Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/07/trump-riot-capitol-police-chief-steven-sund-to-resign-effective-january-16.html
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Might as well; take the entire force with ya on your way out, dude.
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Cool that in this country it takes about a decade to be the incident commander at three active shooter events in a single city.
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I thought he’d already resigned before yesterday. 
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Can he be fired in the next 9 days, instead?
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I’m reading some of the police department’s “we had no way of knowing this would happen!” defenses with some disbelief.
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Why? I don’t get it. They did exactly what they were expected to do when confronted with a mob of white, right wing extremists.
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Good! Wouldn’t want him even in charge of a dog catcher at the Inauguration.
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senior command and operational experience
coulda fooled me
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Safer for DC also.
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Translated from Cop-ese: “bed wetting and pants-pissing experience”
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Sounds like a good day to eat cake decorated with candles.
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You can get an M.A. in Homeland Security??
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Especially since, y’know, they said they were increasing security a week beforehand…
Eva Malecki, a Capitol Police spokesperson, said the department “has comprehensive security plans in place and we continuously monitor and assess new and emerging threats, with the overall goal of keeping those within the Capitol Complex safe and secure.”
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Botched by design i would say, or ‘selective incompetence’ as Cory puts it…
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“Botched response”?
Did you mean “Carefully chosen course of action”?
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Having to remove the legislators to a secure location was odd
Isn’t the Capitol supposed to be the secure location?
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That is more active shooter events (what a great euphemism!) than most countries have in a decade as a whole.
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Plus, the cops definitely knew it was going to happen ahead of time because they planned to be part of it:
One current Metro D.C. police officer said in a public Facebook post that off-duty police officers and members of the military, who were among the rioters, flashed their badges and I.D. cards as they attempted to overrun the building.
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To play the part of devil’s advocate:
Last time a protest of this magnitude happened, the national guard was mobilized in advance (as we’ve seen in the multiple “when BLM protests / when MAGA protests” photo comparisons. Given that 
controlled the deployment of those advanced forces in DC, the capitol police was completely alone.
The “new” doctrine on handling protests is “always make the protesters as the ones in the wrong”. It was a big lesson learned on the failures of handling public opinion on protests in the 20th century. That’s why they provoked the protesters during BLM demonstrations, also faking some of the violence, and also making sure the media was capturing these acts of violence. It’s much easier to suppress the manifestation when the general public feels the use of force is justified.*
Given the circumstances, letting them through and show the world the kind of assholes they were was much more effective than trying to block them completely. It would had put the police in more danger and would had risk putting the protesters in a sympathetic light (aka turning them into martyrs).
I don’t think that, put in the same position, would have done things differently. Once the civilians are evacuated, the rest is just a building. The price the MAGA movement paid in the eyes of public opinion with media showing how wacko they were was the better option.
Having said that, let’s hope they do a good purge there.
*Note: Not living in the USA, I didn’t took part of the BLM protests, but I’ve experienced this first hand in Barcelona during the independentist protests on 2019. The police started stoking the fire by publicly arresting several people in a very sloppy way under the justification that they were “planning to attempt a terrorist attack during the anniversary of the referendum” - the charges were dropped three months later because they were completely bogus. During the protests they infiltrated people to incite the protesters to act violently, even to the point of turning some protesters against others - the ones that wanted to keep the protest peaceful vs the ones who wanted the world to burn -. They let a counter-manifestation of right-wing extremists to collide with the main protest, leading to assaults that weren’t stopped by the police until the independentists started fighting back -of course they only detained independentists. They let the protests spill to public places when needed, and confined them when not. Once the media had enough “violent images”, they charged mercifulessly. Only advantage is we don’t have AR15 wackos shooting people in the head because we have normal gun laws.
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