from the intruders.

C) She wasn't standing there passively, she was trying to jump through a door as the vanguard for the mob.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/ks12mn/anot...

D) Time will tell whether or not the shooting was justified, but it obviously wasn't a matter of protecting property. They were trying to protect the members of Congress, staffers, media, Vice President, and other people in their care from a violent mob.

Edit: added source to support possible Secret Service involvement

That was a justified shooting. With an armed and shouting crowd right there at the chambers, the consequences of rushing over the final barricade towards the men with guns were pretty predictable.

I’m surprised they only shot once. In such a tense situation, I don’t believe I personally would have such restraint.

There are videos of Capitol police opening barricades to let the mob in and taking selfies with the insurrectionists inside the Capitol. Hardly what I would call "fighting valiantly to defend congress."

That should upset every American.

The protesters overran the main barricades, so the Capitol Police retreated to more defensible positions.

https://twitter.com/elijahschaffer/status/134696651499014963...

https://v.redd.it/v38q6eo0pr961

https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/krvboi/clas...

“ The real question here is: where was the national guard or the various other law enforcement and military personnel that seemed so available during other disturbances?”

Trump didn’t want them there. Apparently it was Pence who pushed to have them go there.

Exactly, Trump and his sycophants invited this mob to the Capitol, riled them up, filled them venomous lies about the election and their institutions, and deprived Congress of an appropriate level of protection.

Yet, people are trying to cast aspersions of the poor Capitol Police?

> The real question here is: where was the national guard

Despite being requested by the D.C. Mayor on Tuesday, not approved by the federal executive until after the insurrectionists had occupied the Capitol (which, considering that the insurrection was on behalf of incited by the President, is not so surprising.) And apparently when finally approved, it was by the acting Defense Secretary in consultation with the Vice President.

> or the various other law enforcement

Again, federal executive responsibility (mutual aid from other jurisdictions is routine once an incident is under way, and was provided, but advance deployments of additional LE to federal facilities in the national capital would be federal.)

Pence, for all his faults, will be remembered as a patriot for his actions on 6 January.

No, he will not. Doing the literal minimum does not make you a patriot, and history will be lukewarm to him at best.

“He didn’t follow through with the coup” is the best he can hope for.

He will be remembered as a patriot by the same 50% of everyone who voted MAGA, twice.

I don't know about history books.

Probably if a given book or article even records more than his name and the R, this act could easily be one of the only explicit facts mentioned. All the years of messier boring day to day policies won't be mentioned, just the summary single word conservative, "advocated conservative policies" etc.

It doesn't have the same effect.

So you end up with a little blurb that says his name and the list of offices he held and that he was famous for declining to participate in a coup attempt.

I think I could see it actually that he will be remembered as a patriot.

> 50% of everyone who voted MAGA, twice

50% of everyone didn’t note MAGA, either time, much less twice.

Heck, more than 50% of those who bothered to vote didn’t vote MAGA, either time.

The MAGA crowd hates his guts, especially now. He didn’t use his wholly imaginary powers to install trump for another term; if that mob got ahold of him his lifespan would be measured in minutes.

Extreme groups always reserve their strongest ire for their ideological neighbors, not the alternate side.

Follow up. The rioters setup a set of gallows and were chanting “kill Mike Pence”. They hate him with a righteous fury.

Man were you right about that.

At times like these, you can't count on people to do the literal minimum, so you appreciate when they do it.

Matt Gaetz is currently vacillating between actively defending the insurrection and blaming the whole thing on Antifa.

Edit: before some whacko decides to defend Matt Gaetz, the Washington Times retracted the story he cited.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/6/xrvision-fir...

I acknowledge your point in principle, and reject it roundly in the case of Pence.

It’s not that Pence was doing nothing and finally did the bare minimum to our surprise. No, what actually happened was that Pence has spent four years actively abetting and abiding by this and he pulled back at the last second; he was leading crowds last week in a chant of fighting for trump. He is part of the problem, full stop, and he doesn’t get credit for not following through with it. One doesn’t praise someone for rushing into a burning building to save its occupants if they also lit the building on fire themselves.

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