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I'm pretty late to the party on discussing the Ashli Babbitt shooting, but I now get my chance, because the Trump administration is going to pay $5 million to her family. (Archived link.)
I once discussed January 6th with a conservative in real life, and his stance was that the Ashli Babbitt shooting was an example of police brutality. He said that she was issued no warnings at all before being shot, and she wasn't directly threatening anyone's life. Taking a look at the footage, I don't know how she would have been warned at a volume that she could hear, and any of the police with rifles would have been jeopardizing their own safety and the safety of the other officers to lower their rifles and physically restrain her. I think the barricaded door and the cops with guns trained on the entrance should have been enough to signal that breaking through would be a bad idea. Given all these circumstances, I think that awarding $5 million to her family is
a stupid thing to do. Add it to the pile of other conflict-theory-esque actions that make this presidency a seriously mixed bag for me.regrettable. Sometimes settlements are the cheapest thing for suits.I took a look at the video, and I can count 6 uniformed and heavily armed police just standing around right next to where Ashli is about to climb through the window. (undoubtedly there were more out of the frame of the video) Meanwhile the agent who did the shooting was hiding behind the barricade and probably not visible to most of the rioters. https://files.catbox.moe/8p11px.jpg
Of course, seconds after the shooting, those exact same police came in and took full control of the situation.
Most charitably, the police gave up on trying to take control of the situation, and just let the rioters riot. This is despite the fact that they were equipped with full riot gear and assault rifles, and were able to take over immediately after the shooting. Less charitably, they were ordered to stand down for some reason or another, possibly with the idea that the riot would burn itself out if not provoked more.
Of course this doesn't fully excuse the rioters for fucking around. But if you are doing dirty literally right in front of a heavily armed and equipped squad of police, and they are just milling around and watching you, it's understandable that you might expect that whatever you're doing is not going to get you shot.
The picture of the gun poking out from the doorway tells the tale of the discomfort with this shoot to me -- cops 'get away' with shooting people at times where there's at least a nominal case to be made for self-defence, and this is not that.
It just looks so chickenshit -- step out into the hallway, square up, present your weapon and say "stop or I'll shoot" and I don't think anyone's complaining if Babbit keeps trying to climb through the door (which she might have!) and gets the bullet.
Officer safety is a thing, but at least this much risk tolerance is expected of any beat cop confronting an aggressive individual -- however violent the riot may or may not have been, it was clearly not a warzone, and Byrd was not a soldier.
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Not understandable to me at all. Participating in a riot directed at country's legislative trying to interfere with its proceedings to elect president in the very same building, and Powers That Be have called the armed police present? I would expect bad times just by being here. Not only the armed police are present, they have barricaded a door? You trying to climb through a door, behind which the police are? All the bad shit is on you. If the police have not shot you, drawing inference that "they are not going to shoot if I do this" is like "after I jumped, I have seen 99 floors go past, the ground has not hit me yet".
A century ago, any sane government would have had troops shooting indiscriminately until everyone is either dead or in custody. It would have been correct and just, too. Insurrection (to prevent legal transfer of power) is not a thing that you can kinda maybe have or kinda maybe defend against. If they would have acted like peaceful protestors, there would have been no need for barricades at all. First step of "not getting invaded by hostiles" is to recognize that you are being invaded, and not only it is legal but you are supposed to shoot at the invaders. (Before you ask, this is my stance on BLM protests.)
The US is too scared to oppose extra-legal politics, and consequently the society suffers for lack of respect for the law and its rightful authorities.
I find your response seems to lack some understanding of what actually happened, and what actually goes around a person's mind in such a situation, so I will start with some context.
First, bordering on zero people in the crowd on that day agreed to participate in a riot, they were absorbed by a riot. This was not day 3 in a series of riots. Zero people brought incendiary devices to my knowledge. Same with firearms. Few had weapons, and even fewer appeared to have brought them as something outside of what they normally carry (few of the choice weapons of rioters were found like bricks, it was more utility knives and the like). This were all people there to engage in a protest, and that protest escalated into a riot.
