Fourth police officer who responded to Jan 6 attack dies by suicide

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/566040-fourth-police-officer-who-responded-to-jan-6-attack-dies-by-suicide-report

by AndrewBissell • 5 years ago

103 117 5 years ago

These officers faced BLM hostility on the left, as well as violence against them and accusations of being traitors from the right.

The public that they're supposed to serve was spitting on them and demonizing them from both sides.

Add a pandemic to the mix, and anybody's mental health would be flatlining. Suicide among some of them is tragic but not surprising.

I don't know how effective counseling services are, but if they do anything, they should be made available to the Jan 6 officers.

If anybody reading this is in a dark spot, the suicide lifeline is 800-273-8255, and it's available 24/7.

elygre• 5 years ago

I think I understand what you mean by “accusations of being traitors from the right”.

However, I was unaware of “BLM hostility on the left”. Could you share some more information about this?

cat_plus_plus2• 5 years ago

Just one of many lies Capitol Police specifically faced: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/us-elections-gover...

neartheplain3• 5 years ago

The Democratic Party and BLM movement entertained calls for police abolition and defunding all summer. Three times as many officers were hospitalized defending the Portland federal courthouse compared to those defending the Capitol. BLM grafitti in Portland called for officers there to be defunded, abolished, and killed. The Democratic Party mayor of Portland banned city officers from helping defend the federal courthouse, and personally appeared at the siege to show solidarity with the rioters. I could list a hundred more examples.

GaryTang• 5 years ago

A multitude more deaths caused by BLM protests. It wasn’t the rosy portrayal the TV showed you. And many people are still living in fear, not knowing when a BLM protest might come burn down their home.

mjevans2• 5 years ago

Some communities have also been disproportionately persecuted by the police for, a very long time. Maybe it's a legacy of slavery and later segregation. Maybe it's a lack of unifying national spirit (the melting pot of cultural assimilation and a desire to be a small spice in a greater whole) which might have just been wishful thinking on the part of history book authors.

I suspect most of the non-anarchist who feel that way would agree with my take that "defund" might be better expressed as RE-form.

Re-form the Police in a de-militarized way. Structure community interaction so they are helpful, rather than penalizing. (E.G. more like Japanese neighborhood branches.) Split out social and mental health crisis, maybe with domestic violence response teams that include a mix of branches. Also, for mental health, make it easier to get interventions earlier, before assault with a deadly weapon leads to regrettable and unavoidably bad sets of outcomes.

qwerty4561277• 5 years ago

I agree yet am not really confident in that the police can be de-militarized in a country where every minor criminal has a gun and living is segregated in a way so some neighborhoods actually are much more dangerous than others.

fn1• 5 years ago

Re-form the Police

Triple their pay, but also enforce strict no-tolerance rules on misbehaviour and select candidates more carefully.

user-the-name• 5 years ago

"Reform" has been the policy for decades now, and meanwhile the situation has been steadily and rapidly getting worse.

The whole point of "defund" is that "reform" has failed. Something more drastic is needed.

yy776yyhhh• 5 years ago

It's really weird to automatically assume the community's feelings are justified when most violence faced by black people is from other black people. It seems a lot more likely that standing by idiots from bad neighborhoods is simply politically convenient right now and so they're making noise because that's what idiots do when you give them a microphone.

jzb• 5 years ago

Trying to lay any of this on BLM is bullshit. This is directly tied to the attack on the Capitol by Trump traitors.

arkitaip• 5 years ago

Exactly how were they targeted by BLM?

josteink• 5 years ago

You mean, aside from police being the main target of BLM ever since the George Floyd incident?

rorykoehler• 5 years ago

It pretty obvious police protect capital not people. Sure many of the police officers didn't realise this until it was too late and they had committed but I think that would have a bigger detriment on their mental health than being vilified by fringe groups.

thundergolfer• 5 years ago

This sounds alarming, like something that could be called a mental health crisis in the DC police. How many police responded on Jan 6, maybe five hundred? 4/500 in seven months would be a terrible rate.

cat_plus_plus2• 5 years ago

Well, yeah, police was endlessly demonized and underfunded in the past decade. There are a few bad apples, but that doesn't justify group guilt and neglect. Rioters should have never been able to attack Capitol OR government buildings in Seattle/Portland. Not saying that Jan 6 was not a bigger threat to the union of those events, although vast majority of rioters were simple hooligans with no credible plans to gain or hold power.

zimpenfish• 5 years ago

police was endlessly demonized and underfunded in the past decade.

https://cfo.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/ocfo/publica... suggests that the DC police have had a stable budget since at least 2018.

https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/RevenueSpending/nypd.html suggests that NYPD have had an increasing budget since 1980.

https://www.injusticewatch.org/data/2020/chicago-has-nearly-... suggests that Chicago PD have had an increasing budget since 1964.

