Fourth police officer who responded to Jan 6 attack dies by suicide | Hacker News Reader

Fourth police officer who responded to Jan 6 attack dies by suicide

thehill.com

103 pointsAndrewBissell133 comments

From a little light Googling I don't see that any police officers connected to the 100+ nights of rioting and protests in Portland killed themselves. Why would one event result in so many suicides while the other didn't?

The police in Portland were never overrun. Over the course of those 100+ nights they maintained discipline, held their secure perimeters, and succeeded in their mission to keep rioters from breaching e.g. the federal courthouse or their station buildings. In contrast, officers at the Capitol were completely overrun, isolated, and brutally beaten by the mob without hope or expectation of rescue. Some have said that while lying on the ground taking blows, cut off from backup and effectively abandoned by leadership, they thought they were going to die then and there [0].

They also failed in their mission to protect and secure the Capitol. While blame for that rests mainly on their leaders, at least according what I've read in the IG and Senate reports, I imagine it still weighs heavy on each officer.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dc-police-officers-speak-o...

An event that only lasted a couple of hours is so much more dramatic than months long riots with the leadership throwing police line officers under the bus? Sufficiently so that there's literally an epidemic of suicides?

I'm not buying it.

I'm totally buying it. look at the scale of intensity. rioters are no fun. but they possess no existential risk to America, and withdrawl was a tactical option if needed. I'd also say few protest groups qualify as rioters. there is some rioting, some destruction of property, some physical force that did happen in the various month long "riots" ongoingly but for the most part at a very small scale. mostly I'd classify the groups as being protestors or a crowd, not rioters.

amassed violent insurrectionists threatening & overrunning a seated us congress, which you are sworn to protect, & where backup has not arrived, is a genuine horror the likes of which I never expected anyone in my lifetime would have faced.

Just look at the suicides if you aren't buying it....I won't pretend to know what those officers experienced. But when officers are saying they view the actions of their leaders as disgraceful, and talk about a feeling of abandonment, then just maybe we should believe what they say? Or continue to ignore their complaints.

Leader abandonment is hardly unique to that job. The conclusion of many Portland and similar officers was to retire, change job types, or change job locations - not suicide.

When facts don't add up I tend to conclude that there either are missing facts or some of the purported facts aren't actually facts.

"Do the research!", or how does it go?

I'm hearing violins reading this.

Because of the treason of storming a democratic process, and then lying about it? It makes you question who you're working for, when half of politicians are behaving in such shameful manner without reprecussions and justice. These police officers were physically assaulted and had no way of knowing wether they'd come out of it alive or dead. Some people were even searching for politicians to murder, and officers had no way to be able to guarantee for people's safety (ie. doing their real job). It was an extremely volatile and uncontrollable situation, a bet from the curtains behind, that could've gone either way.

Expectation is another attempt in a few years, as happened between 1930 and 1940.

I wish this warning is unnecessary!

Yes, January 6th is more like the Beer Hall Putsch. And we all know that that was only the beginning of Hitler's political career. Not sure if that is the right comparison, history is not repeating itself in that way. But having a failed, rather embarrassingly, coup attempt is no guarantee there won't be another one. Or a power grab abusing existing, legitimate democratic processes. The first time the NSDAP won was through a fully legitimate election. First order of the day was a new election that was everything but democratic, so.

> First order of the day was a new election that was everything but democratic, so.

We're seeing the groundwork for this being laid by various states passing "reforms" on voting intended to prevent another "fraudulent election" from taking place (intended to both normalize the narrative that such a fraud occurred and legitimize it when it occurs in the Trumpists' favor under these reforms) and attempts to repeal Section 230 protections and have the government directly control platform content (again, normalizing the narrative that social media platforms have been engaged in an organized criminal conspiracy of censorship and making it illegal for such platforms to combat Trumpist misinformation in the future.)

I don't think Trump has a chance of being elected again - he's burned too many bridges even with his own base after the insurrection by not pardoning the conspirators - but it's entirely likely someone else in the family or another, more charismatic Trumpist will step in and succeed where Trump failed.

History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme.

It's the normal people who think that Trump has failed. The world of savages can see this differently. Who else was able to attack the Capitol and survive two impeachments? Who else was able to f*ck the US political system so hard? How he has failed if he is enjoying the life after all that (while others are committing suicides)? He is a very decent chieftain for them.

