Re:The account of realDonaldTrump will be locked for 12 hours
by vel0city on Thursday January 07, 2021 @10:45AM
(#25672277)
Washington, D.C. is very much a commuter and tourist town. Its population might be 705k, but the average number of people in the city on a given day is much higher. Tons of people who work in D.C. live in Virginia and Maryland and commute. I don't think I need to really get into why its kind of a major tourist destination. It does not surprise me they have a much higher people per officer than the average town.
Re:The account of realDonaldTrump will be locked for 12 hours
by michaelt on Thursday January 07, 2021 @11:15AM
(#25672776)
True - what I'm trying to say is: Although DC cops can easily be outnumbered by protesters, in pure numbers DC isn't under-staffed by national standards.
Even the most self-sufficient of cities would find their cops outnumbered in such a situation.
A large protest can have 100,000-500,000 protesters [1]
So even if 95% of protesters are peaceful, a mere 5% inclined towards disorder can easily outnumber the local police. So it's not so crazy they'd need to call backup from somewhere. Why it's so common to deploy the national guard rather than cops from other nearby jurisdictions I don't know.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_in_the_United... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Police_Department... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C.