When a gang of President Trump supporters broke into the Capitol on Wednesday, they faced a much smaller police presence – and far fewer rioters ended up in custody by the end of the day.
The big difference in arrests came as more DC agents were injured in the chaos in the Capitol, killing five people, including a police officer.
Even including 14 additional people arrested by the US Capitol Police, a separate agency, the number of people who both agencies arrested amid Wednesday’s uproar was less than a quarter of those detained by city officials alone on June 1 .
Activists in DC said they were shocked that a deadly attack on the heart of American democracy left far fewer people in police custody than the skirmishes that broke out during protests over law enforcement cruelty.
“It is so, so insulting to racial justice activists who have drawn attention to black lives that have been lost,” said Anthony Lorenzo Green, one of the activists who leads the Black Lives Matter DC group. “The way they chose to secure the Capitol was to let everyone go – they let these people out again.”
If Black Lives Matter protesters had tried to enter the Capitol in lieu of the predominantly white pro-Trump crowd, Green said, “we would be chained, we would be carried away, we would be shot, we would be dead.”
Fewer arrests, more officer injuries
Not a single law enforcement officer died in DC in response to the summer protests and riots.
Of course, the protests during the summer and the Capitol uprising this week were very different events – for example, there were probably many more protesters spread across a larger part of the city last summer than on Wednesday.
Kristen Metzger, an MPD spokeswoman, said the department did not make more arrests on Wednesday, in part because, unlike during the summer protests, the city’s curfew was not announced prior to the incident.
“If we announce (a curfew) in advance, we’ll have enough resources to get people on the vans and we’re ready to make mass arrests,” Metzger told CNN. “Because this happened so late in the day, we were not ready to make such mass arrests until the curfew was imposed later that afternoon.”
Metzger also noted that the US Capitol is the jurisdiction of the US Capitol Police and that the district police were not asked for help until after protesters breached the security of the building.
“At the time, it was just controlling the situation and getting them out of the Capitol,” she said.
“We are a city that is constantly experiencing mass demonstrations,” Hopkins said. “When a law enforcement agency in this city says they were caught flat-footed or that they didn’t know what was coming, it’s just unbelievably false.”
More arrests are likely to take place in connection with the entry into the Capitol. Michael Sherwin, the acting US Attorney for DC, said on Thursday that federal officials plan to review social media images of the bedlam and arrest people they identify. Federal prosecutors have already charged 15 people, Sherwin said.
Capitol protesters are facing less harsh accusations
In any case, so far, there have also been notable differences in the severity of the charges faced by Capitol detainees and those arrested during the summer protests.
Most of the people arrested on Wednesday were detained for curfew violations or illegal boarding charges. DC police arrested just one person on a charge they specifically identified as a felony: a 39-year-old man charged with rioting and unlawful entry into the Capitol. His arrest does not necessarily represent all crime arrests made on Wednesday, as DC police have not always included this information in their records. It’s possible that more people will face criminal charges as prosecutors continue their cases.
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office did not respond to requests for comment about the inequality in arrests and the charges. Bowser has criticized the federal response to the uprising, noting at a press conference on Wednesday that “we saw a different attitude” by federal officials compared to the heavily militarized response to the summer protests.
President-elect Joe Biden focused on the racial inequalities on Thursday, saying, “No one can tell me if that had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently from the mob of criminals who stormed the Capitol. “
The data released by police also shows that the people arrested during the Black Lives Matter protests were more local than the detainees this week, most of whom came to the capital from all over the country.
Among those whose state of residence was available, police data showed that 94% of those arrested between the end of May and August were from DC, Maryland or Virginia. Only 25% of those arrested on Wednesday or Thursday morning came from the same region.
Hopkins, the ACLU executive, said the inequality between the treatment of “white supremacists coming to our town” and black protesters was a textbook example of the differences in police work.
The events show that police reformers need to pay attention to “not only what the police do,” she said, but also “when officers choose to do something and when they choose not to do anything.”