I wouldn't say that's even a fair characterization. Per the capitol police website they have 2,600 officers and a budget of $460 million. It honestly just ... didn't look like they were trying very hard. They managed to arrest what, 14 people? Compare that to the BLM protests on the west coast where unmarked vans of feds were literally rolling up and black bagging people off the street.
USCP is charged with protecting Congress, and I think members of congress should be thinking hard about whether the police were complicit in what happened today.
The standards for response time ought to be rather higher for a large police force that exists primarily to protect a single building complex. And then there's the fact that the Capitol is obviously a much higher-profile target than a random federal courthouse.
>Compare that to the BLM protests on the west coast where unmarked vans of feds were literally rolling up and black bagging people off the street.
Let's not lose perspective.
In the protests outside the Portland federal courthouse building, police held out for weeks while insurrectionists threw bombs [0] and incendiary devices [1], attacked officers with hammers [2] and blinding lasers [3], and tried to breach the courthouse with crowbars and power saws [4]. Nightly arson attempts set fires at, around, and inside the courthouse [5]. The protestors' goal- as stated in their extensive graffiti [6]- was to attack police, breach the courthouse and destroy public property, much as they had done in earlier riots [7]. One stabbed a black conservative journalist in the stomach [8]. Many were arrested carrying illegal guns and ammunition [9].
In response, and after local law enforcement abandoned the courthouse by order of Portland's Mayor Wheeler, federal agents arrested suspects in accordance with the law. They read suspects their rights, treated them fairly, and in most cases- thanks to an extremely permissive District Attorney [10]- released them within 48 hours of arrest.
What happened in Portland (and Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, and other American cities) this summer was also undeniably insurrection, and undeniably much more violent. Despite this, police in Portland never shot anyone in the back, much less fatally.
Call today's insurrection what it is, but be consistent.
1) People are calling this an “insurrection” because it’s so directly an attack on country leadership. (Whereas the incidents you’re referencing are predominantly riots and attacks on the police.) There may be hypocrisy here, but I don’t think that word is a part of it
2) I think the major difference in the left’s eyes is that those protests were against police brutality and racism, whereas this is an attack on our democracy and an attempt to overrule a free and fair election. Motives matter
3) Invading the capital building wielding deadly weapons is (pretty objectively) more serious than attacking the outside of a single federal courthouse (not to minimize that of course)
Let's not mince words. Insurrection means violent uprising against the government. Attacks on public servants and public buildings for the purpose of overthrowing the government are insurrection.
The Portland courthouse siege- OP's chosen example- was led by violent white anarchists. Their motive was to topple the government. Portland's Black Lives Matter activists complained many times that their cause and movement had been hijacked [0][1][2].
The people who invaded the capitol today, at least some, probably thought they were protecting democracy. They may have thought they were defending election integrity. They were wrong. That doesn't mean they are evil or amoral. It means they are misinformed and misled. Using them as a foil to downplay other, much more violent unrest is neither helpful nor informative.
I haven't seen photos of armed rioters in the capitol. If you have some, please link them.
> The people who invaded the capitol today, at least some, probably thought they were protecting democracy.
What they thought is irrelevant in a country that believes in the rule of law: they were attacking the highest institution of one branch of government with the express purpose of forcing them to overturn the legal result of the election and install their preferred president. This is an (attempted) insurrection, and there are no two ways around it.
Comparing this to an attack on a courthouse is patently absurd. Especially since the courthouse was not attacked for 'toppling the government' - I can't even imagine where you came up with that - but because it was known that arrested/kidnapped protesters had been held inside the courthouse building. In general, none of the BLM or Antifa protesters are interested in "toppling the government" - they are interested in "toppling" the police and in stopping the white nationalist fascists that police are openly supporting from taking over the country.
>This is an (attempted) insurrection, and there are no two ways around it.
Yes, I called it insurrection earlier. You've replied to my comment out of context of the reply which preceded it, so your strawman of me doesn't make any sense.
>they are interested in "toppling" the police and in stopping the white nationalist fascists that police are openly supporting
I wrote a longer reply to your comment, but then I deleted it. DC metro police are more than 50% black, it's a joke that they would "openly support white supremacists."
Good grief. If you’re using graffiti as the source then compare it to today where signs said their goal was to overthrow the government.
Trying to draw any sort of equivalence is insincere.
And honestly any one who breached or attempted to breach the courthouse or the Capitol (the building or the property) should go to jail for a long time. So in that sense, we agree.
I think that the Lafayette Square episode with the Trump church visit would look mild in comparison. ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts’ was what Trump said then, where is that rhetoric now?
It appears the DC leadership and the Pentagon wanted to avoid a show of force that mimicked what happened during the summer, trying to learn from their mistakes during the protests triggered by Floyd’s death.
> Compare that to the BLM protests on the west coast where unmarked vans of feds were literally rolling up and black bagging people off the street.