They just don't want to touch the former president role. You can only lose and face destruction with people like that. It's about dragging down everyone. To be even loved for their demise, is just top of dominion.

Fox News et al way way way way over blew what actually happened in Portland. There were a few incidents (which Fox News blew up into a full scale war), but overall it was very peaceful.

The biggest problem in Portland was not the protesters or the police, it was the anonymous federal troops that trump sent to stir up trouble, against the demands of the Portland and Oregon governments that they leave. I put 99% of the trouble in Portland at the feet of Trumps SS troops.

That, my friend, is the primary difference between protest and insurrection. Protestors are trying to get their voices heard by the system, insurrectionists are trying to thwart the system itself.

These officers faced BLM hostility on the left, as well as violence against them and accusations of being traitors from the right.

The public that they're supposed to serve was spitting on them and demonizing them from both sides.

Add a pandemic to the mix, and anybody's mental health would be flatlining. Suicide among some of them is tragic but not surprising.

I don't know how effective counseling services are, but if they do anything, they should be made available to the Jan 6 officers.

If anybody reading this is in a dark spot, the suicide lifeline is 800-273-8255, and it's available 24/7.

Some communities have also been disproportionately persecuted by the police for, a very long time. Maybe it's a legacy of slavery and later segregation. Maybe it's a lack of unifying national spirit (the melting pot of cultural assimilation and a desire to be a small spice in a greater whole) which might have just been wishful thinking on the part of history book authors.

I suspect most of the non-anarchist who feel that way would agree with my take that "defund" might be better expressed as RE-form.

Re-form the Police in a de-militarized way. Structure community interaction so they are helpful, rather than penalizing. (E.G. more like Japanese neighborhood branches.) Split out social and mental health crisis, maybe with domestic violence response teams that include a mix of branches. Also, for mental health, make it easier to get interventions earlier, before assault with a deadly weapon leads to regrettable and unavoidably bad sets of outcomes.

I agree yet am not really confident in that the police can be de-militarized in a country where every minor criminal has a gun and living is segregated in a way so some neighborhoods actually are much more dangerous than others.

The police haven't always been as militarized as they are now. We could easily go back.

I think ending the drug war with legalization and decriminalization and ending no-knock warrants without extreme circumstances would go a long way.

As for this - yes, I'm rather sure. The drug war is evil. I'm glad some states are legalizing psychedelics already. I would add that zero-tolerance policies by which people loose jobs and schools for trace amounts of light drugs found in their urine samples after a weekend should be banned too.

Drug tests should be banned for most folks.

Additionally: What is a trace amount after a weekend? Can you tell if someone smoked pot on Sunday rather than Monday on a Wednesday drug test? Does it matter if it is a "heavy" drug (say, mushrooms?)? Does it matter that someone did a couple of lines of coke saturday rather than be drunk and high from Friday to Sunday?

> Can you tell if someone smoked pot on Sunday rather than Monday on a Wednesday drug test?

I don't really know. I thought there would be difference in concentration.

> Does it matter if it is a "heavy" drug (say, mushrooms?)?

Mushrooms are not a hard drug. Fentanyl/heroine and crack are.

> Does it matter that someone did a couple of lines of coke saturday rather than be drunk and high from Friday to Sunday?

IMHO the second is worse.

I don't really know. I thought there would be difference in concentration.

That concentration depends on the person: A person with more fat will show a higher concentration for a longer amount of time. If you don't smoke often, you might find that you get it out of your system rather fast. In short, tests aren't all that helpful with pot, and you won't realistically be able to tell if they smoked last night after work or last saturday during off time.

> Does it matter if it is a "heavy" drug (say, mushrooms?)?

Mushrooms are not a hard drug. Fentanyl/heroine and crack are.

Mushrooms and LSD are classified that way by many folks, though - including the US government. Fentanyl isn't instantly addictive - if it were, they wouldn't use it in hospitals. People do heroine occasionally without being addicted, too (most folks don't shoot up). Same with cocaine. I don't know as much about crack, but there was a time when folks did meth on a more recreational basis instead of all the time (I've never personally done it, no desire).

And that's the issue. "Hard" depends on some combination of use, effect, and what frequent use does. Regardless, plenty of people do "hard" drugs occasionally and you'll never know. And if it is better to you that someone do some cocaine - generally accepted as a hard, addictive drug (through propaganda) - than be drunk all weekend, in some ways, you already know this. A drug test isn't gonna help most of these, though.

