The Capitol Hill Riots: Where Were The Armed Guards?
I woke up early this morning, and I know I should begin my day by repeating affirmations, setting my intentions and downing a glass of warm lemon water, but I wanted to find out more about yesterday’s storming of the Capitol Building by ‘patriotic’ Americans whose only desire was to ‘Make America Great Again’. It was perverse, I know, and as I powered up my laptop, I knew that I’d be setting myself up for a day during which my mind would be filled with angry thoughts about how racist so many Americans still are even after they watched a video of a man being killed by an officer of the law whose only job was to ‘protect and serve’.
I scrolled through the highlights of my Bing search engine feed and read headlines announcing the death of four people and the arrest of fifty-two (mainly curfew breakers – really?). I clicked on images and videos and marvelled at Trump supporters milling around in corridors of the seat of American democracy, looking to all the world like visitors at a portrait gallery, admiring the paintings and taking cheeky selfies. One man was sitting at the desk of a member of Congress, feet up as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
If this was not troubling enough, the clip that left me most perplexed was that of a lone African-American Capitol Hill officer at the entrance to the Building attempting to prevent the mob from entering. I’m not joking. He had his arm stretched out in a gesture that clearly indicated that the outgoing president’s rabid supporters should go no further. They weren’t having any of it: the officer assessed the situation correctly and, seeing that the intruders were hell bent on breaching this fortress of freedom, made an about turn and ran, not for his life, but for his baton. He must have dropped it as he dashed to the doors of the citadel in a heroic but ultimately futile attempt to stem the tide of approaching humanity in the same way, I suppose, as King Canute must have done all those years ago. He retrieved it and rushed towards the militia, but they were not cowed: there were hundreds of them and only one of him.
And as I watched, I couldn’t quite fathom why one man had been left to guard the doors: The entire world knew Trumpsters would be descending on the Capitol. The orders were given a full week before Christmas. Where were the armed guards? Where were the police whose job it is to stop people getting as far as they did? Where was the second Capitol Hill officer to back a brother up? Oh, yeah, the protesters were White, so there was no need to call in the troops.
I’d heard that the Mayor of Washington DC – a very ‘savvy’ woman, according to Heather Cox Richardson, the American historian whose Facebook lives I’ve been listening to since the November election – and so I was confident that any attempts by the Proud Boys et al to pull off a coup would be put down in no uncertain terms. The powers that be knew how dangerous these people were and would be out in force. But they weren’t. The mob had come prepared: they had guns. And pipe bombs. And molotov cocktails.
In spite of what is known about Trump’s core fan base, at some point, someone in charge considered the many and varied security options at their disposal and concluded: “Any threat posed by Trump loyalists is negligible, therefore, it’s business as usual”
And that was when I googled ‘where were the police during the Washington DC riots?’. What came up – among other things – was an image of gun-toting military men standing guard on the steps of Congress (Police Response To Washington’s Black Lives Matter Protesters Starkly Different To Capitol Riot - UNILAD). Not a few. Not tens. There were at least a hundred. For whom? I asked myself. Oh, silly me, they were there to protect democracy from the socialist, Antifa, anti-law-and-order Black Lives Matter protestors. The picture was taken at a peaceful demonstration last summer, hot on the heels of the murder of George Floyd.
Because Black people pose a physical threat to White people.
‘Twas ever thus.
I needed to compute this: one lone security guard was tasked with preventing armed men hell bent on insurrection from entering a sacred space, while soldiers were drafted in to stop peaceful protestors from taking a stand – or a knee – against proven police brutality.
Let that sink in.
I’m going to backtrack a bit and look at the BLM protests in the United States since last summer to compare how the ‘authorities’ responded to them with how they responded to Trump’s henchmen and women.
At a BLM protest in New York police officers dowsed protestors with chemical irritants, beat them as they struggled on the ground and drove police vehicles into them.
In a report put out by the US Crisis Project in 2020, federal agents and National Guard troops were deployed fifty-five times following the murder of George Floyd.
At the Washington D,C. protest of 1st June 2020, peaceful demonstrators were confronted by five thousand national guard troops, federal agents, including from the bureau of prisons, an army helicopter, teargas, batons (presumably with officers attached) and horses.
The Washington Post confirmed in October 2020 that Black Lives Matter protests were ‘overwhelmingly peaceful’. Any violence that did occur came about as a result of police intervention or White supremacist-led counter-demonstrations. In research the paper carried out, it found that in two months of protesting, eight thousand five hundred arrests were made. A quote from the report went as follows:
“Given that protesters were objecting to extrajudicial police killings of Black citizens, protesters displayed an extraordinary level of nonviolent discipline, particularly for a campaign involving hundreds of documented incidents of apparent police brutality.”
Now let’s compare over seven thousand demonstrations with the one that took place on the 6th January 2021.
