You’ll get no disagreement from me on this fundamental point.
Again, no disagreement on this point.
However, my point is still that it is not necessarily the case that Mayor Bowser’s understandable actions didn’t contribute to this problem. Had Mayor Bowser gone against her better judgment and asked for additional federal, nonmilitary law-enforcement officers stationed along the route of the march and outside the Capitol, it’s possible that there would have been no need for the National Guard.
Who would they have sent? ICE? Fed Bureau of Prisons?
Which federal non-military forces with crowd control and riot suppression training and equipment would have been more appropriate than the DC NG?
Based on their behavior this summer and fall against BLM protests, I’d give it a better than 50% chance they wouldn’t have just opened the doors for the Trumpsurrectionists, but joined in.
You’re hilarious.
Best bet? The Park Police, FBI-associated uniformed officers, and additional Secret Service Police (i.e., the uniformed law enforcement officers of the Secret Service, whose job is generally to patrol the area around the White House).
Any of them. The DC National Guard is a military force. I would prefer not to have them engage in civilian policing unless and until there are exigent circumstances. Frankly, the redhat spin would be a lot easier to sell this week if the story had been “DC National Guard opens fire on Republican protestors approaching the U.S. Capitol.”
I don’t discount that possibility.
To paraphrase Colbert, the traditional response to a violent coup is a whole lotta killing of the coup-ers.
Also have you seen how many unarmed people the police shot last year with zero repercussions? One of them was even asleep in her own bed in her own apartment!
I’m glad to see a lot of people are finding out the hard way that this is not a f*cking game.
Even if they didn’t know about the plans for a coup, the police presence was still pathetic just for the registered protest that The President announced. Meanwhile, when BLM registers to have a peaceful sit-in, three divisions of National Guard are rolled in, it seems.
The contrast is so stark and blatant that it hurts to think about. This event has revealed even further how deeply corrupt every level of law enforcement is.
They absolutely knew there were plans to storm the capitol building, at the very least. There’s the interview with some Black Capitol Hill police officers who weren’t involved in any kind of intelligence gathering, they were just working that day and managed to hear about the rioters’ plans earlier that morning. They were freaking out because they hadn’t been told to prepare for this kind of event, their concerns weren’t acknowledged and the command structure basically ghosted them on the day - absent and un-contactable. They quite justifiably feel like their white colleagues and chiefs threw them to the wolves, because yeah, that’s what happened. They were getting beaten up by rioters shouting the n-word at them on one side of the building while their white colleagues were taking selfies on the other.
All the pictures and reports that keep coming out of the police actively helping rioters really shows where their sympathies lay. The most recent picture I saw was of a cop tenderly washing out the eyes of a rioter who had been hit with some pepper spray or tear gas. Compared to the BLM protests where the cops actually tore down medical tents and stole, destroyed or pepper sprayed water bottles intended for this purpose - and even assaulted anyone providing that aid to protestors.
And it turns out the Capitol Police can’t claim ignorance, as it turns out they were explicitly told the situation was dangerous, but deliberately ignored the information:
The officials said Capitol Police were given a specific and separate intelligence report describing extremist rhetoric and threats of violence that appeared on social media in connection with the rally.
Yikes.
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