Do you have some sources for the "underfunded in the past decade"?

formerly_proven2• 5 years ago

You can have stable or even increasing budgets and still be underfunded. Not saying this is necessarily the case here, just that it's definitely possible to pull that off.

mike_d3• 5 years ago

DC has the 7th highest population growth rate in the country https://dc.gov/release/2020-census-data-shows-dcs-population...

NY metro area has added the population of Los Angeles (4m) since 1980 https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23083/new-york-city/popul...

Chicago Metro has grown from 6.5 million in '64 to 8.8 million https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22956/chicago/population

vkou2• 5 years ago

demonized

Do you think it may have something to do with a culture where a police officer can put his knee on an unarmed man's throat, hold it there until he dies, write it up as a 'Police responded to a medical emergency, man died on the way to the hospital', and then have their peers close rank around them when the truth gets out?

roenxi4• 5 years ago

The police will sometimes, in the routine execution of their duty, have to pin someone down. I don't recall any evidence that the murder was intentional. There is an expectation that the police are the sort of people who could kill someone if the need arises. They aren't all going to be philosophers.

Given that and the vitriol around the situation, it is quite reasonable for the police to close ranks around him and look to the most charitable interpretation of what happened. The courts exist to sort out such situations, the police don't need to become vigilantes as well.

vultour• 5 years ago

Underfunded? US police does army cosplay and drives around in vehicles that one would expect in Syria and not the streets of a first world country.

wudangmonk• 5 years ago

I guess I'm a cynic at heart since my mind went directly to this being somehow related to harrasment by their peers rather than being depressed about the public not appreciating them.

LightG• 5 years ago

Could easily be both, compounded with personal problems. Who really knows. Sad state of affairs either way.

nelsonfavedra• 5 years ago

Or it could be "suicide." After all, there's four of them now, and a fifth one of "stroke," so what are the odds? As you said, who knows.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/02/politics/dc-metropolitan-...

ALittleLight3• 5 years ago

From a little light Googling I don't see that any police officers connected to the 100+ nights of rioting and protests in Portland killed themselves. Why would one event result in so many suicides while the other didn't?

_y5hn2• 5 years ago

Because of the treason of storming a democratic process, and then lying about it? It makes you question who you're working for, when half of politicians are behaving in such shameful manner without reprecussions and justice. These police officers were physically assaulted and had no way of knowing wether they'd come out of it alive or dead. Some people were even searching for politicians to murder, and officers had no way to be able to guarantee for people's safety (ie. doing their real job). It was an extremely volatile and uncontrollable situation, a bet from the curtains behind, that could've gone either way.

Expectation is another attempt in a few years, as happened between 1930 and 1940.

I wish this warning is unnecessary!

hef198982• 5 years ago

Yes, January 6th is more like the Beer Hall Putsch. And we all know that that was only the beginning of Hitler's political career. Not sure if that is the right comparison, history is not repeating itself in that way. But having a failed, rather embarrassingly, coup attempt is no guarantee there won't be another one. Or a power grab abusing existing, legitimate democratic processes. The first time the NSDAP won was through a fully legitimate election. First order of the day was a new election that was everything but democratic, so.

neartheplain3• 5 years ago

The police in Portland were never overrun. Over the course of those 100+ nights they maintained discipline, held their secure perimeters, and succeeded in their mission to keep rioters from breaching e.g. the federal courthouse or their station buildings. In contrast, officers at the Capitol were completely overrun, isolated, and brutally beaten by the mob without hope or expectation of rescue. Some have said that while lying on the ground taking blows, cut off from backup and effectively abandoned by leadership, they thought they were going to die then and there [0].

They also failed in their mission to protect and secure the Capitol. While blame for that rests mainly on their leaders, at least according what I've read in the IG and Senate reports, I imagine it still weighs heavy on each officer.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dc-police-officers-speak-o...

BackBlast2• 5 years ago

An event that only lasted a couple of hours is so much more dramatic than months long riots with the leadership throwing police line officers under the bus? Sufficiently so that there's literally an epidemic of suicides?

I'm not buying it.

JuliusPullo• 5 years ago

I'm hearing violins reading this.

irrational• 5 years ago

Fox News et al way way way way over blew what actually happened in Portland. There were a few incidents (which Fox News blew up into a full scale war), but overall it was very peaceful.