There is no such thing as a "hard" or "heavy" drug. These terms are not in pharmacological literature and are not defined by any property of the chemical or their pharmacological action.

Nevertheless it is rather easy to tell them apart. Hard drugs quickly cause heavy addiction in almost everybody who tries them, destroy their health and can even kill them easily. Psilocybin does not, it can actually be used to improve neural health and cure addictions (just search it here on HN, there are many papers to reference).

There are things which are hard to define precisely nevertheless easy to distinguish intuitively.

I guess we can consider alcohol a hard drug then. Time to make it illegal? I don't know anybody who uses it responsibly, therefore those people don't exist right?

I know many people who use alcohol responsibly and even people who use meth responsibly (it's great for heavy ADHD if you have enough willpower to only use tiny doses occasionally) but I seriously doubt there are many who use crack responsibly.

Believe it or not I have met people who use cocaine, in both salt and base (crack) forms, responsibly. Just because you don't know them doesn't mean they don't exist. Same with methamphetamine and heroin.

Do you think Dr. Carl Hart uses heroin irresponsibly? You may want to look him up.

I'd outright refuse to work at a place that imposed them on principle, body integrity is one of my strongest-held values. There's enough creepy corporate manipulation of our private lives as it is, the only piss they'll get from me is a swift "piss off" and I'll work somewhere that respects personal boundaries.

Me too, but we are privileged to choose a job according to our preferences. Meanwhile, there are many people for whom it is way harder to find a better job in their life circumstances / places they live. Losing it can easily ruin their lives.

Yeah, I'm definitely aware it's a luxury to be able to turn down jobs and that this sector-specific good job market isn't going to last forever either.

I really think we should ban drug testing in the vast majority of cases to protect people who are less fortunate from the ridiculous puritan corporate culture many places adopt. I can see a case for it in roles where heavy machinery or other potentially deadly outcomes are a possibility but for the overwhelming majority of jobs it's just controlling behaviour for the sake of being controlling in my opinion.

Even the thin veil of "heavy machinery" isn't really enough: Your average factory worker deals with "heavy machinery" and trash compactors, commonly used in retail for boxes, are the same. Folks employed in these positions in other countries don't have drug tests and do not have bad safety records, so the danger isn't as high as the employer makes it out to be. I think employers should prove that there is either a federal mandate for drug testing the position OR that drug use, even outside of work, affects work.

Go back to which era ? Just asking out of curiosity. AFAIK, gun violence has always been endemic to the USA - and most especially in places where guns are banned. I suspect this will only change with a national ban on Guns. Yet gun traffickers across the border would love that. The American continents have more guns than anywhere else in the world.

Militarization of the Police happened, strangely enough, primarily during the Clinton Administration in the mid-1990s. Clinton shut down a lot of military bases, and shrunk the military overall as part of wrapping up the cold war with Russia/ex-Soviet Union.

Shrinking the military meant shrinking buying military equipment, which meant fewer dollars going into defense manufacturing, and furthermore, possibly fewer jobs. As part of a compromise of shrinking the military, congress unlocked both military surplus, and new defense equipment sales to local police departments. Prior to this, police were very limited in what they could buy. The photos of rural vermont police owning armored personnel carriers, etc didn't occur before this time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_Realignment_and_Closure

Gun traffickers would not love it: It is easy to get guns in, say, Indiana, and then traffic them other places. This is, in general, what has been happening. Chicago has more gun issues due to Indiana's lax laws (and it is right next to Indiana). In a bigger picture, Canada has more trouble with gun smuggling due to the ease of getting weapons in the US. And as others have said, the US tends to supply other places in the Americas, either directly or indirectly.

When guns are more tightly regulated, though, guns are more difficult to get and they get much, much more expensive on the black market. After all, supply has went down and the risk goes up. Australia is the usual example used here (who had a similar gun culture in the past, by the way).

I can't find where gun violence is higher where guns are banned - at least not after the ban, so long as they aren't just one town in the US, which might due to issues above, but that is hardly due to a weapons ban.

> get much, much more expensive on the black market

Gun traffickers (the gang bosses scpecifically) would love this. Smugglers love prohibition.

The overwhelming majority of illegally owned guns you'll find somewhere like Chicago, NYC or Boston are stolen.

