islander wrote:
 
There's more to it than a simple error.  The FBI apparently visited known extremists last week and warned them against attending the "rally", yet there was no warning posted to local law enforcement regarding the potential for violence and the need to step up security?

That link is to a Fox story...so it's not fake news (although those outlets have also picked it up).

What happened last week will take months to unravel, but it seems likely people downplayed the risks either intentionally or based on bias and assumption (as you point out).  

 islander wrote:
 

Yes, we need an answer to why the security response was such a miserable failure.

 Lazy8 wrote:

I sort of agree here. But a (warranted/needed) shift to more restraint doesn't explain selfies with intruders.  There is a systemic problem of treating groups differently that needs to be addressed. If police forces aren't seen as neutral, it's going to be hard to get buy in from both sides to accept their enforcement. 

obviously i felt the scales were a little uneven to post my question.
not to go into it again (referring to my points last week), but comparing either the violence or the reaction is not necessary,
and only detracts from what happened. 
Let it stand on its own, and be condemned on its own. 

islander wrote:

The two events are related in another way: the response to the summer BLM protests was roundly criticized as heavy-handed and excessive. That undoubtedly led to at least some measure of the restraint on the part of law enforcement.

Honestly I don't see that as such a bad thing—cops need to split fewer heads at protests of all types. But this event revealed some appallingly poor planning on the part of the capitol cops. They left officers out at barricades with no support, no fall-back plan. They improvised an effective defense in depth (fall back to a perimeter you can defend and call in reinforcements) but that shouldn't have had to happen on the fly, and the other agencies that could have backed them up should have been ready to roll rather than playing bureaucratic phone tag.

Heads have already rolled but the blame goes farther. And none of that excuses a president whipping up a mob and sending it on its way.

I missed this until now but how on earth did US security forces miss this!?!!

 black321 wrote:
 

Sure, I've been pretty on the record that the violence all summer was bad/stupid/not good for the cause.  I'm all for civil disobedience - block the road, sit in at the legislature, get yourself arrested (Without doing anything violent) to get attention for the cause - fine. But once you light a match or bust a window you're not protesting.

Now that we've got that out of the way.  Let's compare the cause of the protests - BLM is mad because of systemic racism holding back an entire segment of the population, and harsh policing creating violence toward that population, often resulting in death. The MAGA crowd is mad because they lost the election that they feel they should have won.

Since we are in a comparing mood. The response to the protesters (which we agreed to compare) is significantly different. It also highlights the reasons the BLM crowd is upset (does not excuse their violence).  

Edit:
Also what Steeler said here  - The end goal of the BLM group was peaceful coexistence, the end goal of the MAGA group was to drag out people that disagreed with their flawed view and hang them on a gallows that they brought along. So compare away, and let us know how you think it balances out. 

 black321 wrote:
 

I am not sure of the value of such comparisons . . . 

I think storming the Capitol and rampaging inside while bellowing about seeking out certain elected officials for retribution has to be seen as an attack not only on a revered institution, but on democracy itself. An attack on the republic is more damaging than a riot.  Thus, it is a matter of degree.   An assassination of a President is infinitely more damaging than any other murder because it threatens the republic itself.

just to clarify re below...
Are we allowed to compare the police response to last week's riot to  those over the summer,
but not the violence of last week's riot with those over the summer?

 oldviolin wrote: 
Don't judge him.

 sirdroseph wrote:
 
And you wonder why the idiots believe the election was stolen.

I assume you don't realize from that angle the White House and open parkland would be in the foreground....not the streets on fire.  Everyone forgets, because it never looked like that.

They do remember this though...

 Steely_D wrote:
 
A guy is actually blowing a shofar, or trying to...
sheesh...

 R_P wrote:
 

Yet every single one of them should be prosecuted.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the size of the crowd that stormed Capitol Hill

---

The U.S. Capitol raid was a failed self-coup previously seen in dying regimes

Such episodes were not supposed to occur in the United States. The storming of the Capitol was a jarring affront to a revered symbol of the U.S. Constitution and government.

The United States has often held itself up to the rest of the world as an example of how to avoid the violence and corruption that doomed Rome and enfeebled European absolutist monarchs.

The attempted solution lay in a particular understanding of the separation of powers, an innovative model based not on parliamentary supremacy but on the explicit and intentional construction of checks and balances designed to uphold and protect the rule of law against the ambitions of unscrupulous rulers.

This system, which contemporary political scientists call presidentialism because it involves the separate election of the executive and legislative branches of government for fixed and (typically) limited terms, has been adopted by new democracies around the world. But many scholars have noted the fragility of presidentialism especially in countries where there are many parties and the rule of law is uneven because it creates competition and duelling claims of legitimacy among the various branches of government and political parties.

Today we see that weakness in a two-party system where the rule of law is supposed to be secure. What can the United States learn from the breakdown of presidential democracies elsewhere? The “slow death” of democracy typically starts with constitutional violations.

 Steely_D wrote:
 

It is remarkable that only 4 of them died, and only one of those were actually killed by police. 

Here on Instagram is a series of clips demonstrating the unrelenting violence that the police at the Capitol were up against. You can look at it now from a different perspective, but when you're in the midst of it, it had to be terrifying to see all those armed, masked, angry, chaotic seditionists coming for you.

Did Trump Walk Into a Trap? – Wilkerson and Jay

 steeler wrote:
 

"We love you. You're special."
-The President of the United States addressing violent seditionists as they assault Congress-

“All of the sudden protesting Congress is being called the end of the world”: How Rush Limbaugh and other talk radio hosts are downplaying the attack on the Capitol

One day after a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, Rush Limbaugh implicitly endorsed political violence and at the same time blamed the attack partly on so-called “antifa” “instigators.” Some of Limbaugh’s fellow conservative talk radio hosts have similarly attempted to downplay the mob’s actions, dismissing calls to condemn the violence and suggesting that the attack was actually a “false flag” operation. (...)

Most of these radio personalities — with the notable exception of Limbaugh — offered at least a perfunctory condemnation of political violence in response to Wednesday’s events. But hosts have tried to avoid reckoning with the rioters’ actions in other ways, falsely blaming “antifa” for the violence or complaining about how the mob was treated in media coverage compared to Black Lives Matter protesters. (...)