4 Responses to “Hockey stick guy”

• #1

  zubanel

  January 22, 2021 at 9:39 am

  How was this guy not shot?
• #2

  iknklast

  January 22, 2021 at 9:58 am

  How was this guy not shot?

  Of course, you know the answer:

  His lily-white face
• #3

  What a Maroon

  January 22, 2021 at 10:03 am

  Did they get crutch guy yet?
• #4

  Dave Ricks

  January 22, 2021 at 10:57 am

  zubanel asked,

  How was this guy not shot?

  A former U.S. Capitol Police officer wrote an essay on that question in The Washington Post here, with this title and subtitle:

  Our training didn’t cover when to shoot at a mob storming the Capitol

  Policing a riot involves walls of officers. This riot left individual officers facing an awful choice they should not have had to make.

  I can read the essay without signing in, so maybe others can too, but I’ll post these paragraphs in case others can’t see it:

  Shoot/Don’t shoot. Shoot/Don’t shoot. I keep muttering that impossible choice as I watch scenes of violence inside the U.S. Capitol. I know this question was racing through the minds of the Capitol Police officers we saw surrounded by the mob on Jan. 6. Shoot/Don’t shoot. Some of them will be asking themselves that question for the rest of their lives.

  It’s easy to say that if you were there, you would have shot at a certain point; it appears there was only one incident of deadly force by a police officer, remarkable when you see the full scope of what was happening. But the reality is that every instinct of those police officers was to not shoot, and for a number of reasons. Left alone or in small groups because of leaders’ lack of preparation for this event, each of these officers had to ask themselves the most horrible of questions: What is happening behind me? When do I kill 16 of the 1,000 people in front of me with the ammunition I have in my Glock 22 because they are pushing past me? (You won’t be able to reload.) What is my point of no return? I know I’m not a coward, but can I be a monster? And then this question: If I survive this, can I live with this?

  I don’t pretend to have answers, but I do know that this can never happen again. It shouldn’t have happened at all. The whole point of security planning, of layered defenses and depth, is that it never gets to the point of what we all saw at the Capitol. If your security plan relies on the heroism of individual officers, then you haven’t written a security plan. You’ve written suicide notes for other people.

  What would we be talking about now if officers on the perimeter had decided to shoot because they correctly perceived the threat as imminent but not in a way that any policy would cover? How many people would have died? Would it have changed anything? We let far too much rest on the decisions of individual police officers endlessly reviewing an awful choice: Shoot/Don’t shoot.