To prevent unauthorized entry, Capitol Police would have had to put up a fight. Seems they were unwilling to do so. If America continues down this path Russia (and others) are just gonna have a field day.
If federal security at Court House shoots BLM protestors who are entering a federal court house, those security people would probably get charged with murder.
It's unreasonable to expect Capitol Police to make that sort of moral choice in the moment. And if you give cops the greenlight to shoot people to protect property, there will be a lot of unnecessarily death going forward.
That said, they may (probably?) screwed up containing the crowd contained in the first place. Though to play devils advocate, the President had just told a mob to go "wild." Not sure if Capitol Police could successfully manage that.
Certainly with the benefit of hindsight, there should have been a much stronger show of force/barricades/etc. Should that have been obvious even without hindsight? Don't know.
That said, once the Capitol Police were outnumbered and things were getting out of hand, I'm pretty sure the best outcome if they had used deadly force to stop a rush would have been headlines like "Dozens of Trump supporters dead after police open fire on crowd." Worse scenarios include the police getting overwhelmed anyway and many of them killed also leading to a firefight within the capitol.
The very idea that no-one could see this coming is ridiculous.
The actual level of violence done by the mob is relatively tame. Shooting a bunch of people in the halls of Congress isn't going to stop the damage to the rule of law. And it would have what? Prevented a few laptops from being stolen, a couple doors from being broken down, etc. It's not like they torched the place.
I personally don't think violence by a mob is acceptable. But it seems most people do--as long as they are sympathetic to the cause.
Which is contrast of the “mostly peaceful” protests that involved arson and beatings.
This is just as bad but everyone acknowledges it.
Why do people jump to the most extreme side of things in discussions now a days?
There are many many many ways to disperse of a crowd that doesn't involve firing live rounds at a crowd. In fact: they were able to do it later!
Tear gas, flash bangs, barricades, rubber bullets. None of these were used until well after they made it inside.
So its sort of irrelevant to what police who were suddenly asked to hold a door from a violent mob.
With hindsight they should have had teargas ready. But they probably didn't expect the President to direct a mob to capture the Capitol.
Probably? Says who? In fact, multiple people have been shot (fatally or otherwise) during BLM protests, and actions against those officers have been very much the exception.
At least in Minnesota and Portland they let looters burn/occupy the buildings without contest.
At my own workplace, all the areas that are not intended for public use - office blocks and most meeting rooms, for example - are locked at all times and have keycard access. Defense in depth, y'know? And we're not even a juicy target like the US Capitol, we're just some company.
But you could also grab enough of your friends to obtain a decisive numerical advantage – let's say, you and twenty of your closest friends, that probably gets close to what we saw yesterday. Be sure one or two of them are visibly armed.
Once you have your buddies, you can go break through the glass door leading to the receptionist's desk. We saw that yesterday too.
Once you're in, game over: I don't expect Nancy to tackle you at the door, or my friend Brian to kick you when you try to come into the conference room. I expect when you're inside you'll get a guest badge – or an employees – and proceed to go about doing whatever you were interested in doing.
My office's threat model – and yours – is not based on defending against a mob of people storming the building.
That's sort of exactly the point I'm making. My office's threat model isn't even in the same league, and yet it still seems to have more thought put into physical security than the Capitol building. It would appear that, unlike in the hypothetical you're constructing, in the real event, people didn't even need keycards in order to freely move about the building after getting past the exterior doors.
The Capitol is intended to allow most people most of the time.
I've honestly never tried to visit a congressperson in DC, so I suppose I wouldn't know, but it sounds unlikely. My public library is even more intended for public use than the US Capitol, but I still need a key to go back into the offices.
Generally, yes. Their offices are suites with a reception that'll be staffed for constituent services most of the day. Staff are also typically there all day taking calls from the public.
Found a quick tour of one (small office; leadership will have much larger ones) on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnIMUfF3U8I
And that goes double for mysterious flash drives randomly stuck in people's computers, or bugs hidden in planters etc. Just an absolute travesty.
If they weren't prepared for this: incompetence. But there are videos of people getting selfies with guards, and staying within the velvet ropes when coming in. Something isn't right here and no one is talking about it.