Boy, I wonder if the fact that these guys basically just goofed around and took pictures instead of burning down the capitol (like what happened in the Portland courthouse) had any bearing on that.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. We're trying to avoid the hell we're all sinking into. Comments like this are a sharp push hellward, so please don't.
One was an unarmed woman shot by law enforcement, as police have confirmed [0]. The other 3 died near the riot due to separate medical emergencies [1].
> The videos from the Capitol demonstrate just how outmatched the police were
Not sure if I understand the point you're trying to make.
They shouldn't have been outmatched in the first place. The protest was planned and the information was extremely overt. Something went horribly wrong for this to happen.
Any one of those protestors could have brought in a bomb. They weren't exactly going through metal detectors. Given that a pipe bomb was found at the RNC, and a suspicious package of some sort at the DNC, I'm surprised someone didn't try. I wonder how worried security there was about explosive devices and weighing whether to open fire.
Many of them were also carrying guns. No idea who thought it'd be a good idea to just stand down and let them in, but my guess is that making martyrs of them would push us closer to something like the beginning of a civil war.
The police seem to have stood down because they are sympathetic. There's video circulating of the rioters being let through barricades by the officers manning them. I'll say it's plausible they were not prepared to resist the crowd, but the way it looks is like they wanted to participate.
Was there to document and distribute some propaganda, we did not get very close to the militant action, but a few things to report:
- At least one flash-bang (probably) and one tear gas grenade (definitely) were used on the capitol steps.
- Their duty as police is to protect and serve, so shooting would have been a terrible idea. Evacuation is not difficult in an ultra-hard target like the capitol, and a lot of civilians had bags, some of which definitely contained firearms. I also heard some shouts about fetching guns from hotel rooms (we did not stay overnight in the city). A gun battle would have been catastrophic on both sides.
What I’m saying is that they almost certainly would not have been able to “get the bad guys” without being shot themselves, unless the tactic was machine-gun emplacements turning everyone into hamburger, with the side effect of starting a shooting war nationwide.
I think you have a very weird and wrong idea of what "collateral damage" means. Actually, the police should avoid collateral damage at all cost, even if it means not catching the bad guys.
I think he refers to the fact that there's been (supreme)court cases about this that generally rule in the polices favour saying they're under no obligation to protect, etc.
Living in Portland, I can say I'm simply amazed at their restraint! Our own police here will taze, pepperspray, baton, without any law being broken first. It's sort of like Affirmative Action, but for violence.
We still don't know who fired that shot, and there were no reports of shots fired otherwise. Given the scope of what happened, a single lethal shot fired is kind of a miracle. And shocking given how many injuries and deaths we saw from protests earlier in the year which were under far better control, with far more law enforcement involved.
If you poke around a bit on YouTube, there are multiple videos of it happening on there. My guess is that the woman was trying to get into a corridor that the Secret Service was protecting, and they really didn't want anyone in there. Capitol Police seemed unaware of this as a few of them armed with long guns stood on the same side of the door literally right next to the woman who was shot, when she was shot after trying to enter through that broken window.
This article gives some background color on her public social media. [1] It's pretty depressing honestly to think that she was so caught up in conspiracies and it got her killed.
You want cops to be more like stoic stormtroopers? If every cop out there took a selfie with rioters, it would have been easier to manage them by a degree. Imagine hundreds of selfies with cops were posted in right wing social media, how will that not make right wing protestors have a nicer attitude towards the cop in the future?
what's really the downside of letting this happen? Not focused on crowd control? This is also crowd control.
As demonstrated by the mobs actions, they weren't there to protest. They were there to wreck the joint. The cops let their guard down. It's silly to think that being chummy with the crowd would deescalate them when they've been prepping for this for ages.
If they were there to wreck the joint, it would have been wrecked. From what I saw many protestors were stopping the anarchist from causing any real damage.
If this is how cops de-escalate then it’s a massive double standard to how they dealt with protesters over the summer, including the time they tear gassed peaceful protesters to make way for Trump’s photo op right there on DC in June [0]
Outmatched or just letting people in? Mixed messages in this video, some cops standing ground while others just deciding to remove themselves from the post https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ9oThRuMVs
Riot cops are regularly outnumbered. They are trained to use less-lethals to outmanuever, disperse and kettle crowds like this. They had advance warning and could have dispersed the early crowds. It was just this past summer that Trump had a crowd near the White House dispersed with tear gas to give a speech where he held a Bible upside down.
But when the time came today, there were no tear gas or 40mm rounds, no LRAD. The security simply didn't show up when the expected crowd was percieved to be aligned with the police.
This is a consistent pattern throughout our law enforcement system.
I wouldn't say that's even a fair characterization. Per the capitol police website they have 2,600 officers and a budget of $460 million. It honestly just ... didn't look like they were trying very hard. They managed to arrest what, 14 people? Compare that to the BLM protests on the west coast where unmarked vans of feds were literally rolling up and black bagging people off the street.
USCP is charged with protecting Congress, and I think members of congress should be thinking hard about whether the police were complicit in what happened today.
[1] https://www.uscp.gov/media-center/uscp-fast-facts