Washington DC Car Chase - woman shot dead

[David Guyatt]

Unarmed, with a child in the car, refusing to stop, then shot dead.

Shooting citizens dead these days only takes a frame of mind.

Break the rules and bang, bang, bang.

Washington DC car chase: suspect shot dead after Capitol Hill lockdownWoman with a young child in her car attempted to breach a White House security checkpoint, prompting a car chase

Dan Roberts in Washington and agencies
theguardian.com, Thursday 3 October 2013 19.40 BST




US Capitol shooting: suspect killed after car chase ends in gunfire.
A woman with a young child in her car attempted to breach a White House checkpoint on Thursday, prompting a high-speed chase through the security-heavy streets of Washington that ended near the US Capitol when police shot her dead.
Government buildings on Capitol Hill were placed on lockdown and members of Congress sheltered in their offices as the incident unfolded.
Capitol police said the woman was chased between the two centres of government, striking a police vehicle shortly before she was stopped. Officers shot the woman dead. The one-year-old child was unhurt.
Less than three weeks after a fatal shooting at the nearby navy yard left 12 dead, the incident put security forces on full alert and led to the temporary suspension of business in the House of Representatives, where lawmakers were debating the government shutdown.
The incident began at about 2.10pm ET when the woman attempted to get past an outer security checkpoint at the White House. She was challenged by secret service officers, and a police chase ensued. At one point, police cars surrounded the vehicle, but the woman reversed into one of them and drove off again. The chase eventually ended 1.7 miles from the White House, the US Capitol, where the woman was shot.
Witnesses reported hearing several "loud bangs" outside the Capitol complex. Video later emerged of a black sedan being chased at speed around the heavily-guarded roads close to the US Senate buildings.
"We heard three, four, five pops," said Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat who was walking from the Capitol to an office building across the street. Police ordered Casey and nearby tourists to crouch behind a car for protection, then hustled everyone into the Capitol, according to the Associated Press.
"There were multiple shots fired and the air was filled with gunpowder," said Berin Szoka, whose office at a technology thinktank overlooks the shooting scene.
Cathy Lanier, chief of the Metropolitan police department in Washington, said the incident was not an accident and that the suspect attempted to breach two security barriers. "This was a lengthy pursuit," Lanier said.
Capitol police chief Kim Dine said the two scenes were quickly secured after a short security lockdown meant hundreds of government staff were told to "shelter in place". He told reporters on Capitol Hill: "We have no information that this was related to terrorism or is anything other than an isolated incident."
He confirmed that a Capitol police officer was hurt. The injured officer was evacuated by a helicopter which landed on the lawn in front of Congress. The officer was not seriously injured.

[Charlie Prima]

- edited -

[Lauren Johnson]

Another use of the term "shelter in place" first heard in the Boston Marathon "situation" and now in Washington, D.C. The possibility of mind control has to be included and that this would therefore be another little piece of theater in the continuing drama of a strategy of tension.

[David Guyatt]

Another use of the term "shelter in place" first heard in the Boston Marathon "situation" and now in Washington, D.C. The possibility of mind control has to be included and that this would therefore be another little piece of theater in the continuing drama of a strategy of tension.

Yes, could be. Or she also could've been so distraught about being put out of work with a young child to care for (supposing this was the case - vast leaps here, I know) that she lost it completely. We might find out in time - might not. But what struck me most was the cops shooting at an obviously unarmed woman with a child in the back. Do these people have no consciences at all? If she had the car wired for a bomb, she would've almost certainly detonated it when she first brought the car to a stop, surrounded by cops - but didn't.

The policy of shoot first and worry about it later is just awful. There is no hint of reasonable force, no message of justice. It's a cowboy cop force ready to blast away at the least provocation.

And that reminds me Lauren. In the Marathon thread you predicted early on (if I recall correctly) that the background idea was for a military lockdown. I didn't think that likely at the time, but I think you have been proved correct. This is the wrong topic, wrong thread, I know, but I keep meaning to tell you, and my memory being what it is these days, I have to grab it while I can.

[Magda Hassan]

I wonder if they would have shot her if she were white? I did also hear some thing about postnatal depression but I am not sure that is the case. Maybe they are still just looking for anything to hang it on. But the fact is armed cops killed an completely unarmed woman in front of her child. There is no excuse. The car could have been easily disabled by shooting the tyres or a road block.

[David Guyatt]

I wonder if they would have shot her if she were white? I did also hear some thing about postnatal depression but I am not sure that is the case. Maybe they are still just looking for anything to hang it on. But the fact is armed cops killed an completely unarmed woman in front of her child. There is no excuse. The car could have been easily disabled by shooting the tyres or a road block.

Or throwing those spike chains in front of it. They must have something like that for the White House surely? Or have they gone completely low tech homicidal in the way they deal with, well what? What exactly could she be accused of, "driving a car rashly with a child on board?"

It's a disgraceful over-reaction in what is today a police state.

Next station down the track will be growing lists of "disappeared ones" I suppose.