There were no horses, helicopters or police vehicles that drove into any of the assembled patriots. As far as I know, there was only pepper spray, but I did see hoses being used. Washington’s Mayor, Muriel Bowser, put in a request for three hundred and forty National Guard troops to deal with any attempts to disrupt proceedings following the results of the Georgia run-off. This request was submitted on New Year’s Eve. According to an anonymous source, she was given access to one hundred and fifteen guards, whose duties would involve directing traffic and assisting. They would, ‘not be armed or wearing body armor.’.
After some digging around, I discovered that because D.C. does not have a governor, all requests for guard deployments must be approved by the commander of the City’s National Guard. On further reading, the Chicago Tribune reported that on receiving the request, the commander confirmed there would be no active military troops, no aircraft or intelligence and no D.C. Guard members at the National Mall or at the U.S. Capitol. He did, however, agree to providing teams who would be ‘prepared to respond to any chemical or biological incident’. That’s alright then.
Now some of you reading this might come back at me and say that the absence of the National Guard was a response to the outrage expressed at the use of the military during the BLM protest, which was a civil matter. A slippery slope, some might have called it. Fair enough. But images coming out of Washington suggest that police officers were thin on the ground, and those who were present appeared reluctant to meet the rioters with the same level of zeal and brutality that was demonstrated time and again barely six months ago. In fact, in one video I watched on Twitter, a handful of officers actually allowed Trumpsters through metal barriers. Not a baton, taser gun or tear gas canister in sight. I imagined that the way they seemed to usher people through was a bit like how stewards open the gates at the start of Glastonbury. Cordial is the word that springs to mind.
I want to make one final comparison: when referring to BLM protesters last summer, Trump called them ‘thugs’ (sorry, ‘THUGS’), ‘anarchists’ and described them as ‘disgraceful’. With reference to protests in the immediate aftermath of the death of George Floyd, he declared, ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ And lest we forget, he called Colin Kaepernick a ‘son of a bitch’ because he took a knee in 2016, and in 2017, after Charlottesville, he observed that there were ‘very fine people on both sides’.
Fast forward to 2021 and we looked on as Trump surveyed the culmination of four years of goading, enabling and reinvigorating far-right terrorists-in-waiting. After unleashing his hellhounds and inviting them do what needed to be done in the name of all that is right, he spoke words of comfort to his adoring fans, telling them he loved them, reassuring them that he knew their ‘pain’ and their ‘hurt’, but telling them was time to go home. While BLM demonstrators hated America, he told his mob they were ‘great patriots’.
With regards to petty vandalism, Trump made no reference to the fact that his minions had invaded Congress, no mention of broken windows or offices broken into, and no mention of the destruction of media equipment. He made no allusions to shooting much less looting.
And four people dead. One death is one too many, but let us be real here. This is not rocket science: if these were BLM protesters, the body count would have easily gone into tens. Cori Bush, the freshman Democratic Representative said it, Sandy Hudson, founder of Black Lives Matter in Canada said it (she went so far as to use the word ‘massacre’), and the mother of writer and activist, Ibram X. Kendi said it. Guaranteed, Black people right across the globe were thinking the very same thing.
There are people who will have watched the scenes men and women willingly seduced by the grifter-in-chief and thought, ‘Well, they’re only standing up for freedom of speech.’ or some such nonsense. They’ll find a way to make what happened seem not that bad and definitely not as bad as the protests of the BLM ‘communists’.
The mental gymnastics will have started as soon as video footage of the outnumbered officer went viral. As my ex-pupil likes to say when we discuss racism, ‘Disappointing, but not surprising.’
We’ve known forever that Black people experience what UK equality legislation euphemistically calls different treatment. Whether it’s the African-Caribbean boy who’s excluded for starting a playground scuffle while his white counterpart is put in detention, or the Black barrister who’s spoken down to because the clerk thinks she’s the defendant. Or the softly spoken 20-something young man who’s stopped and searched by police while his white friend looks on. Whether it’s the Black woman who’s labelled aggressive when she expresses her justified anger while her White counterpart enjoys the sympathy of her colleagues when she kicks off. Or the besuited Black man who is followed around the shop while the White hoodie-wearing youth isn’t given a second glance, understand this: what happens in schools, in the workplace and on the streets is on a spectrum the extreme end of which is the different treatment of peaceful demonstrators and neo-Nazi would-be terrorists.
If the events of the 6th January 2021 did not confirm what so many people already know, then I’ll spell it out: we live in a system where Black people are considered dangerous, criminal, aggressive, disruptive, violent and sub-human by dint of the fact that we are Black. That’s the sole qualification. Therefore, irrespective of the facts placed in front of people – in this case the commander of Washington D.C’s National Guard – White people, including those who the Department for Homeland Security consider to be the most dangerous threat to U.S security will never, ever be as big a threat to a nation as Black men, women and children.
It’s time to take off those rose tinted. It’s time to stop pussy-footing around and get to grips with the fact that….. THIS. SHIT. IS. REAL.
Written by Laurie O’Garro
When the country’s not in semi-lockdown, Laurie works for the Metropolitan Police and pursues a craft called ‘string art’. Her daughter is currently in her final year of university, studying online in London. Laurie also writes poetry and flash fiction.
www.instagram.com/thecatchuptalks