The reason they come from places like Indiana, Pennsylvania or New Hampshire is basic economics. There is no market there since guns are so readily available legally. Even if you're a prohibited person a straw purchase is much more accessible and less of a liability to all involved than a stolen gun so the market for stolen guns moves to wherever straw purchases are much less practical. Because guns are more available legally you get a much broader cross section of society owning them which means more get stolen. Supply and demand works is magic and they all wind up over the border where they can be sold.

> gun traffickers across the border would love that.

The gun trafficking tends to be from the US into Latin America - see the FBI "fast and furious" fiasco.

Not "go back to" some era, but roll back the militarization of the police for the present/future era.

A ban on guns wouldn't change anything. There are many countries that are much more violent with much more violent police and bans on guns. Other countries have high gun ownership and low crime and low police violence.

> Other countries have high gun ownership and low crime and low police violence.

I.e. "la comparaison suisse"

It doesn't really hold up. Switzerland has a very low crime rate, but also has one of the highest gun violence rates in Europe (most are suicides).

Around here lots of guns were removed from the equation 10 - 20 years ago and I haven't heard about a corresponding decrease in suicides.

As far as I can see guns doesn't trigger suicides.

The comment you reply to does not claim that there's a causation between fun ownership and suicide.

It merely notes that the gun violence in Switzerland is largely suicide, which is probably simply because the share of gun suicide among suicide overall is higher in Switzerland than elsewhere.

I don't understand why "we could go back to the exact framework we had 10 years ago" is a permanent political impossibility. It implies either there are no experiments or no mistakes in the legislative process - both of which are implausible ideas.

On the big ticket stuff it makes some sense, but no example springs to mind where something was tried then just totally rolled back after a few decades.

As I understand it, rolling back even ten years means substantially more people - including black people - being killed by the police, because this has gone down over time in the US and a substantial amount of work went into achieving this. That is to say, there was no perfect time in the past where this didn't happen, and if people think there was and things have gotten worse they've been lead astray by the news media.

cough Prohibition

It's really weird to automatically assume the community's feelings are justified when most violence faced by black people is from other black people. It seems a lot more likely that standing by idiots from bad neighborhoods is simply politically convenient right now and so they're making noise because that's what idiots do when you give them a microphone.

> Re-form the Police

Triple their pay, but also enforce strict no-tolerance rules on misbehaviour and select candidates more carefully.

This is what I would do, if I were in charge:

1) Lawsuit payouts come from police pensions, not the taxpayer. Watch them keep each other in line when it's their money on the line.

2) Body cam not running? No qualified immunity, police then become liable for murder/assault/theft/kidnapping charges like any civilian would be if they committed the same acts. That would give police sufficient incentive to ensure their cams are not "malfunctioning".

3) Police that are fired for misconduct are no longer eligible for hire at any precinct.

4) Falsifying reports and planting evidence are prosecutable offenses.

5) Training becomes far more rigorous, and takes a civic-mindedness approach, not a warrior-wolf approach.

6) Military equipment is largely decommed, with only specialist anti-terror squads getting the heavy weaponry.

7) Civil forfeiture is abolished.

8) Hiring standards are raised.

Throw in mandatory minimum training standards, preferably longer then a hand full of weeks and including de-escalation.

Good points so.

8 good suggestions that ought to be able to find bipartisan support

"Reform" has been the policy for decades now, and meanwhile the situation has been steadily and rapidly getting worse.

The whole point of "defund" is that "reform" has failed. Something more drastic is needed.

I think I understand what you mean by “accusations of being traitors from the right”.

However, I was unaware of “BLM hostility on the left”. Could you share some more information about this?

The Democratic Party and BLM movement entertained calls for police abolition and defunding all summer. Three times as many officers were hospitalized defending the Portland federal courthouse compared to those defending the Capitol. BLM grafitti in Portland called for officers there to be defunded, abolished, and killed. The Democratic Party mayor of Portland banned city officers from helping defend the federal courthouse, and personally appeared at the siege to show solidarity with the rioters. I could list a hundred more examples.

From the list of examples, only the Portland grafitti suggesting cops be killed seems valid to me. Defunding police is something I'd assume cops could be very much for, assuming they understand the intention behind. It's isn't a "let's get rid of police" as much as it is "let's reduce the scope of police responsibility". This way, people who might have a mental or drug problem are met by health care professionals, rather than people with guns. If I were a cop, I'd be all for it.