The biggest problem in Portland was not the protesters or the police, it was the anonymous federal troops that trump sent to stir up trouble, against the demands of the Portland and Oregon governments that they leave. I put 99% of the trouble in Portland at the feet of Trumps SS troops.

taylodl• 5 years ago

That, my friend, is the primary difference between protest and insurrection. Protestors are trying to get their voices heard by the system, insurrectionists are trying to thwart the system itself.

aaron695• 5 years ago

"More than a dozen US Capitol Police officers are under internal investigation for allegedly helping rioters"

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/13/politics/capitol-insurrec...

Perhaps the relentless attacks from the media and some members of congress could be part of it.

I do suspect this is covid related if it's not a statistical anomaly / incorrect pattern finding. It's messed with everyone's heads and we are going to see that coming out with certain sub-groups before others.

benmmurphy• 5 years ago

Is this a normal rate of suicide in these circumstances? Is there anything to indicate that these are instead murders in order to hide something?

mcherm• 5 years ago

Is this a normal rate of suicide in these circumstances?

Absolutely not.

For real numbers:

For 2019, the [Blue HELP] calculated the officer suicide rate at 22.4 per 100,000 population.[1]

...and that is an annual rate.

Is there anything to indicate that these are instead murders in order to hide something?

No, there is nothing to indicate that.

[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jun/24/facebook-p...

Splognosticus3• 5 years ago

No, there is nothing to indicate that.

Agreed. I'm noticing this idea floated throughout this thread and it's extremely alarming. There's nothing to suggest that any of the officers died under suspicious circumstances, nobody ever supplies any evidence supporting that theory, they're "just asking questions."

After years of watching as ostensibly reasonable people get mired in ever-increasingly insane conspiracy theories I'm incredibly worried to see them introduced to an already dangerously volatile situation. The Jan 6 riots wouldn't have even happened if not for the pervasiveness of the lie that the election was stolen. I really, really wish people would think more carefully before speaking this way.

AndrewBissell2• 5 years ago

Is there anything to indicate that these are instead murders in order to hide something?

The huge number of instigators of the riot and leadership in some of the organizations who turned out to be FBI "informants" does call for some sideways glances.

cycomanic2• 5 years ago

Does anyone else find the formulation "died by suicide" a bit weird? Is that commonly used?

Compared to "committed suicide" it seems to me that it is supposed to associate a passive action, as if something happened to them.

Just to make sure, I absolutely deplore the people storming the capitol and by no means support any of their causes. However I find this type of corporate speak often troublesome, especially if it's being used in connection with law enforcement and military actions.

BoxOfRain5• 5 years ago

I think it's because the term "commit suicide" implies a moral judgement, in the past Western notions of suicide were actually pretty barbaric. To accuse someone of trying to commit suicide would have been a fairly serious accusation, in fact in the past in some jurisdictions suicide could mean that your estate went to the government instead of your family as suicide was seen as an offence against God and the Crown.

Nowadays we tend to recognise it for the complicated set of behaviours that it actually is, modern notions of mental health and other factors that can contribute to suicide are often no longer seen as personal (and sinful) moral failures on the part of the suicidal person. To "commit" something usually implies that wrongdoing has taken place, for example as a thief or arsonist commits theft or arson. Since suicide is often the result of severe mental health issues, intolerable trauma, or other factors that have nothing to do with a person's moral conduct the verb "commit" is often seen as inappropriate in modern discussion.

cycomanic2• 5 years ago

Thanks for educating me, while I was aware of the strong judgements against suicide (in particular based on religious justifications), I did not connect that to the use of language. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions too quickly.

TheAdamAndChe• 5 years ago

Suicide is ultimately executed by an individual who makes the choice to do so. Obfuscating or minimizing that fact and refusing to shame it will remove social pressure preventing and dissuading that act.

Shame and fear of my father finding my body is what prevented me from doing it years ago.

hashhar• 5 years ago

Suicide is something that happens due to a cause, generally mental health issues or extreme physical pain. “died by suicide” removes culpability from the person who has lost their life and allows a discussion about the disease or disorder from which they were suffering.

Consider a case where someone got shot. Should the headline read, "died by stepping front of a gun" or "shot dead by a gun"?

neartheplain3• 5 years ago

An apparent former D.C. police officer has posted their thoughts on this suicide, and the mood among Capitol and MPD police generally, in the Washington D.C. subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/comments/owl3ru/third_...

prossercj• 5 years ago

The opening session of the house committee investigating the attack contains first-hand accounts from officers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HutK2vVFqLM

rdiddly• 5 years ago

I'm sorry, my first thought is murder/coverup. Thought the same thing when it was Hunter Thompson and the 9/11 responders. I have no evidence. And suicide is plenty plausible. Just want that idea out there for some reason. It should at least occur to people.

Fourth police officer who responded to Jan 6 attack dies by suicide

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