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Who Killed Ashli Babbitt, and Why?
Greetings, Ricochetti. With apologies for my long absence from the site, I return today to bring your attention to a piece I’ve written for The Pipeline, “Who Killed Ashli Babbitt?” You’ll recall that Babbitt was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer during the so-called insurrection of Jan. 6. She was unarmed and did not appear to pose a threat to anyone at the time she was shot.
In a time when police shootings far more justifiable than this one are endlessly scrutinized in the press, how is it that Babbitt’s death has escaped even a fraction of the coverage devoted to other police killings? Here’s a sample from the piece:
At the time the shot was fired, the Speaker’s Lobby appeared to be empty save for the shooter and two or three men walking casually at the far end. Babbitt, who was of slight build, carried neither a weapon nor anything that might reasonably be mistaken for one. The officer was about ten feet away from Babbitt when he shot her and cannot reasonably claim he was under an imminent deadly attack at the time, nor can he claim he was defending someone else from such an attack as no one else visible on the far side of the doorway appeared to be closer than fifty feet away. If it is true that the officer fired in self-defense or the defense of others, what was his explanation for doing so when no justification is evident in the video, the only publicly available evidence we have? The government will not say.
I didn’t choose the headline for the piece, and for me the question of who killed Babbitt is of far less importance than why he did. As I write in the piece, local police departments are far more transparent in their investigations of officer-involved shootings than they were just a few years ago. Why should officers working for the federal government be governed by a lesser standard? Why should the Department of Justice be allowed to issue a brief memo saying the officer was faultless and expect us to leave it at that and go away? And why have the media, who have been so quick to condemn police officers involved in far less questionable incidents, been so incurious about Ashli Babbitt’s death?
Please read the column and weigh in here with your comments. And if anyone wishes to catch up with my recent writing, my articles for The Pipeline can be found here, my work for PJ Media is here, and my NRO archive is here.
Published in Policing
You tell me I ask provocative, leading questions. I quote your own provocative, leading questions back to you. You don’t engage with that, of course, but then accuse me of calling for somone to be shot (which actually seems a bit of a stretch).
Are you really contending that they shot that woman because they “didn’t want the mob to break windows”? Is that your claim?
But look – here’s what I think is happening.
If one is invested in the MAGA thing, and as the “Antifa did it” claim for Jan 6 is sort of hard to prove, then it’s all about portraying (and perhaps even perceiving) the actions of that mob [of patriots, no less] as basically harmless – in which case the police shooting anybody is a total over-reaction and unwarranted.
Is that where you’re coming from on this?
I remember the the shooting of an individual in Portland that generated about 400 pages of investigative work. The homicide detectives interviewed the officer that fired the fatal shots, as well as the first officer’s that responded, and officer’s that arrived later to secure the perimeter, as well as witnesses. The Portland Police Bureau, after the DA’s investigation was complete released the report to the public.
The new Joe Biden DOJ is beginning to put pressure on local law enforcement, but the problem is that we cannot even be sure the DOJ has actually investigated the Ashli Babbitt shooting. The DOJ has said there was an investigation, but they refuse to release the report.
Part of the problem may be that the Capitol Hill Police are not much more than armed tour guides. When you patrol acres you are not getting the same police experience that street cops get in cites that cover square miles. Even though the Capitol Hill Police are supposed to qualify quarterly with their firearms one report indicates that is not happening. They also carry the M-4 rifle, the fully auto version of the AR-15. Reports indicate that they are not qualifying with that weapon on a regular basis.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the release of the investigation of the Ashli Babbitt shooting, or what went wrong on January 6. You can be sure there will be a Cover Your Ass investigation.
Bellingcat (bleagh, but anyway) did an article on the whole thing. It includes some maps of the capitol, showing Babbitt’s inferred path, among which:
The red dot near the lower left hand corner is the entrance to the speaker’s lobby, which runs along the side of the chamber and has doors into the chamber. That’s where Ashli Babbitt was shot.
From the article:
I’ll continue my rant. What I didn’t see on television was a coordinated plan to defend the Capitol building. I saw officers in bike helmets engaging in hand to hand combat at bicycle racks. I didn’t see grenadiers that could fire impact munitions, or chemical agents to try and hold a line. I saw about 300 to 400 knuckleheads that were there for a street fight. Portland has had over 150 nights of rioting with a smaller hardcore group that was dressed right for a fight.
Some Capitol Hill officers claim that no supervisors were on the radio directing them. That tells me there was no plan.
I know that’s true, but it is important to keep nagging Washington about it. Maybe we’ll never see a real and believable investigation, but our relentless bugging them to conduct one is the only hope Americans have in keeping the federal government in check.
I saw the video of the shooting the day it was released. I think the video I watched has been taken down by YouTube now. But I can’t get it out of my head. The people in that room were very calm. They were not behaving in any kind of threatening way. It was not a belligerent mob. I think Ashli Babbitt acted impulsively in getting on the desk and trying to get through the window. And there was uncertainty in the situation because of that. But people who work with kids in any capacity–parents or teachers, coaches, band conductors, and so on–are used to functioning with a certain amount of that type of uncertainty. And people who work with the public are also ready for that kind of uncertainty. It goes with the territory. I could not make out why she was shot. I realize that on paper, the facts of the situation explain it. But there is a huge chasm in this case between the words used to describe the scene and the actual scene. “Mob” does not describe what I saw in the video. Civilization has a longstanding problem with the limits of language. A word can mean very different things to different people.
