BY AYMANN ISMAIL
APRIL 15, 2021

When I walked toward the Capitol on Jan. 6 alongside Donald Trump’s supporters and heard some of them had breached the building ahead, I expected the situation to escalate sharply. I expected police in military gear and a response as aggressive as I’ve come to anticipate covering and observing protests over the past year, where a single water bottle thrown at a cop line can bring a volley of tear gas and percussion grenades in retaliation.

Instead, I easily walked into the Capitol perimeter. At the entrances to the building, there were a few Capitol Police officers helplessly trying to hold a line at the doors, but they were vastly outnumbered. The officers had somehow gotten the doors back closed, but within minutes, rioters were easily pushing past them again. Once I was inside, too, I saw no officers at all for a stretch, as rioters plundered and destroyed furniture. When I did, it was even more surreal: They looked as if they were there loitering themselves. Some were equipped with riot gear, others not, but most just stood there and watched. Some rioters stopped to ask them for directions. In one of the only direct interactions I saw, a Capitol officer asked a rioter to put out a cigarette, then walked away.

I’d never seen law enforcement show this level of restraint at any protest, much less a riot. And now we know why. A damning new report by the Capitol Police’s own inspector general, Michael A. Bolton, presented at a Capitol Hill hearing today, portrays a police force that recklessly disregarded intelligence and hobbled its own response at every turn.

With around 140 officers injured and one dead, there was some passing of the buck in the immediate aftermath of the riot. Republicans were in denial. The former Capitol Police chief, Steven Sund, resigned almost immediately. He wrote in a letter, “Perfect hindsight does not change the fact that nothing in our collective experience or our intelligence—Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and D.C. Metropolitan Police (MPD)—indicated that a well-coordinated, armed assault on the Capitol might occur on Jan. 6.” Sund repeated this assertion in testimony in front of a U.S. Senate committee just weeks ago: “None of the intelligence we received predicted what actually occurred,” he said.