It is scary when a baying mob is attacking. It looked like 2 against 30.
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I do not have a hard time at all calling this a justified shoot. The mob was actively charging the door by breaking through it.
Self defense makes it perfectly justified.
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Some was asking why she was shot, why the cop wasn’t arrested and clearly the cop had space to keep retreating. I invited him to come to DC, enter a government building that contained people in line of succession to the presidency and documents of importance to national security, and keep approaching the guards after they said stop. They’ll easily be able to guess you have no hidden weapons, explosives or chemical or biological weapons, and as long as there’s space for them to back up, they’ll surely humor your curiosity and just keep retreating. Weird that Trump had things to say to congress, but didn’t feel like walking to the capitol himself.
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Sedition and insurrection can come with a ten year imprisonment. It would be more fitting if their acts were considered in relation to the Patriot Act (Title 8), especially since the act’s original intent did not focus on this demographic of people.
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I am fairly confident if you or I shot an unarmed person in this manner even though they were beating on our door to get in, we would be charged with a crime.
Shooting after breaking through the door would be justifiable.
I am trying to be consistent in the reasoning here for how we expect police to react/interact with people committing crimes. Just because someone is in the middle of participating in a crime doesn’t give them justification for lethal force.
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Her internet activity history shows she was radicalized online…
Hard to make the case - after all, the speaker said he didn’t want to see the police officers hurt. Gosh, no. He wasn’t going to hurt the police officers, his compatriots were.
Of course, generally when a group commits a crime, during which someone gets killed, everyone involved in that crime gets charged with murder, even if they had nothing to do with it. So there’s that…
His thinking is so delusional, who knows what he thought could happen. Legislators were being targeted for assassination, the votes for destruction. Who knows what Trump could have made of that, if that had happened. But yeah, he’s happy to just burn everything down in spite. (Apparently he was quite gleeful the Republicans lost in Georgia…) This is why allowing him in office with the nuclear codes is so dangerous.
Or just blame Antifa for the violence. They’ve already started, and they’ll be doubling down in the face of contrary evidence.
This was the inner line of defense, after the outer lines had fallen due to some combination of incompetence and active complicity with the attack*. They were in a Senate chamber where people were sheltering at the time, and a mob was breaking down the door and trying to enter in order to kill some of the people inside. Some of the rioters outside the door had guns. That’s a pretty immediate threat.
They did break through the door - the woman who was shot was climbing through the broken window, entering the room. It’s hard to see, but you can see her falling back, out of the window, after she’s shot.
*Not to get conspiratorial, but it’s impossible that this happened without at least some deliberate choices on the part of the police, possibly in coordination with Trump:
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I’m not criticizing the officers in the video for lack of action- I wouldn’t expect them to directly confront an angry mob being outnumbered like that. However, the general casual attitude and nonchalance while an angry dude punches the windows right next to one of the cops and the cop just kind of stands there picking at his uniform. Then the supervisor casually waves them away and lets the mob start attacking the doors. They kind of just stand around like they’re monitoring the lunch line in the cafeteria or something.
Compared to the aggressive posturing of law enforcement during this summer race protests against marchers who were peacefully demonstrating. The contrast is stark and upsetting.
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Brave…yet so many cops seem to “fear for their life” when
Also, they had several “tactical officers” around them who, from the video, were quite well armed.
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But to be fair, if you had three cops trapped by an angry BLM group, they’d suddenly become pretty chill (i.e. quietly shitting bricks), too. (In fact, I recollect a few videos of cops this summer who got separated from their squads - who were roughing people up - and ended up surrounded by BLM protestors, and they were meek and mild as lambs. And they weren’t even trapped against a wall by people with guns.)
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I think this is an amazing example of police professionalism. 3 cops block the door with their bodies and don’t fight back while glass is being smashed around them. Back off, back off, back off, they say. They could not have made it more clear that the rioters have had their fun turning this place into their playground but this is the door they must not go through, because this is where elected officials are. Other officers arrive and let those officers get to safety. They start smashing the glass. The guy with the camera phone warns them there’s an officer inside with a gun pointed waiting for them to go through the door / through the glass. Most back off. She goes for it. So it goes.
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can Trump get ten years for every person he incited to do so?
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Hmm it is hard to see. I think you’re right.
Yeah let’s not get too conspiratorial. If Trump was directly involved in the security detail, then he may have made it light on purpose. Who ever was in charge or that, made it light on purpose. Whether they thought it wasn’t needed, or wanted the Capitol to be stormed is speculation.
She died a terrorist, a traitor, and a disgrace to the uniform she wore. I’m only sorry it wasn’t after a trial and tearful begging for mercy in the dock.
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It’s so sad that someone can serve their country for 14 years, retire as a solid E-4, and then go an commit sedition in the nation’s capitol.
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but the riot was by Antifa, it was a false flag op, Sarah Palin said so
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I suspect (but don’t know for sure) that these were Capitol Police officers. I think they are likely to have been insufficiently armed to take on a raving mob of hundreds of red-hatted mouth-breathing barbarians, but I’d be surprised if they were unarmed.
Clearly true.
Every single one of the people seeking to break into the speaker’s lobby in this video is engaged in active sedition and seeking the overthrow of the U.S. government–and the primary reason they’d made it that far in the first place was that there were an overwhelmingly large number of them and they’d demonstrated their willingness to use violence and threats of violence.
Stupid games = stupid prizes.
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Congress is a coequal branch of government with its own Congressionally controlled security forces inside the Capitol. I don’t believe (but would of course accept correction) that the president has any direct control over security inside the Capitol.
Much as I respect our D.C. mayor, she also may have exacerbated the problem in an understandable overreaction to the overbearing tactics used against BLM protestors in June and July–she made a very limited request for additional federal security and was explicit in stating that she did not want additional federal officers policing our streets. In hindsight, that appears to have been the wrong call, but it is also not an unreasonable response to the tear-gassing of peaceful protestors for a presidential photo op, especially given that the trashcan president promised he’d be marching along with his trashcan redhats.
The fact a Representative was on the other side makes me think there might have been more sheltered on the other side and we were effectively looking at a last line of defence. I don’t know what their defensive plan was (and I wouldn’t expect it to be public) but except for tunnels they weren’t getting the congress people outside the building. And maybe that door lead to the tunnels.
Let the mob through the door and you might have added some legislators to the body count.
Beforehand, I suspect the policing was lighter than it should have been, probably because Trump (and his people) wanted the crowd close enough so legislators could hear.
But I don’t think anyone expected the Capitol to be breached.
When it did happen Trump was reportedly both excited and confused at to why no one else was excited. He was also the one holding back the National Guard.
I suspect he was hoping for the riot to turn into a coup, but no one else in his administration was going to help.
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They should not have even gotten that far, because the rally where the mob was ginned up should have had better security. The fact that, despite the already deep history of violence of some the groups that law enforcement KNEW were going to show up, security was not beefed up is most likely because Trump WANTED this reaction.
Why was this “understandable”?
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A situation was known prior and not prepared for. Not like it was BLM and ANTIFA were thousands of LEO’s were mobilized. After all, 'other states had to mobilized their nation guard cause the LAW AND ORDER President wasn’t/won’t.
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