A motto you have to explain is a bad motto.

To a police officer "Defund the police" sounds a lot like "unemployment".

I think it is mostly hindered by an unwillingness to listen and/or understand, and not that it requires explanation (which, in of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing... explaining things to people seems par for the course when misinformation is high).

If I'm well aware what it means by just following international news, while also not having the affected profession, and living on the other side of the world... you would think the onus should fall sliiiightly on the people directly involved for not understanding the motto, rather than it being a bad or convoluted one.

The inspection required to understand it also doesn't do a whole lot of leaps either. "Defund the police!". "What, like completely?", "Nah, that would be insane. Just the part where they need to deal with shit they shouldn't be dealing with". "Ah, ok.".

That said, I'm sure there are some who mean "fully". Probably a smaller percentage of people meaning it than people assuming others mean it.

Just one of many lies Capitol Police specifically faced: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/us-elections-gover...

Your link is actually a great example of the confusion that has led to harassment and hatred of Capitol Police officers.

The Capitol Police (Controlled by Congress), DC Metro Police (Mayor of DC) and DC Protective Services (Mayor of DC) were the good guys in almost all of this.

The Park Police (subject of your link), Secret Service, Federal Protective Service, US Marshal Service, and DC National Guard were all under the authority of the Executive branch and the ones who forcefully cleared the park and harassed BLM protestors. (ACPD and MPD also assisted Park Police under a mutual aid request)

The Bureau of Prisons was never requested but showed up to the party anyway, likely at the direction of the head of DHS, who was not interviewed for the OIG report.

From the perspective of someone beaten up by a police officer, there is no way to distinguish from which part of the police he just got beat up.

totally off topic, but as a European reader I'm getting the following message on that website:

> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

Come on guys, 3 years after GDPR you could at least change your text from "we are engaged and committed to looking at options" to "we don't really give a s***"!

They really don't, and FFS, I refuse to ever agree to a cookie question on a site I do NOT create a sign-in for. I block those elements and disable javascript, etc.

I'm saddened that 3 years later they still haven't given up trying to demand things I'm never giving them. Too many have given in to the Windows UAC / Popup 'just click yes' illness of security fatigue.

Just use Firefox with Total Cookie Protection (each domain you visit gets an isolated cookie jar) and set the "Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed" option.

You are now free to carelessly click on and accept any random cookie that comes your way. Just restart once a week or so for Firefox updates and you are a completely new person.

Your fingerprint islikely to persist between that. Just your graphics driver and fonts is enough that deleting those cookies did exactly nothing - and that's not any of the advanced tracking techniques.

^THIS^

There's so many sneaky ways these sites try to get you to accept cookies, and the european legislation will probably need a couple more iterations until it is in a state where most annoying loopholes are closed. It is gone so far that sometimes out of happiness over a "reject all"-button, I will disable adbloc to give the sites some revenue.

I agree! Here's a snapshot of the article: https://archive.is/xWaut

Strange, I'm also from an European country, but can see the site fine

Sorry for generalizing, I guess you are from a non-EU European country? Or their filtering is buggy...

I am from the EU and more like GDPR (assuming it's even that and not e.g. licensing like BBC Global) than not but I think it's totally fair in general for companies to not provide their services to places where the local laws don't suit them.

Sure. But then they can frigging say so, can't they?

"Sorry, we ain't gonna" is one thing, whereas "Just a sec, your custom is important to us!", three years afterwards is just utter fucking bullshit. Companies are free to ignore my custom, but not to serve me bullshit.

A multitude more deaths caused by BLM protests. It wasn’t the rosy portrayal the TV showed you. And many people are still living in fear, not knowing when a BLM protest might come burn down their home.