[Peter Lemkin]

With the militarization of the Police at all levels and in all areas; and the integration of intel and military INTO the police forces for training, spying, and apparently some of the officers on special ops teams [SWAT and such], they now have [as Dave suggested] a kill first and don't even bother to ask questions later approach. I remember [am old enough] when Police tried to talk even those who said they had guns, bombs or hostages into a surrender or some accommodation...and there were specially trained hostage and bomb/gun negotiators. Now its just brute force to kill any perceived threat - whether a threat or not. This is an extreme case, but I don't think, sadly, any changes nor justice will come out of this - nor will any of the officers who killed her even loose a days pay or be placed on desk duty pending investigation. There's a 'war' on - and it is against us to create terror....any way, every day. Whether they drove her to this in a variety of ways or she just went off the 'rails' due to stress, there was NO reason to kill her. Her car was small and they could have talked her out of the car and arrested her. In the freeze frame on the video above, she is surrounded by at least 6 armed men. She had no weapons and they could easily have told her to slowly open the door [or opened it after having her put her hands up]. They have electronic equipment that can tell if there is a bomb and they obviously determined there was none - or they'd not have come so close to the car. Those men would have seen a frightened woman and a young child....yet they chose to kill and ask [sic] later. Such is the Police State in the USA today. This could happen in any major city and many minor ones - not just near the buildings of the corrupt government......it was a murder and very nearly also of the child. Sick, and this will continue, and is escalating weekly.

[Magda Hassan]

Next station down the track will be growing lists of "disappeared ones" I suppose.

Quite a few Iraqi and Afghani families have already long been looking for their loved ones.

[Peter Lemkin]

Capitol Hill murder and America's trigger-happy cops

Peter Foster
Sat, 05 Oct 2013 13:06 CDT

This photo shows Miriam Carey with her child, who was present at her mother's shooting, and now has to live a life without her thanks to the Capitol Police

The family of Miriam Carey, the mentally disturbed woman who was shot by police up on Capitol Hill last week, has been on TV demanding answers about why she was shot.

Ms Carey, 34, died in a hail of gunfire after she led police on a high speed car chase from the White House up to Congress, failing to stop at least twice when officers pointed their guns at her. Here 18-month-old daughter was in the back of the car when her mother was killed.

You could argue, that anyone who behaves like that in an area as sensitive as Capitol Hill gets what's coming to them, but if you're mentally disturbed (she to have believed Barack Obama was stalking her) then by definition you are not rational.

This woman did not have a gun. She did not wave anything that looked like a gun at police, so far as we know - and if she had, you can bet the police would have made a big deal of it. She certainly did not fire at the police. And yet they still gunned her down.

Was this really necessary? Was there really no other way to stop that car? Clearly it needed to be stopped, as this woman was a danger to pedestrians, if nothing else.


Comment: More than Carey's driving, the police shots were obviously more dangerous to the pedestrians present, injuring one of their colleagues.



Given the concrete barriers that protect access to the Capitol buildings themselves, she was never going to get in there so what about deploying a "stinger" - one of those spiky thing that shreds a car's tires? Or using other cars to ram her off the road?

Those questions need asking because too often the US police and the media doesn't bother. They just accept uncritically that that's how the police (heroes, inevitably) should behave.

The young child who watched her mother being shot to death was, according to CNN, "rescued" from the car; an interesting turn of phrase which belies this mindset. Perhaps more questions would be being asked if the child had died?

As I've written before, the problem is not just that the media seems to accept guns being used in this way, but so do the law enforcement agencies who have an absolutely terrible - almost non-existent, in fact - record in disciplining trigger-happy officers.

Take a look at this recent New York Times analysis of FBI shooting of 150 lethal incidents involving FBI officers. Law enforcement was deemed faultless every time. You don't need to break out your copy of Freakonomics to know that doesn't pass the sniff test, unless the bar to using lethal force is set incredibly, dangerously low.

The FBI still hasn't provided proper explanation, for example, of how or why it shot 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev when he was being interrogated at his home in Florida over his possible links to the surviving Boston bomber. His father, the ACLU and others are rightly suing to try and find out more.

Like the woman, Todashev was also not carrying a firearm, although he might have had a knife, or a broomhandle, or a metal pole, depending on which half-cocked story that was briefed by FBI at the time you chose to believe - or not.

The fact, of course that the younger Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was even alive was a small miracle, after the Boston cops unloaded their weapons into the boat where he was hiding, even though he wasn't armed either - so presumably didn't shoot first, or threaten them or wave a gun at them.

Again, virtually no questions were asked about that incidents which senior officers dismissed as "fog of war" or "contagious fire".

This should translate as "my trigger-happy officers were engaged in massive collective act of indiscipline that unnecessarily endangered the public and the investigation into the most serious terror incident on the US mainland since September 11", but of course, it doesn't.

I could go on. Remember last year's Empire State shooting where nine passers-by were shot or wounded by NYPD officerswho were tackling a man who was, at least, armed with a firearm. The patrolmen fired sixteen shots, of which only three hit their target.

One of the victims of that shooting, a North Carolina student who was shot in the hip, is suing the NYPD, but already the police commissioner Raymond Kelly and the mayor Michael Bloomberg have come out and said that the cops "followed proper protocol".

The wider question common to all these cases is really about the acceptable level of violence in American society - about where the parameters of the debate are set when it comes to gun use.

In the US, certainly in comparison to other developed-world countries, the tolerance is extraordinarily high. As is the near-uncritical worship of anyone who wears a uniform.

Both of which means the pressure for accountability on law enforcement agencies from the public or the media is incredibly weak. And since environment is so permissive and the law enforcement agencies don't police themselves, the gun is too often the weapon of first resort.

Comment: Since empires hoping to turn into police states depend on a very fearful populace, these trigger-happy cops are not only undisciplined but encouraged to act this way by the state itself. The very state that protects them every time they murder an innocent citizen and gives them the incentive to do it again, knowing they will get away with it.

[David Guyatt]

The child pulled from the car and then Miriam Carey was shot dead? If this is true - and what else can it mean - then it is even worse than I originally thought.