The Reed Report
White Violence, Black Protest, and the Militarized Inauguration
The racial arrest disparity between insurrection vs. George Floyd is not shocking and is more par for the racist course
I intended to use this space to be profound about the police response to last week’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol. That won’t happen. As extraordinary as the January 6 insurrection was, the fact that law enforcement responded with disproportionately underwhelming force compared with its response to Black protesters is, well, regular.
Consider:
It’s taken almost two weeks for federal authorities to round up and charge about 100 people in connection with the insurrection. That number will grow, since most of the geniuses who participated whipped out their phones and treated storming the U.S. Capitol like they were making WorldStar videos. Still, most of those charges came after the events on January 6, which means the feds had to spend money tracking these people down, which also means the feds failed to arrest almost anybody while they were all actually at the Capitol begging to be arrested.
CNN’s reporting makes the case starker: D.C. cops arrested 316 people who were protesting George Floyd’s death last June…
