Former President Barack Obama took to Twitter on Friday to address why civil rights groups and lawmakers are furious about the many other approaches used by law enforcers against Wednesday’s U.S. Capitol intrusion compared to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests by last summer.
Obama posted three articles on his Twitter that looked at different explanations why law enforcement and federal authorities were unprepared for an event that led to the first time the Capitol had been shut down in more than 200 years.
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A study reported by FiveThirtyEight found that between May and November last year, authorities were “more than twice as likely to try to break up a left-wing protest as a right-wing protest.
The study, conducted by the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, also found that when law enforcement officers chose to act, they were more likely to use ’34 percent of the time violence compared to right-wing protests. with 51 percent with left-wing protests. ‘
Elected President Joe Biden also expressed his conviction that if the crowd of men dressed in face paint and protective riot gear had stormed the Capitol BLM supporters, the law enforcement response would have looked different.
‘No one can tell me that if it was a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they would not be treated very differently from the crowd of thugs who stormed the Capitol. We all know this is true, and it is unacceptable, ”Biden said in a Thursday speech. “Completely unacceptable.”
Some on Capitol Hill also agree with the president-elect. “We would have been shot if we had tried to do all this,” first-year representative Cori Bush, D-Mo., Said in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday night.
Bush, who took refuge with her staff in her office – just three days after she was sworn in – while rioters flooded the Capitol building – started her as a BLM organizer after first marching in Ferguson. has after the death of 18 years. -old Michael Brown Jr.
Obama also referred to an article in The New Yorker claiming that Capitol police simply do not take Trump’s supporters’ threat seriously, adding that the protesters are “known enough to be dismissed as fools.”
“The intruders may be disrespectful to a system that they say does not represent them, but on Wednesday they managed to prove that it is so,” reads the article written by Masha Gessen.
Elected Vice President Kamala Harris expressed her frustration at the scene of Trump supporters climbing the walls of the Capitol, breaking windows and barring doors, saying, “We have seen two systems of justice.”
“One extremist stormed the U.S. Capitol yesterday, and another released tear gas to peaceful protesters last summer,” she continued.
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Obama acknowledges Harris’ frustration by pointing to a CNN article describing strategic differences that took law enforcement between Wednesday and last summer. The article included a photo in which three rows of armed national guards appeared on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
But conservative groups have pushed back the incoming government and their claims of double standards – accusing Biden and Harris of ‘gas lighting’.
“Four people died after what happened yesterday. And you know what? People also died last summer. Countless businesses were destroyed. People’s livelihoods were set on fire and stolen. You refused to condemn that violence. Yesterday was horrible, but you have lost your right to moralize, ”wrote the author of Alexandra DeSanctis, National Review, on Twitter.
“This is complete nonsense,” said Conservative writer AG Hamilton in response to Biden’s remarks. “It’s gas lighting that has to ignore what we actually saw on a night last summer.”
Although Muriel Bowser, mayor of Washington DC, arranged for 340 national guards to be in the city on Wednesday, none of them were armed or were stationed at the Capitol at the start of the riots.
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The Pentagon later approved the full deployment of the 1800 National Guardsmen, DC, along with more soldiers from nearby Virginia and Maryland, but it took time to mobilize and travel to the Capitol.
FBI and ATF officers were immediately called in to assist Capitol police if they were overwhelmed by rioters.
One Capitol police officer was killed during the raid.