You’ve doubtless seen it asserted in comments or at right wing media sites that Jan. 6th doesn’t really matter because “BLM was much worse.” Really? In what way?
I decided to track down some numbers. No, BLM was not worse. Not by orders of magnitude.
First off, we need to know how many people took part if we want to compare proportions. Jan. 6th was a single event; the BLM demonstrations took place at hundreds if not thousands of places and scores of days. The estimate of ~6,000 people at the Capitol assault comes from Faces of the Riot. The 70 T of Parler data included over 300 videos from that day. Open source software was used to detect faces and other software was used to remove duplicates. 6,000 is too high in so far as it also includes police and journalists; it is too low because it leaves out people not captured on film or faces too poorly imaged to be captured by the software. It is certainly right within an order of magnitude, and probably within a factor of two to three. The source for the BLM participants can be seen if you scroll inside the table toward the right. Any estimate is going to be soft, but this sounds right within an order of magnitude. Taken together, this means that a thousand times more people took part in BLM protests than in the Capitol assault, and any comparison of better or worse needs to use that as a scaling factor.
Five people died in the Capitol insurrection. The exact number of deaths associated with BLM protests is a little soft (19-25), but if it were proportionate, there would have been thousands. There were not.
140 police were injured on Jan. 6th. The number given here for BLM, ~2000, comes from a police journal and is too high because it doesn’t disambiguate injuries in demonstrations versus peripheral riots and looting. If police injuries in BLM protests had been comparable, we would have seen hundreds of thousands. Yet even this police-friendly source acknowledges that 93% of BLM protests were peaceful!
A police officer died in the Jan. 6th attempted coup. There are no police deaths that can be traced to BLM. This surprised me as well, but the Snopes link is extensive and sourced. I am happy to revise this if folks have other evidence. In any case, not hundreds or thousands!
The biggest difference of all, of course, is in their purposes. The BLM demonstrations were working to gain justice in policing and to fight against systemic racism. The Jan. 6th insurrection attempted to overthrow a legitimate election and to retain in office a man who had been decisively rejected by millions of Americans.
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Jan 6
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BLM
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Jan 6 sources
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BLM sources
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How many people took part?
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~6,000
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15-25,000,000
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https://facesoftheriot.com/
(See comment in text)
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8488409/BLM-protests-largest-U-S-history-26MILLION-Americans-attended.html
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How many people died?
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5
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19-25
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multiple
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-killed-protests-political-unrest-acled
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How many police were injured?
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140
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~2000
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/police-union-says-140-officers-injured-in-capitol-riot/2021/01/27/60743642-60e2-11eb-9430-e7c77b5b0297_story.html
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https://www.policemag.com/585160/more-than-2-000-officers-injured-in-summers-protests-and-riots
(See comment)
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How many police died?
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1 (two later committed suicide)
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0
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multiple
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https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/06/09/cops-killed-george-floyd-protests/
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Purpose?
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To overthrow an election and retain Donald Trump in office
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To obtain fairer police enforcement and address systemic racism
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