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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

That would probably work for these morons, but in general people don't take their IDs to protests.

"A friend" was detained in protests and illegal parties multiple times, the police will make you identify yourself when you don't have an ID and they radio in or verify your identity with the terminals on their cars. You are obliged to identify yourself when you are "detained", and if you don't in cases like this were there's ample evidence of _at least_ breaking and entering they will arrest you and move on to the next person. They had basically all of the the DC police at their disposal for this, plus the national guard. They can't say they didn't have the resources to identify 100 protesters, I've seen them do it with 20 police officers with bigger groups.

If they are overwhelmed they don't do the verification but they always always always at least write the given identities on a notebook or the car computer.

If they didn't do that when they emptied this building is because someone on the chain of command told them not to. Otherwise they _have_ to do it.

Unless you are under arrest you do not need to give identification.

That's what's written but it's not how it works, because "being detained" is usually not stipulated in laws. If you are detained, which the police have ample power to do so if you for example just broke into the Capitol, if you don't identify yourself usually you _will_ get arrested.

So yeah, if you are not arrested you don't have to identify yourself. But if the police show up and you are clearly committing a crime if you actively refuse to identify yourself you will get arrested and you will have to identify yourself.

That is only true in stop and identify states. Being in the building is not itself a crime. Unless there is enough evidence to actually arrest an individual they can just sit there and not say a damn thing until the police are required to release.

There's no city state in the US were the police don't have as part of their operational procedure on a breaking and entering to arrest an individual that exercises their right to silence. That doesn't exist. No Police Department in the US will just let you walk away after they just kicked you out of a building that was violently stormed if you just refuse to identify yourself.

In this case it's even more bizarre and out of the ordinary. The police executed a kettling maneuver but didn't even try to identify the individuals. They don't train police officers with the ACLU "how to act if you are being detained manual" dude, it's the other way around, they train them to try to dissuade you from committing property crimes by actively trying to make you not exercise your rights and identify yourself.

Being in the Capitol while it's on lockdown is enough evidence to get arrested if you can't produce a bagde or something. Letting this people walk out is completely unjustified from the usual DC Metro procedures.

This is incorrect for multiple reasons:

1. There are laws in every U.S. state regarding what grounds the police have to detain someone. In most states, it boils down to reasonable articulable suspicion that someone has committed, is about to or is in the process of committing a crime. Suspicion alone isn't enough. The police don't need to tell you what their reasonable suspicion is during a detainment, but if the matter ends up in court, they will.

2. There are "stop and I.D." states. If you are in one of these states, you are required to identify yourself if detained. If you're not in one of these states, such as California, you are not required by law to identify yourself when detained. That being said, if you are lawfully detained and subsequently arrested you'll be jailed until you do identify yourself no matter which state you're in.

More info here. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_and_identify_statutes

What stops them from arresting you when they just saw you breaking into the Capitol?

To arrest an individual there would have to be evidence that they were responsible for damage or actually breaking in. That is a handful of the people that were there. The police cannot just arrest you if you haven't broken any laws. If a person just entered after somebody else broke in they didn't break any laws.

The Metropolitan Police are good at kettling; see, for example, the Swann Street Siege during protests this summer. The objective was to arrest every protestor. That so many people just walked away is mind boggling.

Again, glaring evidence that this was more or less allowed to happen, even if police officers did not literally open the gates.

Not glaring evidence that it was allowed to happen. Just evidence that they did not correctly anticipate the number of personnel they'd need.

There are videos showing cops waving people in, cops taking selfies with people inside the Capitol, cops gingerly walking hand in hand with insurrectionists.

Underestimating the police necessary is a form of allowing this to happen.

Yeah, maybe there were individuals holding the line, but the police definitely, irrefutably allowed this to happen.

About those selfies. The only ones I've seen are those where the Trump supporters were holding the cameras. Have you seen any where the police were taking shots of themselves with the protesters? A police officer standing passively by while someone takes as shot that includes them seems less ... outrageous.

What's the demeanor of the cops in question? https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1346920198461419520 is not someone who is just idly standing by -- they are participating, even if the insurrectionist is holding the camera.

Yeah, this is the video everyone shows. I don't know what the cop's demeanor is. He's wearing a mask.

As a practical matter, what should the police officer have done in this situation, outnumbered in a potentially hostile crowd?

I'm agnostic on what was actually going on here. I feel cautious about how narrative quickly outpaces the evidence to support it. And I'm honestly not so concerned here about what individual cops do, but whether there was a coordinated conspiracy to insurrection. A coup.

Here is what I believe. This is really very Trump. He riles up the crowd, says he'll go lead them up to the steps of the Capitol, but then gets in his limo and goes to the White House instead. Perhaps he gets the assistance of the capitol police, but that is not established. But he is slow or refuses to provide them National Guard backup (apparently it was Pence who got it done, going around Trump).

All of this is to get a coup with plausible deniability.

I might be wrong.

If last summer is the standard to live up to, he should have been maiming as many random people as possible, with special emphasis on the photographers and any children that might unfortunately be present.

Just look at how any of the 2020 BLM protests were handled, if you want to see what urban police forces in the USA are capable of on short notice.

