Questions hovering over the events of Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol include the failure of the U.S. Capitol Police to prevent rioters from getting inside the Capitol building. Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), a former police chief, told the Associated Press it was “painfully obvious” that Capitol police “were not prepared for today. I certainly thought that we would have had a stronger show of force, that there would have been steps taken in the very beginning to make sure that there was a designated area for the protesters in a safe distance from the Capitol.'’ In an interview with MSNBC Wednesday night, Demings said it appeared the police were woefully understaffed, adding that “it did not seem that they had a clear operational plan to really deal with” thousands of protesters who descended on the Capitol following Trump’s complaints of a “rigged election.'’ Demings said there were “a lot of unanswered questions, and I’m damn determined to get answers to those questions about what went wrong today.''
“This was a piss-poor planning performance,” retired New York City Deputy Chief Thomas Graham, former commanding officer of the department’s Civil Disorder Unit, told The Daily Beast. “They weren’t prepared, for whatever reason. They weren’t prepared to protect the Capitol. Shame on them.” To Graham’s mind, the biggest mistake was elementary: Capitol Police “let them get close to the building, and that’s a no-no,” he said, referring to the rioters. Graham noted that from what he could see, only a few of the Capitol officers had riot shields. He did not see many wearing riot helmets or holding riot batons. Something else that was missing: the sight of officers with bundles of flex cuffs, which they use to make multiple arrests in crowd situations. But some pro-Trump protesters had them — and bragged they planned to make citizen’s arrests.