A police department with an intelligence unit couldn't guess that things might get a little out of hand when 3 weeks before, the President publicly used Twitter to ask his followers[1] to attend a "wild" protest on January 6th? Not that an intelligence unit was required as the plans were in the open. I have great difficulty in putting this down to incompetence, all things considered.
1. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13401857732205158...
The footage of police opening barriers and stuff, and taking selfies is however a bit more worrying. I think it's pretty well known that individuals within the police could identify or sympathise with Q or the far right - so if it turns out that this footage was exactly what it's seems to be (and we know how easily things can be misrepresented and shown out of context) then I imagine some cops are gonna be in big trouble.
I don't know what kinds of contingency planning may have taken place, but ultimately this event seems to have been ended and cleaned up pretty quickly compared to some other demonstrations we've seen recently.
There is not enough information to come to either conclusion, but I would like to think the DC police leadership didn't/doesn't plumb those depths of incompetence. The public (and congress) deserves answers on what happened and why.
This picture?
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pence_posing_with_...
Unless something more sinister emerges the simplest explanation is probably the best - there some cops who are far-right sympathisers and there are incompetently managed and organized Police forces. Both of those things are already demonstrably true and explain how the response quite well without introducing a grand conspiracy.
However, it is no secret that the FBI has long-reported (2006!) on white-supremecist infiltration of police forces[1] - this is not crazy talk. If someone joined the police as a rookie in 2006 to enforce their personal agenda, how far up the leadership hierarchy would they be now?
1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...
This is worrying in its own terms. Policemen are adult, and shouldn't believe in fairy tales.
Being able to use deductive reasoning, understand basic principles of science (like the difference between cheratine and DNA), double-check the facts, and find the truth between the lies is THE work of the police.
Somebody unable to see a hole for years in theories that most 5 Yo curious children could dismantle in a hour is unfit for this kind of work. They simply shouldn't be policemen. Period. Will end distroying the lifes of innocent people.
Hmm, why turn down an offer of assistance from a military whose commander-in-chief wants to overturn the election? I can think of a few reasons...
There's also a fundamental democratic issue at stake: It's not by coincidence that the United States Capitol Police answers to the legislature and not to the executive -- indeed, this is seen around the world (e.g. Canada's Parliamentary Protective Service answers to the Speakers of the House and Senate) and arguably the principle that military forces should not be brought to the seat of legislative power dates back to the Roman Republic... which swiftly became the Roman Empire after Caesar crossed the Rubicon with an army at his back.
Let's do a thought experiment: let's say there are a few elements in the police who are active QAnon believers, sprinkled in at various levels. Let's also assume some more force members are not believers, per se, but sympathize with the cause, and are willing to look aside since they may dislike some legislators who they see as enabling BLM, Antifa and other un-American actors (in their eyes) and believe that something "weird" happened with the elections and/or the whole establishment is dirty. Would these individuals not listen to the orders of the commander in chief, even when not delivered via the official chain of command?
It's a matter of law that they answer to the legislature, this isn't an "assumption." Individually they have answered to a not very sharp police chief, and the Sergeants-At-Arms of the House and Senate, who are all in the process of resigning because of how badly they recently screwed up, if that's what you mean.
I could have expressed myself better there - I was distinguishing between them being answerable to the legislature (de jure) in the logical, org chat way, and them "answering" to a mercurial president they ideologically agree with (de facto), in the here and now.
* higher level leadership judged the threat of the protestors to be insignificant (incompetence)
* higher level leadership wanted the potential for a mob to enter the building (complicity)
However they found themselves in the position, they did, and once there I think they had an unenviable task. And the fact that the occupants of the building were safely sheltered until a larger force came to clear the building shows that they made a good decision.
The dude who fired the shot, are you really defending him? A man with no real reasonable threat to his life? None of the people in that shot were shown to be armed.
Honest question, what are your views on Jacob Blake? Do you defend him? Because he sexually assaulted a women who had a restraining order against him, ignored police orders to stop, got up after being tazed twice and reached into a car with children. The DA found the police were completely justified in shooting him 7 times in the back.
This is the double standard. If you say she had no excuse for getting shot, than neither did Jacob Blake, or Breyanna Taylor.
There's multiple camera angles which captured the minutes leading up to her death, posted on major news sites like The Washington Post, so no assumption needed.