Here is what we have found based on the 7,305 events we’ve collected. The overall levels of violence and property destruction were low, and most of the violence that did take place was, in fact, directed against the BLM protesters.
First, police made arrests in 5% of the protest events, with over 8,500 reported arrests (or possibly more). Police used tear gas or related chemical substances in 2.5% of these events.
Protesters or bystanders were reported injured in 1.6 percent of the protests. In total, at least three Black Lives Matter protesters and one other person were killed while protesting in Omaha, Austin and Kenosha, Wis. One anti-fascist protester killed a far-right group member during a confrontation in Portland, Ore.; law enforcement killed the alleged assailant several days later.
Police were reported injured in 1% of the protests. A law enforcement officer killed in California was allegedly shot by supporters of the far-right “boogaloo” movement, not anti-racism protesters.
The killings in the line of duty of other law enforcement officers during this period were not related to the protests.
Only 3.7% of the protests involved property damage or vandalism. Some portion of these involved neither police nor protesters, but people engaging in vandalism or looting alongside the protests.
In short, our data suggest that 96.3% of events involved no property damage or police injuries, and in 97.7% of events, no injuries were reported among participants, bystanders or police.
These figures should correct the narrative that the protests were overtaken by rioting and vandalism or violence.
Such claims are false. Incidents in which there was protester violence or property destruction should be regarded as exceptional – and not representative of the uprising as a whole.

In many instances, police reportedly began or escalated the violence, but some observers nevertheless blame the protesters.

https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-and-ideas/black-lives...

I think the mistake we've made is attempting to use facts & figures to dispel a belief ;)

The people who wrote this report are activists sympathizing with the BLM movement, just look at the names and their social media presence. It's basically propaganda, twisting and omitting inconvenient facts.

Citation needed.

As with many things, the perception of BLM, and associated fear, is based on how the media portrays it and what they give attention to. People living in fear of BLM mostly have that false fear instilled in them by the media, especially the right wing media.

The overwhelming majority of BLM protests in the US are completely peaceful. Where protests have turned violent it is often initiated by police action and is typically both small scale and very localized. The definition of "violent" demonstration includes blocking roads, which many people wouldn't consider actually violent or destructive. However some people think BLM is an immediate threat to themselves & their property.

To be clear, BLM is certainly not the only example of an incorrectly perceived event/movement/whatever. This happens every day and across the spectrum of politics, geography, etc... Human nature is not perfect and neither is the environment we're living in, so perfect understanding of complex & large scale systems is impossible.

https://acleddata.com/2021/05/25/a-year-of-racial-justice-pr...

Trying to lay any of this on BLM is bullshit. This is directly tied to the attack on the Capitol by Trump traitors.

It pretty obvious police protect capital not people. Sure many of the police officers didn't realise this until it was too late and they had committed but I think that would have a bigger detriment on their mental health than being vilified by fringe groups.

Exactly how were they targeted by BLM?

You mean, aside from police being the main target of BLM ever since the George Floyd incident?

An apparent former D.C. police officer has posted their thoughts on this suicide, and the mood among Capitol and MPD police generally, in the Washington D.C. subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/comments/owl3ru/third_...

I guess I'm a cynic at heart since my mind went directly to this being somehow related to harrasment by their peers rather than being depressed about the public not appreciating them.

Could easily be both, compounded with personal problems. Who really knows. Sad state of affairs either way.

Or it could be "suicide." After all, there's four of them now, and a fifth one of "stroke," so what are the odds? As you said, who knows.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/02/politics/dc-metropolitan-...

This was my thought as well. Perhaps they got orders to shoot at unarmed people, wanted to testify about it, and were silenced?

Or orders to let agents provocateurs push things up to a certain point.

Does anyone else find the formulation "died by suicide" a bit weird? Is that commonly used?

Compared to "committed suicide" it seems to me that it is supposed to associate a passive action, as if something happened to them.

Just to make sure, I absolutely deplore the people storming the capitol and by no means support any of their causes. However I find this type of corporate speak often troublesome, especially if it's being used in connection with law enforcement and military actions.

I think it's because the term "commit suicide" implies a moral judgement, in the past Western notions of suicide were actually pretty barbaric. To accuse someone of trying to commit suicide would have been a fairly serious accusation, in fact in the past in some jurisdictions suicide could mean that your estate went to the government instead of your family as suicide was seen as an offence against God and the Crown.

Nowadays we tend to recognise it for the complicated set of behaviours that it actually is, modern notions of mental health and other factors that can contribute to suicide are often no longer seen as personal (and sinful) moral failures on the part of the suicidal person. To "commit" something usually implies that wrongdoing has taken place, for example as a thief or arsonist commits theft or arson. Since suicide is often the result of severe mental health issues, intolerable trauma, or other factors that have nothing to do with a person's moral conduct the verb "commit" is often seen as inappropriate in modern discussion.

Thanks for educating me, while I was aware of the strong judgements against suicide (in particular based on religious justifications), I did not connect that to the use of language. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions too quickly.