Second, when it is a spontaneous riot, law enforcement actually is the main driver of what happens. If they build a wall, enforce it, and hold it, there is no riot. If they are weak, an opportunity for a riot to emerge exists. This is what happened. If lawful orders were issued and enforced with force no one even gets within 50 feet of the building.
Third, when a person gets mixed signals INDIVIDUALLY from law enforcement, that is usually the fault of LE, not that person. If one officer says hands up, and the other says dont move, this is a problem. And it is exactly what is depicted in the Babit video. Some are nonverbally communicating to her that her conduct is fine, and another guy shoots her.
Going to more specific points of yours:
As I said, no one thought they were doing so. They were protesting an illegitimate seizure of power via a stolen election. Most fully intended to comply with any clear orders given by...
Those armed police. Which are expected and always present whether you are allowed into the building or not.
This is a very charitable description of the door. Recall, Babit was just let through another door by officers doing nothing. At best this is a hastily assembled barricade. More realistically it is a mess that could have been caused by a very active toddler.
We are not a century ago. The people who were there had just seen the police forces in the same city let people burn whole buildings and steal millions of merchandise with no resistance. Precedence matters.
Again, they don't think they were engaging in said act. Describing it as so is question begging in this context.
Maybe is this was a PERFECTLY peaceful protest like the March For Life often is (or was before the counterprotests started), where the city somehow is magically cleaned of trash by thousands of outsiders silently carrying signs. But in reality, most protests get a little chirpy. The answer to this is good law enforcement that sets boundaries and enforces them. This is basic stuff, and it was all failed by Capitol Police on Jan 6. And heck, they didn't even really set barricades. They didn't lock the goddam doors of the building.
I mean, I agree. I think anyone on a sidewalk doing a "hey hey ho ho" chant should get 30 days in the stockades the second they bump into a citizen who's walk to work they impeded. But we don't live in that world. Police need to convey messages to people so those people know what norms they are actually operating under, and the failure to do so is, fundamentally, the real story of the Jan 6 riot.
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The police are not behind the door. They are milling around in front of and next to the door, doing literally nothing. Did you look at the picture?
That's not how it works. In history class you should have learned that about 250 years ago this happened and it ended up kicking off a big mess.
I looked at the video. The police are confused but the guy behind the door who shot is clearly not pleasantly chilling about.
That is the problem with Americans, you read only the American history. The indecisive inaction or half-measures or measures taken too late fails, too. American revolution is one example of that, too. Had the British acted differently prior to Boston shooting, precluding it, or more decisively afterwards (either leniently or far less leniently), it would be half-remembered footnote to history of British empire alongside its many other brutalities.
Speaking of Brits, they still celebrate the failure of the Gunpowder plot, which they put down successfully.
But what I was thinking was all the coups and revolts that worked because nobody whose job is to be last stopgap to stop it happening realized they should have start shooting until it was too late. In particular, the French revolution. The royal family always fell one more step towards guillotine when they found themselves at the mercy of the mob. Any steps to avoid those situation would have been crucial to them. After the royalty were disposed of, the party who controlled whether the mob (which mob, whose mob) had the access to the National Assembly and later Convention ruled Paris, then the country. It was how Girondins died, it is how Robespierre died, it is how Napoleon couped the Directory. A legislative organ of a country of millions is always at mercy of concentrated minority of few thousand people gathered in the capital, so it must be able to deploy force to remain sovereign.
Turning to back BLM -- general unlawful rioting is less serious concern to the sovereign, but it is a concern to citizens. A firm response would have been good, just and required for keeping up the appearances of rule of law.
In these cases mentioned in particular, BLM and Capitol, I am of the mind that a bit larger mess done quickly would have resolved the matter with more clean state afterwards. Unlike in a slow-boiling conflict, when conflict turns to crisis it is dealt with. There is room for catharsis afterwards, and respect for public order is maintained.