It's even more mind boggling when this protesters were inside a building that the secret service has multiple ways to completely lock down, and the police had the full support of the national guard to for example establish a second secure perimeter. They basically could have pointed two assault rifles at each protester while having a third police office per protester telling them to identify themselves.

This was the chance for the government to show a response of hollywoodesque proportions and they didn't. This makes the US government look like a joke, it's not a functional democracy. If the government actually relied of this nut-jobs to function, as in like if Trump was actually throwing a coup, it's understandable to act in this way. But the fact that no one on the Metro decided to go all in against this clowns is something that I can't understand.

The crazy progressives that think that Trump is literally the reincarnation of Hitler are saying that it's because they are white and this is Trump's paramilitary. I thought that they were crazy living in their own reality but after seeing how they got away with storming the Capitol I'm starting to think that the woke conspiracy theories are truer than I thought.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polices-tepid-respo...

Yeah I know, but this is not just a protest. If I were a right-wing activist I would already be planning a BBQ on the Rose Garden for Trump's last day on the White House.

They already are. Also, Trump refused to send in the National Guard claiming “his people” were peaceful and that no one was paying attention to the rioters. You may want to do some digging. All of those woke conspiracy theories being spread by crazy progressives like myself usually come from Trump or QAnon supporters directly.

The Metropolitan Police don't have jurisdiction on Capitol grounds. So perhaps they weren't allowed to do anything without the consent of the Capitol Police.

The way that works with national building is always that they establish a perimeter outside the building and act with that perimeter as a base of operation or whatever is their name for that. A lot of national monuments, reserve areas, national parks, etc... have the same issue where they have their smaller police that never does anything and only patrols inside.

If there's evidence that you broke into a building anywhere in Washington, like, your face or outfit matching 100% the one of someone that was seen on national TV desecrating the building, the Metro police has cause to arrest you anywhere in Washington. There's so much precedent to this it's completely mind-blowing they didn't do anything. If it was so easy to get away with storming the Capitol we would already have a hippie commune in there. The Capitol Police is a joke.

Agreed, but they do have jurisdiction on land completely surrounding the Capitol complex. Moreover, these police forces practice and work together.

The first part of your statement was correct:

https://i.imgur.com/1erVokO.jpg

He was promptly fired by his employer.

He made it look like a media badge but the actual media took very high resolution photos of him where you could fairly easily read it

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2021/01/06/ap21007017666908...

It's some kind of wild foolishness here. The guy participated in what's likely legally somewhere in the neighborhood of insurrection and then he stood there as international media was snapping photos and he didn't think to hide his giant nametag...

I'm sure most who ended up inside were just "following the crowd" and didn't actually plan to be there or murder anyone so it's probably not an "insurrection" in how I would personally define it, (as in, some planned execution of a coordinated intent to seize control of the government), but yeah, probably not the legal waters anyone wants to be swimming in.

In the history books, usually a failed coup is followed by either lining the plotters up against the wall without trial and shooting them or a public execution. It's no good

If I was there I'd be assuming that there'd be a whole slew of undisclosed trackers everywhere in that building - RFID readers picking up my credit cards, BTLE and WIFI sniffers picking up my phone, a cell phone interceptor recording my IMEI, facial detection and tracking, etc ... simply dripping in spy devices. I also wouldn't be surprised if they had some special artillery room with military grade weapons. It seems horrendously dumb to enter that building following a mob.

There's a fair bit of evidence to support the hypothesis that these weren't the brightest people.

Most actually believed this was the start of the Storm and that they would force Congress to overturn the election

Are there q-drops around this? I've been out of that loop.

Generally speaking, by the point you’re trying to find an alibi for the honest-to-god criminal charge of sedition, multiple mistakes have been made.

Surprisingly many of the people who stole souvenirs from the Capitol were willing to tell reporters their full names and hometowns

I am pretty sure they are expecting a pardon.

...or not being prosecuted under a 2nd Trump term - perhaps even lauded as heroes.

No, but they do take cellphones.

lol, prob one or two stingrays floating around that area....

The police can't ask for your cellphone while you are in the limbo of being detained but not arrested. Once you are arrested they can get a warrant for your cellphone, but getting it unlocked can be a whole different issue. If you are arrested they will usually identify you via face recognition or fingerprints.

I think they would have been able to arrest everyone inside the Capitol building, since everyone inside was breaking the law.

Yes most definitely. They also have the infrastructure to do so, but not sure they have the infrastructure to keep them arrested until everything is sorted out.

They absolutely have that infrastructure. Handcuff all of them, and let them lie face-down on the pavement while you process them.

That's what usually happens with mass arrests.

I don't think parent comment was about confiscating phones rather than identifying which phones were in the area during the infiltration. If you can sort out the ones who had reason for being there, everyone else is a possible culprit.

Legally getting that information from cellphone towers or tech companies and then acting on it would take at least one week, even if they had killed multiple people. A three letter agency could probably get it clandestinely and act para-legally for example putting people on surveillance or getting a flash arrest warrant for an unrelated but quickly to parallel-construct crime, but I don't see that happening in this case.

If there's going to be arrests based on cellphone tower or mobile app data I would expect them to happen by the end of next week.

This moron did: https://twitter.com/TreWardWBAL/status/1347226070085480448

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