WASHINGTON (AP) – Three days before supporters of President Donald Trump revolted at the Capitol, the Pentagon asked police at the U.S. Capitol if he needed labor from the National Guard. And as the crowd descended on the building On Wednesday, Justice Department leaders contacted to offer FBI agents. Police rejected them both times, according to senior defense officials and two people familiar with the matter.
Despite many warnings about a possible insurgency and ample resources and time to prepare, Capitol police were only planning a demonstration of free speech.
Still emerging from the uproar over law enforcement’s violent response to last June’s protests near the White House, officials also intended to avoid any appearance that the federal government was deploying service troops. active or the National Guard against the Americans.
The result is that the U.S. Capitol overflowed on Wednesday and police agency officers with a large operating budget and experience in high-security events protecting lawmakers were overwhelmed for the world to see them. Four protesters were killed, including a shot inside the building. A Capitol police officer died Thursday after being wounded in a melee on Wednesday.
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Riots and loss of control have raised serious questions about security at the Capitol for future events. The day’s actions also raise troubling concerns about the treatment primarily of white Trump supporters, who were allowed to roam the building for hours, while black and brown protesters demonstrated last year for police brutality. they faced more robust and aggressive policing.
“This was a failure of the imagination, a failure of leadership,” said Art Acevedo, Houston police chief, whose department responded to several major protests last year after George Floyd’s death. “Capitol police need to do better and I don’t see how we can prevent it.”
Acevedo said he has attended events on Capitol grounds to honor murdered police officers who had higher fences and a stronger security presence than what he saw on video on Wednesday.
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said as the riots were underway, it became apparent that Capitol Police were being invaded. But he said no contingency planning was done in advance of what the forces could do in the event of a problem in the Capitol, because the help of the Department of Defense was turned down. “They have to ask us, the request has to come to us,” McCarthy said.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, under pressure from Schumer, Pelosi and other congressional leaders, was forced to resign. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for and received the immediate resignation of Senate Arms Sergeant Michael Stenger. Paul Irving, the longtime Sergeant in Arms of the House, also resigned.
“There was a leadership failure at the top,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.
The U.S. Capitol had been closed to the public since March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has now killed more than 360,000 people in the U.S. But normally, the building is open to the public and lawmakers are proud of its availability for its components.
It is unclear how many officers were on guard Wednesday, but the complex is controlled by a total of 2,300 officers on 16 acres of land protecting the 435 House representatives, 100 U.S. senators and their staff. In comparison, the city of Minneapolis has about 840 uniformed officers guarding a population of 425,000 in an area of 6,000 acres.
There were signs for weeks that violence could strike on Jan. 6, when Congress convened a joint session to finish counting the Electoral College votes that would confirm Democrat Joe Biden had won the presidential election.
Plans were being drawn up on far-right message boards and pro-Trump circles.
The leader of far-right group Proud Boys was arrested entering the country’s capital this week accused of weapons for carrying empty high-capacity magazines with his logo. He admitted to police that he had made statements about the riots in Washington, local officials said.
Both Acevedo and Ed Davis, a former Boston police commissioner who led the department during the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, said they were not to blame for the clearly outdated responses from front-line officers, but for planning and leadership before the revolt.
“There was a structural feeling that well, this is a group of conservatives, who won’t do anything like that? Very possibly,” Davis said. “This is where the racial component comes into play. Was there a lack of urgency or the feeling that this could never happen to this crowd? Is this possible? Absolutely. ”
Trump and his allies were perhaps the biggest megaphones, encouraging protesters to come out strongly and support their false claim that the election had been stolen from them. He drove them during a rally shortly before they marched on the Capitol and revolted. His personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a former New York mayor known for his tough stance against crime, called for a “combat trial.”
McCarthy said law enforcement intelligence estimates of the potential size of people in the run-up to the protests “were general,” from a low of 2,000 to 80,000.
Therefore, the Capitol police had not established any hard perimeter around the Capitol. Officials were focused on a side where lawmakers came in to vote to certify Biden’s victory.
Barricades were set up in the square in front of the building, but police withdrew from the line and a crowd of people burst in. Lawmakers, initially unaware of the security breach, continued their debate. After a while they crouched under the chairs. Eventually, they were escorted out of the House and Senate. Journalists were left alone in the rooms for hours as crowds tried to break into barricaded rooms.
Sund, the Capitol police chief, said he expected a display of “first amendments” which, in turn, turned into a “violent attack”. But Gus Papathanasiou, head of the Capitol Police Union, said planning failures left officers exposed with no backups or equipment against rioters.
“We were lucky that many of those who violated the Capitol had no firearms or explosives and no more malicious intent,” Papathanasiou said in a statement. “As tragic as the results of the attack may be, we are fortunate that the death toll has not been higher.”
The Justice Department, the FBI and other agencies began monitoring hotels, flights and social media for weeks and were expecting large crowds. Mayor Muriel Bowser had warned of the impending violence for weeks and business had closed in advance. On December 31, he called for help from the National Guard at the Pentagon, but Capitol police turned down the Department of Defense’s Jan. 3 offer, according to Kenneth Rapuano, deputy secretary of national security defense.
“We asked more than once and the last return we got on Sunday the 3rd was that they didn’t ask DOD for help,” he said.
According to the two people familiar with the matter, Capitol police rejected the Justice Department’s offer to support the FBI as the protesters were violent. They were not allowed to publicly discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.
By then it was too late.
Officers from the Metropolitan Police Department descended. They were called agents from almost every Justice Department agency, including the FBI. So did the Secret Service and the Federal Protection Service. The Office of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sent two tactical teams. Police as far away as New Jersey came to help.
It took four hours to expel the protesters from the Capitol complex. They had then toured the halls of Congress, posed for pictures in the consecrated chambers, broken down doors, destroyed property, and taken pictures of themselves doing so. Only 13 were arrested at that time; a few scores were arrested later.
Then a 7-foot fence will climb around the Capitol precinct for at least 30 days. Capitol police will conduct a review of the killing, as well as its planning and policies. Lawmakers plan to investigate how authorities handled the riots.
U.S. District Attorney in the District of Columbia, Michael Sherwin, said the failure to arrest more people is hampering his work.
“Look, now we have to review cell site orders, collect video images to try to identify people and then upload them, and then try to execute their arrest. So this has made things challenging, but I can’t answer why these people weren’t zipped when they left the building by the Capitol police. “
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Associated Press writers Ben Fox, Mary Clare Jalonick, Andrew Taylor and Ashraf Khalil contributed to this report.