Rereading what I wrote, it is very abstract. To be more precise, I think a better response would have been to maintain a clear perimeter and apply deadly force after it was breached. Admittedly, had there been appropriately massive deployment of lawful authority to maintain a perimeter, there would not have been a breach and perhaps no fatalities -- but that is not what was happening. It becomes an exercise in judging how they should have dealt with a situation they were ill-prepared to deal with, and in the particular context the use of firearms must certainly be an anticipated option. To abuse a metaphor, the police have not many options on table after the table has no legs (perimeter, manpower, clear coordination) and it has fallen down.
It didnt have to be that large at all. There are only a few doors into the building. It is basically a fort on a hill. Against the crowd of what we know to be unarmed people with no real organization, 50 armed men would be more than enough if they did their jobs well.
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Ashli Babbit is a national martyr with several movies about her if she's left-identifying and the exact same sequence of events happens. I don't think the shoot was necessarily unjustified but the optics were poor.
And the idiotarian left would be marginally more intellectual coherent in doing so than the right are in our timeline given the two sides respective views on lethal self-defence, but still wrong.
Ashli Babbit fucked around and found out. De mortuis nil nisi bonum so I won't say anything else.
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Apologies for what seems even to me an asinine comment but I think 'left-identifying' would be a helpful hyphen in this sentence.
Yes, I was like "left identifying what, and why did she in particular need to identify it?" until I read it a second time.
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The rant from "A Few Good Men", presented without comment.
Can you give the comment? I don't know what you think relates these things to each other.
The "walls guarded by men with guns" in the clip relates to the wall (well, barricaded door) guarded by a man with a gun in the footage of the shooting.
You do realize the wall in that rant is metaphorical? And that said officer was upset about shitty performance by a person whos performance was akin to the Capitol police officers' performance on Jan 6?
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I'll say what I said after it happened: Libertarian thoughts on “public property” and politicians being High Value Target quibbles aside, I am not virulently against the norm of shooting people in these types of situations. I am against what I perceive to be a massive double standard. For many on the left it’s super clear that Kyle Rittenhouse is a mass murderer, that all these police shootings are racist, and that it’s lives over property. But shooting Ashli Babbitt crawling through a window is a good shoot.
Norms need to be consistent, or they aren’t norms: Ashli Babbitt saw the left violently rioting, looting, committing arson, and occupying government buildings for months without getting shot. If we’re gonna play the game this way, fine, as long as everyone knows the rule: it’s legitimate to shoot you - even if you’re protesting - when you start breaking stuff that’s not yours or try to go places you’re not supposed to go.
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Ashli Babbitt was a very stupid person who got what she was asking for. Putting barricades in place is a signal that one is willing to use violence. It may not be an accurate or reliable signal, but it is a signal. Therefore, Ashli should have been prepared for and expecting violence when she overcame that barricade, just like the first man reaching the top of the wall expects the defenders to use extreme violence to deter him and everyone after him. Her being shot and killed is not police brutality, or a crime. It is one side engaging in violence in the pursuit of its goals.
That being said, movements run with the martyrs they’ve got, even if I could wish for a higher caliber of martyr.
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How many barricaded doors must the police retreat behind before they are justified in opening fire? I think pretty much every armed conservative would have lit up a left-wing Ashli Babbitt if they found themselves in an analogous situation.
Ashli Babbitt did not deserve to die, in the sense that the punishment did not fit the crime. But that is true of most people killed in police / self defense shootings.
I think that this is an important point. Ashli Babbitt's death was the result of both her own criminal stupidity and culpably poor policing. Both were necessary, neither sufficient. "Police are not required to take risks to protect criminals from their own stupidity" is part of conservatism 101, and in the case of criminals threatening physical violence is also the law. "Police should be sufficiently competent that situations where the police need to shoot at idiots are minimised" is non-partisan good government 101, but is not a legal requirement for good reasons.
Ashli Babbit FAFO, but it was also a bad shoot. This is kind of like sure the guy was doing 30 mph over the speed limit, but the person he hit shouldn't have been dancing in the middle of a busy highway.