I still don't feel the shoot to kill was justified (especially as a shot in an area that would immobilize a person, like the chest or the gut, would've been safer of collateral damage vs a shot to the head, similar to the one taken, which unequivocally is a shot intended to kill), but trying to argue she was not completely and totally in the wrong is just absurd to me.
Someone knowledgeable of the subject, which you imply I am not, would know that shooting someone in the middle of their body is the standard operating procedure (and is potentially less fatal, but yes legally still intended to kill) rather than taking an (essentially) headshot as this officer did.
Also notice I did not say what the officer did was "against policy" or illegal, I simply said I didn't feel it was justified (especially with where the shot hit). It's for the department and the courts to decide if the officer violated his duty.
Shooting a center of mass is not at all about being "less fatal" it is about it being the biggest target with the biggest chance of stopping your adversary.
Did I say it was? I believe I used the word "potentially" in the reply you are commenting to. The officer was shooting from ~6ft away and had a firm grip and was well composed, if they can't hit the chest of a target that was mostly still at the moment of the shot then they need to be spending a lot more time in the gun range (at the absolute minimum).
Not at all unlikely.
She was part of an armed mob trying in the process of breaking into the speakers lobby that posed an imminent threat to members of Congress, whom members of the mob had moments before loudly expressed concern were trying to leave.
“Trespassing” wasn't at all the issue.
I think it's pretty clear at this point that they would have been overstaffed if the protestors had a different skin color.
In the 1970s, armed Black Panther members took the California State Capitol and no one died.
At least one officer is dead (this changes daily so who knows) and one protestor (she was unarmed, that's a protestor, trespasser at best) was shot by sorry excuse of a Capitol Officer who shot wildly into a crowd (almost hitting the other Federal Officer behind her!)
Please stop making this about race.
Having seen multiple videos of the event it's clear the shooter was not firing wildly into the crowd. They were aiming specifically at the person trying to break into the area. She's dead because of her own actions.
So you are saying that the Capitol police succeeded in creating a honeypot that was meant to embarrass Trump?
This is all true but might be crediting the Capitol Police leadership with a little more coordination and planning than they truly exhibited. There were clearly some law enforcement officers who did not simply step aside and let the rioters have their way once lawmakers had been evacuated.
Based on some of the comments here I get the feeling it's not common knowledge yet that at least one involved law enforcement officer has died [1] and a couple of dozen were injured. Possibly they could have done better for themselves if they'd all been as easygoing about things as the officers photographed in the rotunda.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/brian-sic...
Peaceful protestors.
Were the BLM people who stormed city hall in Seattle insurrectionists? Where the Black Panthers who took the California State Capitol in the 1970s insurrectionists?
Stop with the bullshit name games. These were not rioters. They didn't set anything on fire. They should not have stolen or broken anything. That's wrong and bad and should be condemned. Those people should get federal time
But man...you have to admit...there is something beautiful about the peasants entering the royal court, and the town idiot putting his feet up on the table that belongs to the Hand of the King.
The villagers entered the royal court and the senators clutched their pearls.
America has had a long history of occupying federal buildings. This is certainly not unprecedented.
These people were not a coup or insurrection. They had no plan. There was no person with a new founding document they were going to read. They didn't bring in an armed force and take and occupy the capital.
The overreaction to what happened is fucking insane, especially compared to what actual Rioters where allowed to get away with for the past year. In May, DC was literally on fire from the BLM riots, and we didn't see this type of DoubleSpeak.
They had zip ties meant for the purpose of taking hostages: https://twitter.com/Adiscen/status/1347189171362918400
IEDs were found at the DNC and RNC: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/pipe-bomb-rnc... https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/abc-news-exclusive-photo-sus...
I agree. Although I’m definitely anti-Trump and condemn his garbage about the election being stolen, and while I don’t condone the behavior of the protestors, I don’t really see how this so much worse than business owners who had their livelihoods destroyed during the BLM riots over the summer. I don’t remember CNN or Democrats tripping over themselves to see who could use the harshest language for what had happened.
Again I’m not condoning this, but honestly, given what happened, the only real tragedy was a woman was shot because a jumpy police officer shot blindly into a crowd. Our pride was embarrassed but that’s ok. Let’s learn from this and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The real problem with what happened is Trump incited it. But that’s another story.
