Ashli Babbitt and the Warped Politics of Police Shootings

By Dan McLaughlin

Friday, January 06, 2023

 

Recall this scene: At the height of the George Floyd protests, an angry mob of Black Lives Matter protesters burst into the federal courthouse in Portland, aiming to stop a criminal trial they felt was rigged against the just outcome. The crowd was armed mostly with crude implements such as flagpoles and helmets, but they were aggressive and inflamed, and they overwhelmed the outnumbered marshals. A small core of the protesters were basically professional agitators, hardened in street combat, but most were ordinary citizens at the end of their tether, fueled by a stew of righteous anger and ignorant paranoia.

 

It was an intense moment. On video, one protester can be heard screaming “F*** the blue!” A white federal officer was pointing his gun in a warning stance. One protester yelled, “There’s a gun! There’s a gun!” As they burst through a door inside the courthouse, the officer fired, killing an unarmed black woman. He gave no verbal warning before opening fire.

 

The protester who was killed was not physically imposing. She was a military veteran from the other end of the country who had descended upon the protests, ablaze with grievance and convinced that injustice and unequal application of the law were ripping the country apart.

 

You’ll have trouble recalling it, of course, because this didn’t happen — at least, not exactly as I have described it. The riot wasn’t in a Portland courthouse in the summer of 2020; it was in the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. It didn’t aim to stop a criminal trial, but a joint session of Congress. The protesters-turned-rioters were supporting the right-wing “stop the steal” cause, not the left-wing Black Lives Matter cause. The officer who fired his weapon was black, and the protester who was killed was white. Otherwise, the basic facts are the same.

 

The rioting protester who was shot to death was Ashli Babbitt, a white, female, 35-year-old, 14-year veteran of the Air Force from California. The police officer who killed her was Lieutenant Michael Byrd, a black Capitol policeman. Babbitt was the only provably direct fatality from the January 6 riots, although there were other protesters who died that day, as well as deaths among the Capitol Police, that might reasonably be attributed to the January 6 riot. Riots are dangerous things, and they swiftly run out of anyone’s control.

 

And yet, across much of the media and the political universe, people have reacted in the exact opposite way from how they would have reacted to precisely the same facts if the races, causes, and locations had been reversed. If the facts were as I described at the start of this column, we would have seen a drumbeat on the streets, amplified by the corporate media and backed by donations from Wall Street banks and genuflection by professional sports leagues. They would have demanded justice for Ashli Babbitt, the prosecution of Byrd by federal and local authorities, and that public officials “say her name!” Meanwhile, the more irresponsible corners of right-wing media would have backed the blue blindly and dug deeply into Babbitt’s background to argue that she was no saint, had provoked her own shooting, and more or less had it coming.

 

How the wheels have turned. Those right-wing outlets have instead raged against the justice system coming down like a ton of bricks on the January 6 rioters while letting Byrd go free. Fox News breathlessly reported a Judicial Watch conclusion that the D.C. Metropolitan Police’s investigation showed “no good reason to shoot and kill Ashli Babbitt.” Donald Trump has led the demands to say her name.

 

The mainstream liberal corporate media, by contrast, has assumed the role usually played by the right-wing media. Byrd was given a sympathetic, soft-focus interview by NBC’s Lester Holt. Paul Schwartzman and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post wrote on “How Ashli Babbitt went from Capitol rioter to Trump-embraced ‘martyr,’” which they described as “revisionism.” Nicholas Goldberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “Ashli Babbitt was not a peaceful protester. It’s clear why the cop who shot her was exonerated”:

 

In the seven months since she was killed, Babbitt has become a martyr to the far right. In the twisted revisionist narrative being pushed by former President Trump and his supporters, she was a peaceful demonstrator — an “innocent, wonderful, incredible woman” — who was unjustifiably murdered by the police even though she posed no danger. . . .

 

These weren’t peaceful demonstrators. These weren’t protesters exercising their constitutionally protected right to calmly express differences of opinion with their elected representatives. They were bashing down the doors. This was a riot, Ashli Babbitt was at its vanguard, and, based on what I’ve seen, the police officer who shot her was doing his job.

 

Coverage this past week has gone even further. Michael Biesecker of the Associated Press published a lengthy piece entitled, “Ashli Babbitt a martyr? Her past tells a more complex story,” arguing from unrelated prior incidents that Babbitt was prone to violence. PBS ran it under the headline “Ashli Babbitt, Jan. 6 insurrectionist portrayed as martyr by some, had violent past.” She had it coming, you see? These are exactly the sorts of things one would read at Breitbart or Gateway Pundit about Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, or George Floyd. They may conflict with efforts to turn the deceased into a secular saint, but they would have no relevance in a court of law to determine if the shooting was justified.

 

It of course is true that partisan or ideological media sometimes feel the need to emphasize just one side of a story because the other side is already being bullhorned from the rooftops. Writers for ideological organs of the Left may feel that they need to complete the story, for the same reason that writers for National Review sometimes feel that way. But it is telling that writers and editors for the Associated Press, PBS, and the Washington Post do not see their role as being meaningfully different from the ideological role of National Review, or, for that matter, from the tribal roles of Breitbart or Gateway Pundit.

 

We should all aspire to be better. Ashli Babbitt did not deserve to die. Like other unarmed people shot by police in a controversial confrontation, however, she made poor choices to put herself in a dangerous position. The result was that a police officer doing his best to protect and serve in chaotic circumstances made a split-second decision with fatal consequences, one he likely regrets but that no sane legal system would treat as a crime. As the Justice Department described the situation in closing its investigation:

 

Ms. Babbitt was among a mob of people that entered the Capitol building and gained access to a hallway outside “Speaker’s Lobby,” which leads to the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. At the time, the USCP [Capitol Police] was evacuating Members from the Chamber, which the mob was trying to enter from multiple doorways. USCP officers used furniture to barricade a set of glass doors separating the hallway and Speaker’s Lobby to try and stop the mob from entering the Speaker’s Lobby and the Chamber, and three officers positioned themselves between the doors and the mob. Members of the mob attempted to break through the doors by striking them and breaking the glass with their hands, flagpoles, helmets, and other objects. Eventually, the three USCP officers positioned outside the doors were forced to evacuate. As members of the mob continued to strike the glass doors, Ms. Babbitt attempted to climb through one of the doors where glass was broken out. An officer inside the Speaker’s Lobby fired one round from his service pistol, striking Ms. Babbitt in the left shoulder, causing her to fall back from the doorway and onto the floor.

 

As conservatives, we believe as a matter of principle that the rules are the rules, no matter whose ox is being gored. We believe that the cops aren’t always right, but they deserve the benefit of the doubt on tough calls made in the moment. We believe that riots are no way to protest. It would be nice if we weren’t the only ones.