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I'm pretty sure it'd have been entirely possible to restrain and arrest her without resorting to lethal force. She was just an average White normie.
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"Barricaded doors" is doing too much work here. The fact of the Capitol riot is that the police were intentionally undermanned, and also engaged in basic incompetence at nearly every phase of the event. The long and short of it is that they never actually barricaded anything. The Capitol is essentially a medieval fort, and over a hundred armed men let it get sacked by a bunch of unorganized people essentially engaging in Brownian motion in the general vicinity of said fort. The fact that the whole force wasn't fired is...questionable. The fact that all of leadership wasn't is conspiratorial.
What was the defensive setup? Well, most of the police were deployed behind small lines of these things which are used for directing orderly lines of humans into an entrance, they are not appropriate for riot control. These are not barricades.
Because the forces were isolated and far from the building, they immediately began panicking and ran to the door. The doors were never closed or locked. Hardly a barricade. Again, the slow pushing mass of unarmed people overcame this "defense". Then we had some chaotically strewn furniture in hallways. Not really what we'd call a barricade either.
In the end, Jan 6 is the answer to a very specific question: What would happen if an understaffed, poorly trained, and even more poorly managed police force faced a crowd composed of people who could easily kill them all, but had absolutely no intention of actually doing so? Is Babbit's payout comically high? Yes. But that always is the case with these cases. She certainly has a pretty good case compared to the average rioter case. If she wanted that officer dead, he would be. She was, by all accounts, a competent combatant when armed, which she was intentionally not.
There is a sliding scale of "adequate". All the members of congress were unharmed and successfully certified the election despite a riot. Minimum viable standard, but still successful. Why would it be the responsibility of the Capitol police to handle an unprecedented riot better than the rioters themselves.
The straightforward conspiracy when guards are undermanned is "the guards are expected to fail at protecting what they are supposed to be guarding". A conspiracy plot to the effect that "the guards are supposed to look like they almost fail protecting congress from a riot in a way that makes the riot look extra bad and scary" is a conspiracy theory with additional epicycles. Did the nefarious conspiracy organize the riot, too, or was it counter-conspiracy organized in response to the planned riot to storm the congress conveniently organized by parties-unrelated to the nefarious conspiracy?
The fact that Trump had given orders to protect the rioters and thus National Guard was not in vicinity of Capitol puts a bit of evidence towards the first kind of conspiracy than the second kind.
Riots happen, or rather they can happen. Why they happen is based on a confluence of factors, but the police deployment and response is always an important factor. People rarely riot when law enforcement is well deployed and competently managed. This riot was not unprecedented in any way other than it was comprised of Republicans. The failings of the police force is basically the only interesting part about what happened.
Its not a conspiracy. We generally know what happened. The chief of the Capitol Police has testified to this many times. His deputy (who was promoted to chief after he was let go) was briefed about an increase in the expected crowd size and an increase in potential agitators in the crowd. She did not give him that information. Regardless, he requested additional troops including overtime and National Guard. Those requests were denied by leadership (Pelosi and McConnel's offices), possibly because he did not have the additional credible threat information, possibly just optics. Then as the riot developed he requested National Guard again, and this time both offices took about 5-6 hours to give him a response.
And in any case, conspiracy or not, who benefited from Jan 6 clearly the Democratic party and anti-Trump Republicans, so we don't need epicycles, just knowledge of how media coverage works and insight into the minds of Capitol leadership, which is not hard to divine.
Here is an actually conspiratorial idea, which is directly contradicted by tons of public evidence, but you seem to think its worth talking about.
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I mean what exact intent is implied by invading a Capitol and attempting to breech the doors of the legislature and ignoring multiple commands to stop? I would undertake the sympathy if she’d gone wandering around the roduntra with a sign or upside down flag, or if she’d been going into offices or something because those things do not represent the same sort of threat as attempting to invade the house floor as member of congress are fleeing. She clearly intended to do something by those actions and so did those with her.
