Mostly amazed that law enforcement was utterly unprepared for this. It's shocking.
Capitol Police are agents of U.S. Congress (the only federal law enforcement agency under
legislative branch instead of executive control)...so that is explainable by the 100+ insurrectionist Congresscritters spread between both chambers being able to install sympathetic leadership in the CapPo who'd make sure the front-line officers assigned were inadequate and fold like a chair in exactly this situation. I mean...the crowd wasn't very large at all compared to the pathetic porousness of the security on-duty today. Everyone keeps citing the show of CapPo force during the BLM protests this summer, and keeps re-tweeting the pics of those officers posting smiling selfies with the insurrectionists inside. But that's sort of political theatre beside the point. Their
S.O.P. is usually strong enough that there wouldn't even be a hint of barriers being toppled under the size of today's protest...let alone people actually making it into Members' offices to deface property. Look how many officers at the barrier weren't even wearing regulated headgear. 5 feet from a maskless crowd frontline either armed-to-the-teeth with open-carry weaponry or possessing all manner of nuisance projectiles...and there's officers not even wearing
caps regulated by the uni, let alone not even the helmets mandated for the situation or the face shields that--if for no other reason than hygiene--serves as the best PPE compliance for crowd management of the COVID superspreader petri dish in front of them. Lapsing on shit like that will get you perma-banished to desk duty at Mayberry PD...but CapPo rolls out that weakest-possible sauce
today of all times?!?
I don't think so. Chief, Asst. Chief, and whatever Deputies were assigned to running today's security farce are going to get grilled on their political obsequiousness...and who arm-twisted them with whispers and/or threats of funding changes to make the swisss-cheese defense come out just when the political statement would be biggest. (Though I'm sure not even the Congressional insurrectionists thought pressuring a little wet-noodle defense would backfire this thoroughly and badly, so don't mistake that arm-twisting for anyone's diabolical game of eleven-dimensional chess. In a choice of "Stupid" or "Evil", "Stupid" always wins...always.).
I also think D.C. Statehood is going to get an unintended boost from this as potentially expedited action in the fallout, because perennially having one hand tied behind City P.D.'s back while CapPo gets played for political football is already a long and festering fissure with District voters AND city pols. Capitol Police have lots of cross-jurisdictional power over local P.D. when it comes to stuff like traffic enforcement around gov't buildings, event coordination, and so on. And the City H-A-T-E-S having to silently bear the brunt of the inconvenience while having no say over their own streets whenever CapPo is superseding local control on a whim. So the fact that the
City had to be the ones tasked with coming to rescue today for that inept display by calling in the Virginia National Guard to end the first sacking of the Capitol since the Brits in 1814 is going to trigger payback...swift and fierce. Under statehood, the newly-minted D.C. State Police would absorb >90% of CapPo's duties. They'd be relegated to just buildings-and-grounds security at the handful of buildings in the residual Fed District after everything else terraforms into the Staties' jurisdiction rather than this nullification of local-control law enforcement continuing to exist at flip of a switch for any barely-justified reason under the sun. They'd be reduced to glorified Mall Cops. So security theatre-of-absurd now gets crowned on top...with a bullet...of the other litany of other longstanding "Taxation Without Representation" gripes D.C. has long held against its captors. If there's going to be retribution against the Congressional insurrectionists for their role in fermenting this fiasco, D.C. statehold just gained a whole lot of steam as a wedge to ram through.
While I still think such legislation would have a hard time passing such a divided Senate...God help us, if there really is enough self-flagellation introspection resulting from today's Rubicon crossing 51 stars by year's end might no-foolin' be part of the reckoning. Unlikely, I know...but chances just got tantalizingly real. If CapPo simply have to be blown up and rebooted in-full in penance for its sins of politically aiding the coup today, D.C. statehood is one of the literally
least-messy administrative means of accomplishing their symbolic neutering & dispersal.