The thing about investigations that reveal, or attempt to reveal, the truth of situations like the demonstration-gone-wrong on January 6 is that we learn from those investigations. And that learning brings peace and growth.
When the covid-19 pandemic began, there was worldwide panic. But with investigation and learning the truth, the world calmed down, and we were able to make sense of it. That is the value of knowledge.
So many questions for those at the top of the USPC. I’ll start: What did Nancy and Mitch know and when did they know it? How about a FOIA request for any communications immediately prior to and after January 6 between them (or their offices) and USCP Chief of Police and the DC Chief of Police.
Why are they never asked about this in public? Why are no reporters even asking?
I agree with you. One must have an incredible suspension of disbelief to look at that shooting and say it was not cold-blooded murder . . .
How often do the Capitol police have to qualify with their weapons? Because if I were going to shoot someone coming through one of my windows, I’d know to a certainty what my backstop was, and it would not be an open plaza filled with a crowd of people milling about.
Very good points. I’m trying to remember with exactitude the videos of the day, and frankly, all I remember it as was posturing (though I could go back and watch the videos and check my memories of it).
I remember it as being surprisingly calm. The protesters banging on the Capitol’s front door seemed to be intent only on that. And some were calling observers to take part, and a man was haranguing the police to act. But the police ignored him.
A young man happily and excitedly was banging a clear plastic shield on a Capitol window (and finally broke through it) and the whole time encouraging others to take part, but they called him anti-fa and tried to stop him.
At the side (or the rear?) door police were seemingly nonchalantly pushing back against bike-rack barriers that the crowd as a whole was halfheartedly pushing against, until the police suddenly stopped and waved the crowd inside the Capitol — or perhaps the one officer was waving the cameramen — one of whom was filming the police line, and the other of whom was filming the guy filming the police — back toward the side door as it to motion them out of the way . Another officer held the door for protesters.
Inside the protesters walked fairly casually between velvet cordons toward stairs. Then they were at a quiet standstill at a doorway watching a man dressed as a policeman on the other side of the doorway wave a baton at them and scuttle back and forth, drop his baton, and pick it up, then run wildly up the stairs. The crowd never moved until he took off running up the steps; then they followed. There were two young male cameramen on the steps — again, one filming the policeman’s baton waving, and the other filming the one filming the policeman.
I also remember people filming other protesters talking and taking selfies with the police.
And upstairs the scene was actually calm. Yes, some young men were shouting immediate orders, but others were simply talking (loudly) to the police and telling them to move away. Other young men were taking turns trying to break glass — not push the police out of the way, or shoulder open the doors, but seemingly to break glass for the purpose of breaking the glass. The police just watched.
Most of the people that day seemed to not know what to do. And other few, again, young men, provided all the stimulus and direction, and did the damage to anything made of glass, as if that was really what was most important.
Then of course I watched Michael Yon and Masako Ganaha being interviewed about antifa tactics and it all made sense.
Yes, the cops were poorly led, or not led at all, and forced to deal with the situation haphazardly. One of the cops who abandoned the doorway appeared to be a sergeant, though he didn’t look very old. The shooter, from the brief glance we get of him in the video, appears middle-aged, but we don’t know his rank. Someone, regardless of rank or tenure, needed to take control, and that didn’t happen.
Manslaughter, I think, but not murder.
I want to clarify something that I know because I saw the original video: There seemed to be security people on the Ashli Babbitt side of the wall to the room where her shooter was.
The press has drawn a picture of an angry mob trying to break down the door and window into a room of scared hostages.
That’s not what it was.
There seemed to be security personnel and an orderly group of people on the Ashli Babbitt side of the wall. Yes, she did something unexpected, but she and the group she was with were under the watchful eye of security personnel who were in that room with them. Which is why the people in the room with the shooter were not cowering in fear but were moving around somewhat normally. They were nervous, but they weren’t afraid for their lives.
Though I think it was a bad shooting, to be fair to the officer I don’t think his shooting background (the term I was trained with) was an issue. He was shooting across the hallway as Babbitt was climbing through the window on the opposite side. The background was a wall.
Hi, Jack. Read your work or years.
Don’t mean to get all conspiratorial, but did he look and present himself like an actual officer to your eyes?
Thanks for that.
Why does everyone presume that the murderer was a policeman?
Well put.
He appeared to be dressed like a lot of other Capitol cops that day. Hard to make a judgment on how he presented based on such a brief appearance on the video. But it looked to me like he panicked.
So those mostly peaceful protesters in Minneapolis who burned down a police precinct HQ (and the city let them), you’re saying they don’t have it in them to enact vigilante justice? But the people who entered the capitol on Jan. 6th and did nothing more than break some windows and sit in Nancy’s chair, . . . they’re dangerous vigilantes?
Yes. McCarthy, McConnell and their RepubliCAN’T gang are fully complicit in the coverup.