If I were far more right-wing than I am and feeling snarky, I'd probably say something about the right to petition one's government here, but I'd generally agree with the "play stupid games" line in this sort of scenario. Maybe that particular argument would be different if members of Congress were known for ignoring their constituents generally.
But it's also not terribly out of line with the times for police shooting "unarmed" but hostile citizens: Ferguson settled with the family of Mike Brown — of "hands up, don't shoot" fame where forensic evidence suggests his hands were not, in fact, up — for a bit under $2M 8 years ago, which is not that different adjusted for inflation.
I think you can make an argument she was playing stupid games, but the public response to it is almost totally informed by 'Blue Team Good, Red Team Bad' factionalism. People who were vehemently pushing BLM and Defund the Police slogans a month before suddenly became totally cool with the idea of a justified shoot, whilst if Babbitt had been shot as an unarmed woman in a similar circumstance whilst say trying to approach Trump during a BLM protest or entering a capitol building she would be held as a martyr to the cause.
I understand why the Red team hasn't pushed her since they tend to be more accepting of violent consequences to 'fuck around and find out' but the handling feels deeply hypocritical on part of the Blue Team.
Ironically one of the loopier members of the BLM movement, Shaun King, was the only one who actually took a principled stand and said he thought the Babbit killing was a bad shoot and an act of police brutality.
Good man. Props to him even if we do disagree.
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I was writing a reply to zoink above but this is ridiculous standard. Yes, many on the left are hypocrites. Somehow, it is turned to equally hypocritical defense of a riot -- see, the problem with the riot is not the riot, the problem is that out-group who are all hypocritical angry when my-own-group does a riot but they don't care when their ingroup does it.
It is extra ridiculous because this being the internet, it takes no
effecteffort (ETA) at all to defend consistent standards for dealing with riots, left or right. Yet somehow the most important thing when discussing news of Trump awarding 5 megadollars to Babbitt family is complain loudly about BLM.Yes but Jan 6th aside from the location and the suggested vibe of 'If the control point of US democracy were held for 30 minutes by funny hat man, the entire USA would automatically fall under his control' was hardly even a Riot. People who were glibly encouraging far more Riotous riots and complaining about far more justified shoots suddenly dropped both principles in favor of pure team allegiance logic.
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Can you give me some context for this? I looked at the video and I have no idea what is going on.
I am impressed you are unfamiliar with this shooting.
The shooting took place on January 6th, 2021, during the riot; the officers were positioned to guard the House chambers. I don't know if there were any House members inside those chambers, but the police apparently thought they would be in danger if the rioters broke through, and there was no other place for the officers themselves to retreat to. The door that Babbitt broke through was to the Speaker's Lobby which led to the House chambers. Ashley Babbitt was the only direct homicide of the day, and she has become something of a martyr since then on the right wing. Her family started a suit for $30 million based on wrongful death and it was just settled today for $5 million.
Ohhh this is the January fifth riot ok. Yeah that provided the context I needed thanks.
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I think those amounts should be underlined, if Trump wanted to send a CW coded message, the administration should settle the suit for more than the $30 million they sought.
Per this database compiled by the NAACP, $5 million is well above the typical wrongful death settlement paid out by police departments, and Babbitt's case is pretty weak. (There are a fair few >$5 million settlements in the database, but most of them involve multiple plaintiffs). That said, more media-famous cases tend to attract bigger settlements.
Paying out $5 million for a legally meritless wrongful death case that would settle for less than half that under normal circumstances seems a big enough signal to me.
On the other hand, Trump is notably profligate, and he really can’t afford to relitigate J6 in the public eye again, so overpaying on his shut up money is very possible.
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For sure, I had to edit it once already to update that it may not be a culture war thing since it was a settlement for a larger suit. Apparently the Biden administration resisted harder, but I don't know if it made more sense to resist at that point than to settle, especially for an administration that would really want to avoid the optics such an outcome would bring. I'm not much of a lawcel.
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