After watching the video in the second embedded hyperlink. I'm wondering from a law enforcement perspective how "clean" the shooting was. I heard a perpetrator(s?) say repeatedly "he has a gun!" or "there's a gun!", but as of yet there hadn't been any bloodshed or other shootings. So I'm wondering what the ROE equivalent was and if there were other de-escalation steps that could've been taken. How come no warning shots? No tear gas to disperse the unruly crowd? It appeared that the representatives had already been removed, so was he covering the evacuation or withdrawl? The crowd moved out fairly quickly after the shot was fired, so I'm wondering why a warning shot wasn't a viable COA to try and prevent any bloodshed.
To address the three questions highlighted:
- From everything I've seen and discussed with law enforcement 'warning shots' aren't usually a thing.
- It appears none of the officers had tear gas and were not prepared to utilize it as they did not have masks of their own. As for other non-lethal means like a taser it does not appear any of the plain clothes officers had them.
- While the Representatives who are shown in the video appear to have left the Speaker's Lobby, which is what that room where they were in the video is called, it is not readily apparent that they were safe yet from video as they could have been in an adjacent room with no barriers between them and the mob. There were also a significant number of Representatives that sheltered in place in the gallery of the House chamber for quite some time during the seige, that is evident in the many photos of the chamber during the incident and why the Capitol Police barricaded the main entrance to the House chamber and had their guns drawn to hold back the mob there. The Speaker's Lobby is to the rear of the chamber and also has entrances to the chamber, those do not appear to have been closed or barricaded at the time of the shooting and would have provided access to the House chamber and the Representatives in the gallery who may have been still sheltering there. In short, the door the woman was breaching appears to be the last real barrier between the mob and the back/rear entrances to the House chamber and possibly some people still sheltering there. This was different from the Senate where the members who were in the chamber had been evacuated and the mob was able to get in, not so in the House chamber.
The 'main' entrance to the House chamber that is directly opposite the House dais where the Speaker presides over the House while in session, it appears that all the entrances on that side of the chamber and the sides were secure.
The Speaker's Lobby is the long room located behind the dais and which appears to have at least 4 entrances directly to the main floor of the House chamber, since they were apparently evacuating the members through those doors they do not appear to have been secured by teh time the mob reached the Speaker's Lobby:
It is pretty evident to me that police were not able to completely evacuate the House chamber for some time, barricading and guarding the entrances they could while trying to evacuate the Representatives who were in the chamber that was made more difficult by the much larger number of Representatives than Senators and by the large number of Representatives that were sheltering in place in the gallery. Given the fact the officers at the scene appear to have a limited number of non-lethal means to ensure the safety of the folks they were guarding it appears at first blush to me to be a justified use of force.
I understand that tensions were high, but after other high-profile police shootings recently there has been quite the coverage of whether or not the shooting was justified. I haven't really seen anything like that, much less the President-elect publicly question why the officer didn't try to shoot her in the leg. Is it because of the rather heinous nature of the victim's alleged crime? (And yes, I am saying alleged because this is still America and people are still presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.)
In most other shootings it was often a singular event, while this was part of a much larger one. There is also ample video evidence showing the shooting that coupled with the violent nature of the mob has likely tempered the usual criticism of a police shooting.