Capitol Police did no special preparation before the Trump/Hawley/Cruz/McCarthy riots

It wasn’t that Capitol Police were inadequately prepared for a putsch, they weren’t prepared at all:

Despite ample warnings about pro-Trump demonstrations in Washington, U.S. Capitol Police did not bolster staffing on Wednesday and made no preparations for the possibility that the planned protests could escalate into massive violent riots, according to several people briefed on law enforcement’s response.

The revelations shed new light on why Capitol Police were so quickly overrun by rioters. The department had the same number of officers in place as on a routine day. While some of those officers were outfitted with equipment for a protest, they were not staffed or equipped for a riot.

Once the mob began to move on the Capitol, a police lieutenant issued an order not to use deadly force, which explains why officers outside the building did not draw their weapons as the crowd closed in. Officers are sometimes ordered against escalating a situation by drawing their weapons if superiors believe doing so could lead to a stampede or a shootout.

In this instance, it also left officers with little ability to resist the mob. In one video from the scene, an officer puts up his fists to try to push back a crowd pinning him and his colleagues against a door. The crowd jeers “You are not American!” and one man tries to prod him with the tip of an American flag.

“They were left naked,” Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California. said of the police in an interview with AP. She had raised security concerns in a Dec. 28 meeting of House Democrats and grilled Steven Sund, the Capitol Police chief, during an hourlong private call on New Year’s Eve. “It turns out it was the worst kind of non-security anybody could ever imagine.”

And it certainly wasn’t because they weren’t warned.

I don’t know to what extent this is simple incompetence and to what extent it’s something worse, but we certainly need an extensive investigation to find out.

Okay so the President incited an attack on Congress and it would've killed a bunch of members except:
* there are some seriously tough and clever capitol police officers
* a Rep happened to know the JCoS Chairman
* an aide knew a guy who used to work with the FBI Deputy Director https://t.co/LZFTgnyQpd pic.twitter.com/TDmO2U98fe— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) January 11, 2021