In The Jan 6 Killing Of Ashli Babbitt, A Double-Standard On Cop Misconduct
Public opinion on wrongful use of deadly force warped by animus against the victim
Contrary to exaggerated, partisan rhetoric that frames the Jan 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot as a “deadly insurrection,” the truth is that only one homicide occurred that day. The victim, an unarmed Trump supporter, was shot and killed by a police officer with a history of irresponsible handling of firearms, who opted against a nonlethal response to an act of trespassing, and who fired his weapon in the absence of any imminent threat of death or serious injury to himself or others in his vicinity.
US Capitol Police (USCP) Lieutenant Michael Byrd’s killing of Ashli Babbitt came just six months after George Floyd’s death under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, an incident that sparked outrage, widespread calls for police reform, and nationwide rioting. In the case of Babbitt’s killing, however, the collective reaction from the American left and major media at best amounted to an indifferent shrug. Worse, many reflexively heralded Byrd as a hero and viewed Babbitt as a deserving recipient of the bullet that perforated her trachea and lung.
The contrast illustrates how partisan framing short-circuits people’s ability to uniformly and objectively apply principles to the facts before them. Put another way, an intellectually honest person can reject Babbitt’s politics, condemn her unlawful conduct on Jan. 6 and rightly conclude that she was the victim of an unjustified police shooting.
In 2021, the Department of Justice announced it had completed an investigation of the shooting and found “insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.” The DOJ did not, however, assert that Byrd’s use of deadly force was warranted. Last year, Babbitt’s husband filed a civil suit against the federal government, seeking $30 million in damages; the trial is slated to commence in July 2026.
Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego who operated a pool business with her husband, attended the “Save America” rally in Washington on Jan. 6 before joining others who proceeded to the Capitol grounds. After things escalated and rioters breached the Capitol building, she entered it, and a female police officer reportedly instructed her to walk toward the House side of the complex.
Here’s how the DOJ described what happened next; I’ve bolded three words I’ll address shortly:
Ms. Babbitt was among a mob of people that…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 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.
Though it’s not narrowly relevant to Byrd’s decision to pull the trigger, the DOJ’s passive-tense claim that the three officers on Babbitt’s side of the doors “were forced to evacuate” is important because it indicates an extreme inclination to put the best spin possible on officers’ decisions. Video shows those three officers failing to make any meaningful effort to stop those who were hammering the glass doors. After enduring mounting verbal abuse and violations of their personal space, they simply walked away from the doors, clearing the way for the rioters to remove the glass from a side window and for Babbitt to proceed through the opening.
According to the 32-page complaint filed in the civil suit, one of those three officers later told investigators, “I grapple with this, you know, if I should’ve stayed.” More pointedly, one of the members of the Containment and Emergency Response Team (CERT) who ascended the stairs from behind the mob told investigators, “I was thinking why, why the fuck did they leave?”
Some of the most damning information in the civil complaint comes from Byrd’s own mouth. In a 2021 NBC interview conducted by an excessively sympathetic Lester Holt, Byrd said:
“I could not see exactly what was happening [on the other side of] the door…it’s impossible for me to see what’s on the other side because we had created such a barricade — it was high enough that the visibility was impossible.”
“[Babbitt’s] failure to comply required me to take the appropriate action to save the lives of members of Congress and myself and my fellow officers.”
“It was later [that] I found out that the subject did not have a weapon, but there was no way to know that at that time, and I could not fully see her hands or what was in the backpack or what the intentions [were].”
“Of course we had our weapons drawn as part of our training. You had [false reports of] shots fired onto the House floor, you’re trained to take a tactical defensive position and prepare for the threat.”
There are many unsettling things about Byrd’s statements, chief among them his admission that he saw no weapon in Babbitt’s hands, and had “no way to know” if she was armed or what her intentions were.
“Without additional information indicating that a person is likely armed, officers cannot conclude that someone has a weapon just because they cannot see definitively that the person does not have a weapon,” wrote Geoffrey Alpert, Jeff Noble, Seth Stoughton at Lawfare.
Among other incriminating elements of Byrd’s NBC interview:
Byrd asserts that Babbitt’s mere failure to comply with orders not to proceed through the door justified the use of lethal force.
He implies that (false) reports of shots fired somewhere else in the Capitol gave him a green light to start shooting noncompliant people in his vicinity; in other words, he seems to have made a blanket assessment that every trespasser in the building posed an imminent danger justifying deadly force.
“Officers cannot rely on generalized assumptions. They must base their conclusions on specific and individualized facts,” the Lawfare authors note.
Unsatisfied with merely defending his killing of Babbitt, Byrd used the NBC interview to declare himself as a hero, telling Holt, “I showed the utmost courage on January 6…I know that day I saved countless lives.” That latter boast is truly extraordinary, especially considering it was made with the benefit of hindsight. It would be one thing for Byrd to try attributing his deadly decision to a reliance on bad information amid the chaos of Jan. 6; it’s another to lionize himself with a baseless claim of rioters’ murderous intent.