No worries! As far as I'm aware it's a fairly recent innovation in language, it'd be harsh to judge people for using the older terminology especially as top-down language changes like this are often fairly controversial.

Suicide is ultimately executed by an individual who makes the choice to do so. Obfuscating or minimizing that fact and refusing to shame it will remove social pressure preventing and dissuading that act.

Shame and fear of my father finding my body is what prevented me from doing it years ago.

I think suicide prevention should be a matter for healthcare professionals personally, what works for one person might be very dangerous for another.

Everybody who works in suicide prevention disagrees with you.

Suicide is something that happens due to a cause, generally mental health issues or extreme physical pain. “died by suicide” removes culpability from the person who has lost their life and allows a discussion about the disease or disorder from which they were suffering.

Consider a case where someone got shot. Should the headline read, "died by stepping front of a gun" or "shot dead by a gun"?

This sounds alarming, like something that could be called a mental health crisis in the DC police. How many police responded on Jan 6, maybe five hundred? 4/500 in seven months would be a terrible rate.

"More than a dozen US Capitol Police officers are under internal investigation for allegedly helping rioters"

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/13/politics/capitol-insurrec...

Perhaps the relentless attacks from the media and some members of congress could be part of it.

I do suspect this is covid related if it's not a statistical anomaly / incorrect pattern finding. It's messed with everyone's heads and we are going to see that coming out with certain sub-groups before others.

I'm sorry, my first thought is murder/coverup. Thought the same thing when it was Hunter Thompson and the 9/11 responders. I have no evidence. And suicide is plenty plausible. Just want that idea out there for some reason. It should at least occur to people.

The opening session of the house committee investigating the attack contains first-hand accounts from officers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HutK2vVFqLM

Is this a normal rate of suicide in these circumstances? Is there anything to indicate that these are instead murders in order to hide something?

> Is this a normal rate of suicide in these circumstances?

Absolutely not.

For real numbers:

> For 2019, the [Blue HELP] calculated the officer suicide rate at 22.4 per 100,000 population.[1]

...and that is an annual rate.

> Is there anything to indicate that these are instead murders in order to hide something?

No, there is nothing to indicate that.

[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jun/24/facebook-p...

> No, there is nothing to indicate that.

Agreed. I'm noticing this idea floated throughout this thread and it's extremely alarming. There's nothing to suggest that any of the officers died under suspicious circumstances, nobody ever supplies any evidence supporting that theory, they're "just asking questions."

After years of watching as ostensibly reasonable people get mired in ever-increasingly insane conspiracy theories I'm incredibly worried to see them introduced to an already dangerously volatile situation. The Jan 6 riots wouldn't have even happened if not for the pervasiveness of the lie that the election was stolen. I really, really wish people would think more carefully before speaking this way.

> Is there anything to indicate that these are instead murders in order to hide something?

The huge number of instigators of the riot and leadership in some of the organizations who turned out to be FBI "informants" does call for some sideways glances.

Well, yeah, police was endlessly demonized and underfunded in the past decade. There are a few bad apples, but that doesn't justify group guilt and neglect. Rioters should have never been able to attack Capitol OR government buildings in Seattle/Portland. Not saying that Jan 6 was not a bigger threat to the union of those events, although vast majority of rioters were simple hooligans with no credible plans to gain or hold power.

> police was endlessly demonized and underfunded in the past decade.

https://cfo.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/ocfo/publica... suggests that the DC police have had a stable budget since at least 2018.

https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/RevenueSpending/nypd.html suggests that NYPD have had an increasing budget since 1980.

https://www.injusticewatch.org/data/2020/chicago-has-nearly-... suggests that Chicago PD have had an increasing budget since 1964.

Do you have some sources for the "underfunded in the past decade"?

DC has the 7th highest population growth rate in the country https://dc.gov/release/2020-census-data-shows-dcs-population...

NY metro area has added the population of Los Angeles (4m) since 1980 https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23083/new-york-city/popul...

Chicago Metro has grown from 6.5 million in '64 to 8.8 million https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22956/chicago/population

You can have stable or even increasing budgets and still be underfunded. Not saying this is necessarily the case here, just that it's definitely possible to pull that off.

It's not the case as far as I can tell--the DC Metro PD reports show crime there is dropping steadily over time[1]. There's a lot of factors that go into why crime rates change, but suffice to say that if the police weren't funded properly they wouldn't be able to handle the workload.

