Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
No Confidence Vote and an Investigation
“Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.” The January 6 riot and the invasion of the Capitol building in Washington DC were, as a police officer would say, an epic fail. An epic fail in planning and coordinating a defense in a city that probably has the largest presence of different law enforcement agencies in the United States. From Fox News:
The U.S. Capitol Police Labor Union on Monday delivered an “overwhelming vote of No Confidence” on the senior leadership of the U.S. Capitol Police.
The vote comes after the Executive Board of the Capitol Police Union last week called for its members to consider a vote of no confidence following the senior leadership’s mishandling of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riots.
The union said that 92% of its members voted no confidence in acting Chief Yogananda Pittman, who assumed the role two days after the riots. Papathanasiou said there are leaders within the department that are better suited for leadership.
“We hope Congressional leaders and the entire Capitol Hill community understands that continuing with the current USCP leadership is not an option,” he said.
“The current leadership is just a continuation of the past regimes on this Department and there needs to be accountability. Their failures are inexcusable. This vote, which the majority of the officers in the bargaining unit participated in, shows they have lost our trust. The anger in this department is widespread and the trust that has been broken it is not going to be regained.”
The acting chief was not the only supervisor named in the “No Confidence Vote.” As I watched the battle for the bicycle racks, I was surprised to see officers that had to engage in hand-to-hand combat with worthless collapsible batons. There were no less-than-lethal impact munitions or chemical agents to allow the officers to maintain some physical distance from the rioters.
Nancy Pelosi has called for an investigation and she is right; there should be an investigation. The investigators should not be members of Congress. Investigators should not include Adam Schiff, or Feng Feng’s consort, Eric Swalwell, or any other member of Congress. If you are seeking the truth, rather than obfuscating the truth, elected officials should be excluded from trying to shape the narrative.
An investigation should include testimony from the officers present during the riot and the plan to defend the Capitol, or the lack of a plan.
Published in Policing
This is the real missing story. Why were there not DC police riot details reinforcing the Capitol Police? Why did the Capitol police have no plan for crowd control? A show of force will keep people honest, and having proper riot control would likely have prevented some of the associated deaths.
Any investigation conducted by Congress can be expected to apply whitewash with abandon.
Hopefully an independent 9/11 Commission will completely investigate all aspects of the 1/6 riot.
Hopefully an independent (which is code for clandestine) 9/11 commission, which is unconstitutional, never gets off the ground to attack liberties and waste billions of taxpayer dollars.
Considering the 9/11 Commission mostly whitewashed Clinton’s failure’s on Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden and didn’t really produce anything useful in understanding the failures of government that lead to 9/11 I would hope we could do a sight better than that.
Because the planners actually wanted the outcome they received? And not all policemen will be able to testify. Three officers mysteriously or opportunely died after that incursion.
The Democrats are labeling it a “9/11 Commission” in an attempt to make the January 6 event comparable to those coordinated attacks that killed over 3,000 people. It’s consistent with their usual disgustingly outrageous language about pretty much anything.
Let’s not forget there were two faces to the 9/11 Commission. The first was the one that wrote the sober report, released as a book, which sits on a lot of shelves and few have read. The second was the TV Reality Show produced by the Democrats. While the GOP members were all goo-goo (good-government) moderates who were polite and deferential, the Dems showed political savvy naming Richard Ben-Veniste, a reliable party hack and attack dog and Jamie Gorelick, the “mistress of disaster” to the commission. Those nice GOP members politely declined to investigate the aspects of 9/11 that Gorelick was involved in and sat like trained pets while Ben-Veniste showboated and roasted witnesses. The clincher was the testimony of Richard Clarke, terrorism advisor to both Clinton and then to Bush. Clarke’s book, released at the time of his testimony, is damning of both Clinton and Bush and revealed that Al Gore was the chief proponent of initiating the rendition policy. Yet Clarke’s public testimony, carefully coordinated with the Dems in advance, was damning only of the Bush administration so the Dems and the media had a field day with it. I don’t expect anything different to happen with this commission.
I do not think it was an epic fail. I think it was designed and executed mostly as planned with the exception that they would have preferred more deaths to justify future actions.
Two thoughts:
1 The police have almost certainly done an after action appraisal of the fiasco.
2 It was only a failure if you don’t count the violence as justification for impeachment, for trashing Republicans in general, for causing division in their ranks, for allowing AOC to pose as a terrorized victim, and as grounds for removing liberties in the name of ‘safety’. If, however, you want any of the things listed above, the pathetic and anemic little riot was a roaring success.
Here is one thing people need to understand. If you are a conservative and decide to protest anything there is a good chance it will be perverted and used in such a way to destroy your cause and maybe imprison your cause, your people and your self.
In my area BLM has done 150+ days of “peaceful protest” where people have been peacefully beat up and killed as well as their property peacefully destroyed or stolen. Far as I am aware there has been no lasting arrests, just political catch and release show if any at all. On the other hand the government is currently going around the state and arresting anybody that was anywhere near DC on 1/6. Pretty much shows all you need to know.
Don’t count on an impartial investigation.
“There’s still more evidence that the American people need and deserve to hear and a 9/11 Commission is a way to make sure that we secure the Capitol going forward and that we lay bare the record of just how responsible and how abjectly violating of his constitutional oath President Trump really was,” Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) said on “This Week.”
If it comes from our government or the MSM it is basically only minimally the truth anymore.