Thank you for your service.
And thank you for this insight here.
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I can’t in good conscious defend unreasonable force used even if used during the act of a crime. Just like a cop can’t shoot an unarmed person just because they broke into a bank or building to rob. Or an unarmed person yelling they are going to kill you also doesn’t justify lethal force. There needs to be an actual threat.
Absolutely there are all guilty of crimes - but that should not give carte blanche to use lethal force. Let us not suddenly be OK with cops murdering people because they are on the other “side”. That side is super cool with cops killing people because “Well they shouldn’t have been doing what they were doing, or they wouldn’t have gotten shot.”
That said, after it being pointed out by another member, the woman had breached the doors, and given this seemed to be the area they retreated to and fortified, it was reasonable force to prevent her from entering. A single measured, aimed shot. That, IMO, was reasonable force.
I agree. They also rejected the use of additional personnel. I still can’t tell if this was incompetence, naivety, or a calculated plan. I lean towards the first two, because in general cops don’t want to be put in unnecessary danger. Being overwhelmed in a protest is a good way to get hurt or killed. Unless this came from the top and they were like, “Sigh, ok, it comes from the top, but this is going to be a shit show.”
They wouldn’t have to get all “crack-downy” like they did with the BLM protests, but if they had enough physical people, they would have had a much better time at crowd control. Maybe violence would have still broken out, but the Capitol would have been secured.
I did not. I haven’t seen any firearms in the videos (other than cops). As noted above there were several arrests for weapons, so there were some. Unlike other protests, I would not consider this an armed protest/riot.
As noted above, I find it hard to think that the cops would willingly put themselves in harms way. I suppose being complicit could have been part of the plan, but at the same time I think most of them are pretty loyal to the idea that it is their job to protect the law makers. Though I am sure that some of those who work forces, are the same who burn crosses.
I dunno - this is all speculation. I expect congress to do a full investigation and it will shake out who did what and why and hopefully we will get some answers. I guess speculation is fun, but overall not productive.
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I thought in the military if you weren’t increasing in rank they cycled you out?
FWIW, my grandpa was a career Coastie and retired as a Chief Warrant Officer.
Used to be that if you didnt make certain ranks in an allotted time you would be cycled out. For example in the Army you could not exceed 8 years as an E-4. That changed in 1998, and E-4 retention limit was pushed out to 12 years (without waiver) or 14 years (with waiver). Later it was removed entirely.
I presume the Air Force had something similar. Also, all of the branches have certain low-density specialty MOSs where it isn’t possible to ever exceed E-4 with changing one’s MOS.
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Not all of them, but several. Most of the small number of arrests that the DC police did make Wednesday night were for firearms charges. The dude with the van full of Molotov cocktails was carrying, with extra guns in the vehicle. And as its been pointed out, one of the guys with flex cuffs had a sidearm and a tactical vest bearing multiple extra magazines.
ETA: Those were the documented cases. How many in the Trumpsurrectionist crowd had a firearm concealed, that we didn’t see? They could have walked in carrying a Rambo arsenal with the heavy coats most were wearing.
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I was in the USAF for 10 years in the 90’s. I wasn’t the best Airman, partially due to not liking my last post, McGuire AFB in New Jersey, but I was also just kind of a slack-ass. I made it to E4 (senior airman) through the standard time-in-service method, which meant that if you were in for about 3-4 years without getting in too much trouble, they just gave you the stripe.
They started testing me for E5 (staff sergeant) pretty soon after making E4, but I didn’t want the responsibility, so I consistently spiked the exam. At some point, I found out about a thing called “high year tenure”, which stated that if you hadn’t made E5 by 10 years, they honorably discharged you. That came with a year’s pay, which sounded pretty good to me. Thing is, the longer you’re in, the more points they give you on the exam for time in grade. It came to the point that I had to aggressively study for the exam just to make sure I knew the right answers so I could make sure I put down the wrong ones and not pass by accident.
Ordinarily, any of my fellow service members died, I wouldn’t even bring this up. However, this one was actively going against everything we all got told we were supposed to stand for. She got sold a bag of goods, and if her rank and time in service are accurate, it may help to explain how that happened.
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Welcome to BoingBoing!
BTW McGuire was/is a dump, but at least their chow hall was better than Ft. Dix next door!
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Not to divert to MCG bashing, but yeah. There were two types of people I met posted there: people from NJ who wanted the post and folks who’d gotten screwed out of other assignments!
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Welcome aboard, comrade.
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The problem is, they didn’t see it that way. These weren’t their enemies, these were their allies - Proud Boys, MAGA, “blue lives matter,” the kinds of folks they pal around with on the street, their common enemies against BLM and Antifa*, but also legislators and state attorney generals. Cops are, in general, incredibly pro-Trump, with many police unions actively supporting him. These were their people - quite literally, given the number of off-duty cops spotted among the rioters. Whatever was going on, the cops fundamentally weren’t viewing them as “protestors” but those with a common goal.
