What if DC rioters were Black, SC Rep asks. USC, law experts speak on police response
The gallery where Sen. Lindsey Graham spoke for a Thursday news conference above the U.S. Senate Chamber had been evacuated the day before.
A mob refusing to recognized Joe Biden’s lawful victory as president had breached the U.S. Capitol, forcing the evacuation.
“And the question for the country is, ‘How could that happen?’” Graham said.
Many questions are being asked about the police preparation and response to the powder keg that exploded in Washington D.C. on Wednesday. It took several hours for reinforcements to arrive to beef up a badly outnumbered U.S. Capitol police presence.
The Capitol Police chief resigned Thursday in wake of what Sen. Mitch McConnell called “a massive failure of institutions, protocols and planning that are supposed to protect the first branch of our federal government,” the New York Times reported. Both the U.S. House and Senate sergeants-at-arms also resigned.
Five people died as a result of the event, according to reports, including an officer who the mob assaulted and a woman who was shot by police inside the Capitol. Three other people died from medical emergencies.
Police have arrested at least 82 people since the riot as of Friday morning, the L.A. Times reported.
Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., made it clear why he thought Capitol Police’s response was weak: “There are racial connotations to this, and we all know it.”
On Friday, Clyburn, told a group of more than 20 reporters in a virtual press conference that a racial component to Wednesday’s security failures and saving members of Congress from “a group of thugs” cannot be ignored.
“There were plenty of signs that there was going to be trouble at the Capitol, and security needed to be enhanced,” said Clyburn, the U.S. House’s third ranking member.
“They enhanced it (security) for peaceful Black demonstrators,” Clyburn said. “But (on Wednesday) they had nothing to ward off unlawful thugs who happened to be white.”
Nearly all the rioters appear to be white in video and photographs that were taken.
Now, federal lawmakers and the public are asking how law enforcement should begin the criminal cases for those who stormed the halls of the Senate and House of Representatives.
At his Thursday news conference, Graham called for a joint task force to “spend all the time and money necessary” to identify the people who breached the Capitol.
“The people sitting in (lawmakers’) chairs need to be sitting in a jail cell,” Graham continued. “The people who attacked Capitol police need to be charged.”
‘That does not reflect well’
Seth Stoughton, a University of South Carolina law professor and nationally recognized expert on policing, said he’s still unclear how exactly a mob breached the Capitol and what plans the police force tasked with guarding the building had in place.
“I don’t have a sense of what Capitol police’s operational security plans were,” he said.
But one thing is clear: Police responded differently to the right-wing crowd in D.C. than they did to the left-leaning racial justice protests held this past summer.
“That does not reflect well on the United States’ society,” Stoughton said.
Over the summer, tear gas choked people and impact ammunition, like rubber bullets, all fired by police, maimed protesters speaking out against police killings of Black people, though some agencies across the country reacted more collaboratively and less aggressively, Stoughton pointed out. The police response to Wednesday’s rally to usurp Joe Biden’s election in Washington did not rise anywhere close to the scope of force used against racial justice protesters.
Right now, more questions than answers exist, but race was certainly one factor in the police response to the Capitol siege, Stoughton said. Skin color wasn’t the only factor, though.
Stoughton questions what kind of intelligence gathering was done on the Trump-supporting groups prior to Wednesday versus left-leaning groups this past summer. Was there a difference between the extent of the efforts?
A lack of intelligence gathering on right-wing groups compared to leftist may point to racial biase, but it also may simply be that Capitol police and other agencies just weren’t prepared for the riot in D.C., Stoughton said.
It’s also possible, Stoughton said, that agencies didn’t want to face the same backlash for aggressive tactics that they felt from the summer protests. So perhaps police softened their tactics as Trump supporters gathered around the Capitol, “and that backfired,” Stoughton said.
But racial and political biases can’t be discounted.
Somewhere in the police agencies’ chain of command, a leader may have said, “We’re not going to treat these folks like this,” Stoughton said, noting that President Trump’s own words back up that kind of thinking.
Stoughton is cautious to compare what happened in D.C. to the summer’s protest one-to-one. There were many protests over the summer, and many different police responses. There was only one Capitol siege. How police would respond to another mob attack in D.C. is yet to be seen.
But looking at police’s relatively gentle response to other right-wing events — such as protests against orders related to the coronavirus and other pro-Trump rallies — compared to racial justice protests, the picture becomes a bit clearer.
“The short answer: Is there a difference? Yeah, there’s a difference,” Stoughton said.
Graham has given Capitol police less benefit of the doubt about the agency’s efforts.
Had the law enforcement in charge of defending the nation’s seat of power been in the military, they would have been court-martialed for their failure, he said at his news conference.
What do a sheriff and former prosecutor think?
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott predicted Thursday that even more people eventually will be arrested for breaching and ransacking the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday. Rioters broke windows, chased outnumbered law officers and ravaged offices as lawmakers, staff and journalists fled the House and Senate chambers.
Lott based his thoughts on his own experience of arresting numerous people during and after violent disturbances in downtown Columbia on May 30 and for days after, following a peaceful racial justice protest at the S.C. State House.
“What they are going to do in D.C. is no different from what we did here with our rioters,” Lott said. “They will be looking at all the cameras. The people who did this need to be held accountable.”
A dozen or so initial arrests were made on May 30, and investigators used video images from city surveillance cameras and other sources to identify and track down alleged rioters over days and weeks to come, Lott said.
Eventually, approximately 100 people were arrested as a result of the Columbia May 30 events, he said.
Lott declined to criticize the U.S. Capitol Police, who apparently failed to have on hand what is known as a rapid response team of highly trained police equipped with riot gear who could have taken immediate action to stop intruders from entering the Capitol.
Only after several hours did hundreds of reinforcements arrive at the Capitol in the form of District of Columbia National Guard troops and police from neighboring Virginia and Maryland.
S.C. state Sen. Dick Harpootlian, D-Richland, a former state prosecutor and defense lawyer, said rioters at the Capitol could be charged with sedition, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
Several dozen people already have been charged with crimes. Most were charged with violating D.C.’s 6 p.m. curfew or unlawful entry of the Capitol. More than two dozen so far are accused of unlawfully possessing weapons and guns, assaulting officers, rioting, resisting arrest or defacing property.
Harpootlian believes many of the participants should be charged with more.
Sedition, also called “seditious conspiracy,” is defined as preventing or hindering or stopping any official duties or acts of federal officials — or “seize, take or possess any property of the United States,” Harpootlian said. “That was when they actually broke into the Capitol and took possession of it.”
Basically, Harpootlian said, the mob closed Congress down, and that is sedition. Images of the lawbreakers were likely caught on many videos.
“This is not a big reach to indict and prosecute hundreds of people,” he said.
Graham said on Thursday that “sedition may be a charge for some of these people.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Metropolitan Police and the FBI posted photos of many of Wednesday’s intruders at the U.S. Capitol online, seeking the public’s help in identifying perpetrators. On social media, tips appeared to be rolling in.
Tips, photos and video “depicting rioting or violence in and around the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6” can be submitted to the FBI on its website.
Reporter Joe Bustos contributed to this story.
This story was originally published January 8, 2021 at 1:18 PM.