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>A bunch of idiots roaming the capitol building isn't a threat per se, shameful and sad yes, but not one that should've been met with violent force from a small number of capitol police at the expense of (and risk of not) evacuating the people inside.

Of course, if the mob were leftists or had any significant amount of minorities mixed in, there would have been rivers of blood outside the Capitol.

> And they stated they had two choices, barricade the capitol and prevent entry, or evacuate the people inside.

This seems really strange to me. So the capitol police isn't staffed and doesn’t plan for a situation where they need to do both of these things?

What struck me the most is that the rioters seem like just a few hundred/thousand. Definitely scary but should have been able to be controlled by law enforcement. It wasn’t a million people or a zombie horde.

Their web site [0] says they have 2,300 officers and staff. So even if only half are officers it seems like 1,150 armed, trained capitol police should be able to control a mob of this size.

Certainly rioters trying to stage a coup is a rare event but seems like something that the capitol police should have contingency plans for.

Them saying that they had to choose between evacuating lawmakers and protecting the building seems like they need a lot of help planning.

[0] https://www.uscp.gov/media-center/uscp-fast-facts

Crowd control is very, very tricky. What would these armed police officers do, in your opinion? Shoot everyone? Arguably not. So what other options do they have? Without riot gear, that very difficult, and even with riot gear, the insurgents were partially armed. So yeah, evacuate and wait for superior numbers to show up was the smarter decision once things already did go south. Now follow it up with aggressive prosecution of those i taking selfies in senator offices would be a good thing, too.

"Without riot gear, that very difficult"

Then there would be the question, of why there was no riot gear, when riots or riot-like situation could be expected. And since this was a planned event - and protestors openly planned to storm it - then maybe there should have been some better preparation?

And crowd control is indeed tricky, but it is still standard procedure for police.

You have fences.

You have lines of strong policemen with shields and tonfa.

You have tear gas.

Watercannon.

Beanbag.

Taser.

And ultimately, if rioters are indeed shooting or preparing to do so: there are guns with the police, too.

Many others brought the point: there probably would have been rivers of blood, if the black life matters movement, would have tried to storm the capitol.

I would expect them to have a plan for crowd control. How do other security organizations handle this? I would expect they do have an armory with riot gear and crowd control equipment.

That’s what I mean about odd that they don’t have a plan for this. I live near a top 50 city and the local police has crowd control equipment. Seems like the National capitol police would have some capability for this.

Certainly not shooting everyone.

It seems this is the 17th time that the US uses the military against their own citizens. What is the death count up to now?

Can someone explain why the people trained in handling civilians, ie the police in the capital of the united states, is not enough in order to secure a building?

DC police have 3,800 officers [2] which is quite a few considering Washington DC has a population of 705,000 [3] (the national average is 470 people per officer, while DC has just 185 people per officer) and of course only so many of them can be on shift at a time.

A large protest can have 100,000-500,000 protesters [1]

So even if 95% of protesters are peaceful, a mere 5% inclined towards disorder can easily outnumber the local police. So it's not so crazy they'd need to call backup from somewhere. Why it's so common to deploy the national guard rather than cops from other nearby jurisdictions I don't know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_in_the_United... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Police_Department... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C.

Washington, D.C. is very much a commuter and tourist town. Its population might be 705k, but the average number of people in the city on a given day is much higher. Tons of people who work in D.C. live in Virginia and Maryland and commute. I don't think I need to really get into why its kind of a major tourist destination. It does not surprise me they have a much higher people per officer than the average town.

True - what I'm trying to say is: Although DC cops can easily be outnumbered by protesters, in pure numbers DC isn't under-staffed by national standards.

Even the most self-sufficient of cities would find their cops outnumbered in such a situation.

It's not that they couldn't secure the capitol, it's because they didn't want to and are sympathetic to the rioters. The same way us devs look at requirements we know how to do but don't want to and instead say:

"Nope, can't do that, not enough timeslices on mutex semaphore of a monadic type for me to transpile that functionality of changing the color of the background"

Ok, that is very active from Trump, if the reports are true. And if not, well he still is the military leader. That surely influences forces moral on how to act.

But was this not known?

The FBI could not bring more people in?

But yes, could also very well explained by, "they would not really dare it" preparation.