Basically there are two options here, neither of which are good for the cops - either someone on the command level decided, “let them do what they want, it won’t be any big deal” or were deliberately enabling the coup that was being publicly discussed beforehand (which is what foreign security officials believe). The first option requires them to have thrown standard procedures out the window, in an act of criminal negligence. The rioters were publicly discussing plans to storm the capitol building and execute legislators and Pence, so it’s not credible that the police were unaware of it. The most cursory standard intelligence gathering would have revealed that. So either a standard part of the process just didn’t happen, because the cops were so sympathetic to those involved, or they actively ignored it. This tends to suggest that somebody - not all the cops, but somebody at a significant level - was at least passively supporting a coup.
*The irony is that, in between this and the “Boogaloo” attacks in California, these right-wing groups that the police see as their allies have murdered a number of cops in the last year, while BLM and Antifa haven’t. Yet this doesn’t seem to have registered with law enforcement, at all.
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Because the last time outside Federal law enforcement came to DC, they refused to identify themselves and tear-gassed a peaceful protest.
But we’re not talking about outside Federal law enforcement. We’re talking DC National Guard. I mean, they weren’t going to get ICE to show up, anyway. They’d all taken the day off to be part of the insurrection!
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Not Goldwater. That guy was the proto-Reagan and he’s considered largely responsible for modern conservatism. Nixon on the other hand with his free trade loving, pro-China, pro-environment, and anti-Vietnam war policies? Total pinko commie.
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Perhaps that’s what you’re talking about, but if you’ll scroll up and read what I wrote, you’ll see it’s not what I was talking about in the quote mindysan was responding to, which was Mayor Bowser’s pre-insurrection request that outside federal law enforcement be limited to the specific units she identified:
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.
I respect that was the scope you outlined in your post. However, she also made a request for the DC NG that was rebuffed by the Pentagon, if you consider the full context of the situation.
Okay. I thought you were referring to the reaction to BLM being understandable. Thanks for clearing that up.
That being said, @DukeTrout is correct about the National Guard not being a part of that. It was Trump loyalists in the DHS. There is a reason why Trump had the DC National Guard stand down (until Pence called them in to save his bacon). He knows they’re not loyal to him, but to the constitution. They should have been there preemptively, as it’s clear that this group includes violent extremist that we know of well prior to them showing up in DC on Wednesday.
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Commissioned officers, yes. Warrant officers, I’m not sure. Enlisted personnel and NCO’s, not that I know of. I saw some rather old E3s-E4s-E5s. This was at the end of the 'Nam era.
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Gotcha. Just to be crystal clear, the federal law enforcement reaction to the BLM protests was FAR, FAR out of proportion. And I think that’s why Mayor Bowser was very adamant about imposing strict limits (beforehand) on the additional outside federal law enforcement presence before the speech and protest morphed into an insurrectionist riot.
My general point–related both to that and to what @duketrout is saying–is that her actions, understandable as they were, reduced the overall law-enforcement presence on the streets of DC and around the Capitol. There had been some DC NG troops deployed around downtown since at least Tuesday morning, but the ones I saw on Tuesday were not geared up for riot protection–and I think that was, similarly, a decision made in overreaction to the force used during BLM.
Had the insurrectionists marched down Pennsylvania Ave to the Capitol and remained outside the barricades, no laws would have been broken. It would have been a distasteful protest fed by disinformation and egged on by a whiny diaper-baby and his slithering Senate enablers, but, unfortunately, crowds of screaming red-hatted idiots have become something of a fixture around here lately and we just try to grit our teeth and get on with life.
And all that’s my windup to this: I don’t think it’s a good idea to start employing military units, including the National Guard, for day-to-day law-enforcement purposes. A greater show of force by uniformed DC and federal police during the march and around the Capitol beforehand might have prevented the protest from becoming an insurrection. It might not have–we’ve all seen the videos of at least some police apparently opening barricades. But there are similarly videos, taken around the same time, of large crowds assaulting and overwhelming handfuls of police.
Once the crowds breached the Capitol grounds, of course, it was too late. But I’m not sure what the right balance to strike here is. Just as I think the law-enforcement response during BLM was an overreaction, I think before Wednesday it would similarly have been called an overreaction to deploy 1100 fully-armed National Guard troops around the Capitol.
But that wasn’t Mayor Bowser’s call - it was against her request, which the Pentagon denied, and explicitly limited DC NG involvement to unarmed traffic control, and specified non-engagement with “protesters.”
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That’s on her, then. Because it’s not a huge leap to connect the various far right/white supremacist groups that have been supportive of Trump since day one and what ended up happening, especially since they’ve been talking about this sort of thing on social media platforms for weeks now.
She has no control over the National Guard, as that’s fed territory. They should have been there prior to the rally, given the very real threat these groups already posed prior to this week. There is evidence to suggest that Trump or Trump loyalists in the government told them to not send the Guard.
True, but that’s not what happened. And really, this is not a big shock, given that the rhetoric from Trump, etc, has been that the election has been stolen and all that. They think that the Democrats are the fascists. So this is not an unexpected outcome at all.
That’s not what that is, though. Having the Guard on stand by when you KNOW for a fact that violent extremists are going to be among a large crowd of people who fully believe that “their” country is being “stolen” from them is the right move.
They KNEW who some of these people were and what their end goals are, and it’s a white ethnostate. We need to take that seriously.
[ETA] We know their goals and that they will spill blood to get it.
These people are a threat to our country.
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