When a mob of President Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, they were confronted with far fewer police presence – and by the end of the day, far fewer of the rioters had ended in custody.
Despite the sharp disparity in arrests, more DC officers were injured during the Capitol Mayhem, killing five people, including a police officer.
The number of people arrested by both agencies during Wednesday’s riots was less than a quarter of those detained by city officials on June 1, including 14 additional people arrested by different agencies, including the U.S. Capitol Police.
DC activists said they were shocked that there were far fewer people in police custody than the clashes that erupted during protests over the brutality of law enforcement due to a deadly attack on the heart of American democracy.
Anthony Lorenzo Green, an activist who led the Black Lives Matter DC group, said it was so insulting to racial justice activists that it drew the attention of those who lost their black lives. “The way they chose to keep the Capitol safe was to let everyone go – they let these people go back to our streets.”
If opponents of Black Lives Matter had tried to enter the capital instead of the pro-White-Trump mob, Leela said, “We will be shaken, we will be taken away, we will be shot, we will die.”
Less arrests, more officer injuries
No law enforcement officers were killed in DC in response to protests and riots during the summer.
Of course, the protests during the summer and the Capitol uprising this week were very different events – for example, there were many more protests in a wide area of the city than there were on Wednesday last summer.
Kristen Metzger, an MPD spokeswoman, said the department did not make further arrests in part on Wednesday because the city curfew incident during the summer protests had not been announced in advance.
“When we announce (curfew) in advance, we have enough resources to get people into the van and we are ready for a mass arrest,” Metzger told CNN. Metzger told CNN. “Since it was so late in the day, we were not prepared to make such a mass arrest until the curfew was imposed later in the afternoon.”
Metzger also noted that Capitol is a U.S. The Capitol police have jurisdiction and the district police were called in for help only after the protesters breached the security of the building.
“At the time, he was just controlling the situation and driving them out of the capital building,” he said.
“We’re a city that deals with mass performances all the time,” Hopkins said. “It’s just incredibly wrong for any law enforcement agency in this city to say they’ve been caught on flat feet or they didn’t know what was coming.”
Additional arrests will likely be made in connection with the infiltration of the Capitol. Michael Sherwin, the acting U.S. attorney for DC, said Thursday that federal officials plan to review social media footage from Bedlam and arrest people who do not recognize them. Federal prosecutors have already indicted 15 people, Sherwin said.
Capitol opponents facing less harsh charges
So far, at least, there has been a significant disparity in the seriousness of the charges against Capitol arrestees and those arrested during the summer protests.
Most of those arrested Wednesday were charged with violating a misdemeanor curfew or unlawful entry. DC police arrested only one person, whom they specifically list as a crime: a 39-year-old man charged with rioting and illegal entry into the Capitol. His arrest does not represent all the criminal arrests made Wednesday, as DC police have not always included this information in his data. It is possible that more people may face serious offenses as lawyers proceed with their cases.
Requests for comment on the disparity of arrests and the allegations were not answered by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office. Bawser criticized the federal response to the uprising, noting at a press conference on Wednesday that “we saw it being used in a different way” by federal officials than the military response to the summer protests.
President-elect Joe Biden said in a speech Thursday focusing on racial inequality, “No one can tell me that if it were a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they would not have been treated very differently from the mob. The lying thugs. “
Figures released by the police department also show that those arrested during the Black Lives Matter protests were more local than those arrested this week, most of whom came to the capital from other parts of the country.
Among those arrested whose state of residence was available, police data show that 94% of those arrested in May and late August are from DC, Maryland or Virginia. Only 25% of those arrested on Wednesday or early Thursday morning were from the same region.
Hopkins, an ACLU executive, said the disparity between the treatment of “white supremacists coming to our city” and the treatment of black protesters was a textbook of inequalities in policing.
These incidents show that police reformers should pay attention not only to “what the police do,” but also to “when officers choose to do something and when they don’t.”
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