Look at how different the MSM response was. Destroyed businesses and disruption to innocent people's lives was a necessary sacrifice for BLM riots. And best of all, covid is only dangerous depending on what you're protesting for. But some people going into a building?! No! Stop that!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_Un...
How many is that? I can't even count. More than 50, less than 100? Versus 10, possibly way less, depending on what kind of comparisons one wants to draw? [1]
Doesn't this point exactly to the significance of what happened on the 6th? Race riots have been happening in the United States for a hundred some years. They are obviously not significant in achieving the goals of the rioters. Meanwhile the storming of seats of power by an ousted leaders' supporters has the potential to change history. The former is a passing event, the latter is a rare event with some potential to change global history.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/political-violence-us-capital.ht...
No, because their goal wasn't to overturn a legally held election.
> They had no plan.
You got that part right.
When BLM stormed and occupied the city hall in Seattle, their primary demand was to remove the mayor.
“Hey hey. Ho ho. Jenny Durkan’s got to go!”
Not really when you consider that the protests in may were for the correct side with the media and elites fully on board. They were for all intents and purposes sanctioned events. The 6th mob was absolutely terrifying for the media and elite since they had zero control over it. What looks like just another mob riot to a common peasant appears to be an actual threat to those which never see threats.
Speaking of overreactions ...
> They didn't set anything on fire. They should not have stolen or broken anything. That's wrong and bad and should be condemned.
Okay, so to be clear, there's a difference between breaking things with your hands and setting it on fire. One is "bad", and one is "rioting". Huh, interesting.
https://twitter.com/aletweetsnews/status/1346948665013751809
https://twitter.com/RichieMcGinniss/status/13469488668689776...
https://twitter.com/KathrynDiss/status/1346947617893265421
I saw a video yesterday of tear gas being used inside the capitol building but today I was only able to find videos of when it was used outside.
Just because we work in tech does not mean we know everything, and not having been there means we don't know the circumstances anyway. It is disgustingly arrogant of any of us to proclaim that these people must be incompetent or complicit like some armchair quarterback.
Christ, I mean, this is roughly the same mentality as the people who think the election was stolen based on some anecdotes and bullshit despite what election officials, courts, and other experts are saying.
Trump’s “show of force” during the BLM protests (where he brought in the national guard) was an aberration for that reason.
You have a very very low bar for what you think an attempted coup was.
But the riot was a riot. There was no organization and no attempt to take the government and rule it. It was vandalism.
Your definition of a low bar different than mine.
Five Congressmen were shot by Puerto Rican nationalists on the floor of the house in the 50s.
Protestors interrupt things fairly often. Happened during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and again during the vote.
This is probably the most overwhelmed the Capitol has been since the British captured it.
It would be interesting to see exactly how often the capitol police have been overwhelmed and civilians have entered the building or chosen not to.
"@womensmarch just took the Capitol. Women, survivors, and allies walked straight past the police, climbed over barricades, and sat down on the Capitol steps."
In other words, they may have been set up to fail.
(There's still the issue of that video of protesters being let in, which would imply that capital police do have some explaining to do.)
"The Capitol Police" is not a single, monolithic entity; it's made up of individual people, with their own political views.
Police letting terrorists in: https://twitter.com/joshuapotash/status/1346931235176783873
I have to stress though that I agree with "danaris" one level up from from this comment - it seems perfectly believable that individual police sympathised and aided these people. However it's not "The Police" as an entity as some others are suggesting, that's venturing into Q territory and is a bit Conspiracy Theory for me.
If you're falling back because you're overwhelmed by a surge, the last thing you do is _remove obstacles between you and the surge_!
The bigger concern for me is the understaffing and declining of offers of assistance made by other police departments.
https://twitter.com/christina_bobb/status/134759627858319769...
Not sure what happened, I hope we find out, but this video is especially damning.
https://twitter.com/trbrtc/status/1347077988756676608
https://twitter.com/KySportsRadio/status/1347031398176223233
"Multiple"? Do you have proof of this? There was one woman who was shot by police.
As far as I know, it is not yet clear how the others (excluding the Capitol officer) died. I've seen reports that one man got a heart attack after tasing himself and another fell off some scaffolding.