Under USCP policy, lethal force is only authorized when “the officer perceives that the subject poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.” As Babbitt rose to awkwardly enter through the open window — where she would next have to awkwardly navigate a furniture barricade on the other side — there was no indication that she had the ability to seriously injure or kill anyone.
As seen in video of the shooting, Byrd’s positioning was problematic; the civil complaint characterizes it as an “ambush.” From the perspective of the rioters, Byrd was positioned on the far left, at an angle some 160 degrees from Babbitt, who was on the right side of the doors. Before stepping forward and killing Babbitt, Byrd was tucked inside another doorway, with only his pistol extending past the opening.
It’s very unlikely Babbitt saw his raised pistol and knew she was being threatened with death if she went through the window. Indeed, one of those three officers who inexplicably abandoned the doorway on Babbitt’s side told investigators, “I saw him . . . there was no way that woman would’ve seen that.”
What’s more, Byrd told Holt that he repeatedly screamed “get back..stop…get back…no,” but made no claim that he verbally warned Babbitt that she was on the verge of being shot.
By all indications, Babbitt’s unarmed ascent to the window was a circumstance that called for the use of nonlethal force. That could have taken many forms — a firm shove back through the window, yanking her forward to the floor, or perhaps using pepper spray or a taser. While not clear how the various officers were equipped, note that police aren’t justified in resorting to deadly force just because it’s all they have available. It’s telling that, among multiple armed officers on that side of the doorway, Byrd was the only one who opened fire.
The civil complaint also credibly accuses Byrd of failing to handle his firearm in accordance with USCP policy, saying he:
Unholstered it before any imminent threat had emerged to justify doing so
Failed to hold his pistol at a “low ready” position and instead pointed it at people who posed no imminent threat
Put his finger inside the pistol’s trigger guard, “tapping it on and off the trigger for at least 14 seconds before he shot and killed Ashli.” Across law enforcement, the military and in civilian self-defense, it’s a universally-embraced principle that one’s finger shouldn’t be put inside the trigger guard until a decision to fire has been made.
After shooting Babbitt, Byrd took to his radio, his voice filled with panic — and a self-serving falsehood. “We got shots fired in the lobby. We got shots, shots fired in the lobby of the House chamber. Shots are being fired at us and we’re sh… uhh, prepared to fire back at them,” he said, seemingly so desperate to justify his action that he falsely reported coming under fire himself.
In the aftermath of incidents involving excessive use of force, we often find the officer in question has a blemished service record. That’s the case with Byrd, whose checkered past includes irresponsible handling of firearms.
In 2019, Byrd was suspended for 33 days after he left his loaded weapon in a Capitol Visitor Center complex bathroom for nearly an hour; it was discovered by another officer.
Even more concerning was a 2004 off-duty incident. Byrd fired his service weapon at a stolen car fleeing his neighborhood — hitting it from behind. Investigators said Byrd’s claim that he fired at the car in self-defense as the driver attempted to hit him was “inaccurate.”
They also determined that Byrd put his innocent neighbor in the line of fire as he pulled the trigger. Stray rounds hit nearby homes, according to the Babbitt civil complaint. Foreshadowing Byrd’s decision-making on Jan. 6, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) concluded he’d fired in a “careless and imprudent manner.” That finding was overruled, however, via an appeal to the Disciplinary Review Board.
In another off-duty incident, Byrd was given a seven-day suspension without pay in 2015 after accosting a police officer providing security at a high school football game, showering him with profanities and reportedly calling him “a piece of shit, asshole and racist” who was only concerned with policing the “black side” of the football field.
Further underscoring the double-standards at play in the Babbitt case, imagine the response from the left if there were a controversial shooting in which a white male police officer had demonstrated a similar, racially-charged loss of composure years before killing an unarmed black female trespasser.
“The ironies of Babbitt's death abound—and not just because in this case the cop with the quick trigger finger was black and his victim was a white woman,” wrote Jonathan Tobin. “Both those who are supporting Byrd and those who consider the pass he got from his superiors an injustice have probably been on the opposite side of similar controversies in the past year. Some of those who think Babbitt was the victim of a police murder have defended officers accused of killing unarmed black persons. And many who are lauding Byrd as a defender of democracy were outraged by the same killings.”
Whether inspired by sheer compassion or “Don’t Tread On Me” patriotism, Americans of all political orientations should be alert to excessive police force and quick to condemn it, whether or not that force is used on or by people they’re prone to sympathize with.
The racial double standard in this case is incredible! If the racial roles were reversed, it would’ve been a whole different story! If a White cop shot and killed an unarmed Black female, regardless of the circumstances, it would be thoroughly condemned, it would never be justified, and we’d never hear the end of it!
Excellent synopsis. The government hid the identity of Michael Byrd for weeks. Speaks volumes.