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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

I heard there was a protester who was killed by an officer (Ashli Babbitt), but didn't hear about an officer that was murdered. Do you have a link?

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There was a brief period where a police officer was reported as having been murdered by rioters at the Capitol [0], and iirc many people on social media conflated his death with footage of a riot officer being struck on the head by a fire hydrant, though I don't believe they were the same man.

An investigation revealed that he'd died of a stroke the day after the riot, and that his death could not be directly connected to the Capitol riot.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/brian-sicknick-police-o...

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/19/politics/brian-sicknick-death...

Also not without instrumentalizing Sicknick's death to further the 'orange man bad' narrative.

"Neutral" NPR reporting on this:

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/02/963336791/brian-sicknick-capi...

OK, but an officer being struck on the head by a fire extinguisher (not hydrant, IIRC) could be classified as "accidentally not murdered"; that is, the only reason it wasn't murder is because he survived an attack that easily could have killed him. "He wasn't murdered" doesn't exonerate the rioters; it merely says that they were unlucky or unskilled.

Further, according to a DC metropolitan police report, the killing was unnecessary and unjustified:

https://securitystudies.org/report-shows-babbitt-not-a-deadl...

According to the DOJ, the shooting was justified

https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/department-justice-closes...

Guess it depends on your own reason and interpretation then, and we all have an excuse to fall back to our existing biases and pre-chosen sides.

> Further, according to a DC metropolitan police report, the killing was unnecessary and unjustified

Incorrect. The report does not conclude that. A political advocacy site dedicated to “defending the value of American power against the true threats we face” concludes that “based on” the report, which is, very much, not the same thing.

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