[1] https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/district-crime-data-glance

Underfunded? US police does army cosplay and drives around in vehicles that one would expect in Syria and not the streets of a first world country.

> demonized

Do you think it may have something to do with a culture where a police officer can put his knee on an unarmed man's throat, hold it there until he dies, write it up as a 'Police responded to a medical emergency, man died on the way to the hospital', and then have their peers close rank around them when the truth gets out?

The police will sometimes, in the routine execution of their duty, have to pin someone down. I don't recall any evidence that the murder was intentional. There is an expectation that the police are the sort of people who could kill someone if the need arises. They aren't all going to be philosophers.

Given that and the vitriol around the situation, it is quite reasonable for the police to close ranks around him and look to the most charitable interpretation of what happened. The courts exist to sort out such situations, the police don't need to become vigilantes as well.

The police exerted considerable effort precisely to prevent it ever going to court. Derek Chauvin would never have seen court without months of protests.

> look to the most charitable interpretation of what happened

This is not a courtesy the police extend to anyone else.

> There is an expectation that the police are the sort of people who could kill someone if the need arises

This is a very serious problem and not an excuse.

> the police don't need to become vigilantes as well.

We're asking the police to investigate, report and submit for prosecution, a crime. If they refuse to do that simply because they're protecting someone they've ceased to be police.

> Derek Chauvin would never have seen court without months of protests.

That is an uncertain counterfactual. There was widespread horror at the video. Since he was in fact prosecuted and convicted quite convincingly it obviously wan't impossible.

> [police being mentally prepared to kill] is a very serious problem...

It is expected. That is part of their role in society. Otherwise it'll be necessary to get the army involved in policing crimes.

> > [police being mentally prepared to kill] is a very serious problem...

> It is expected. That is part of their role in society.

Trivially falsified by the majority of UK police not even having access to firearms.

While (fire)armed police do exist in the UK, they are the exception not the rule, and indeed surveys repeatedly show a majority of UK police officers do not even want to be routinely armed.

No matter what differences exist between nations, it is clearly possible to make a society that functions without giving the power of life and death to day-to-day policing.

> Trivially falsified by the majority of UK police not even having access to firearms.

It happens [0]. This is a thing the police are expected to do from time to time. it does not necessarily mean they have made a criminal mistake.

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

and note

After police stopped his vehicle, Charles fled the vehicle and was pursued by police into a shop, where he placed an object into his mouth and resisted arrest. The officer, who wore a body camera, threw Charles to the ground, held him down by the neck, and tried to reach inside his mouth. A member of the public helped him restrain Charles. Charles "became ill", was given emergency treatment at the scene, and was taken by ambulance to Royal London Hospital, where he died later that morning. The object Charles tried to swallow was reportedly recovered at the scene.

I thought I was being clear I was denying that being ready to kill is a necessary part of the role of police in society in general, not trying to assert it never happens. Hence acknowledging UK firearms teams, even while saying they are a minority that most don’t want to be a part of.

Given the context, I don’t even understand why you’re bringing up the death of Rashan Charles — There’s no reason for me to believe those officers were in any sense “ready” to end his life, and some evidence to suggest they were actively trying to prevent it.

> I don't recall any evidence that the murder was intentional.

You're mistaken, but this is a complicated subject and it's entirely reasonable to not know this. I had to look it up at the time to learn it as well.

Chauvin was found guilty and sentenced to 22 years for second-degree unintentional murder, which would be the crime you're aware of, third-degree murder, which is a catch-all for special circumstances that does not ascribe intent, and second-degree manslaughter, which is when you act negligently in a way that you know will cause death.

Ed: oh, it occurs to me that reconciling one charge of unintentional murder and a another of intentional murder when there is only one victim is probably confusing, so just to clarify the way I understand it is that it's two different intentions that both result in death. In the former case, it's like if you were to find out your wife was cheating and you shot her in a crime of passion. In the latter it's like if you set a spring gun.

The lies and coverup was intentional, and preceeded the protests. Derek and the other police at the scene knew that what they did was wrong. That's why they lied about it in the police report. They weren't just performing their duties, unless their duties include covering up murder.

And 'unintentional' murder is still murder.

The courts can't work when the police are actively covering for murder. That's not doing their jobs.

If they don't want to be demonized, they should stop acting like demons.

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