The head of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of Washington, DC, told senators on Tuesday that there was an initial “reluctance” to send the National Guard during the January 6 riots at the United States Capitol – a resistance that left him “surprised” and “stunned”, given the seriousness of the violent attack.
Witnessing before two Senate commissions, acting chief Robert Contee said that at 2:22 pm on January 6 – more than an hour after his forces were summoned to the Capitol – he was part of an emergency phone call that included Police leaders Capitol, National Guard and Army Department.
“I was surprised at the reluctance to immediately send the National Guard to the Capitol,” Contee told senators on the Rules and Homeland Security committees.
Almost an hour would pass before the Pentagon approved the sending of more Guard troops to disarm the violent crowd, and those troops would not arrive at the Capitol before 5:40 pm – more than four hours after Steven Sund, then head of The Police of the Capitol requested federal reinforcements.
This long delay became the central focus of the Congressional investigation into the deadly attack, an investigation that was launched publicly with the Senate hearing on Tuesday.
Contee said that at 2:30 pm, just minutes after the emergency call to the Pentagon, his office asked for help from police departments in distant places like New Jersey.
“From that point, it took another three and a half hours until all the protesters were removed from the Capitol,” said Contee.
Other witnesses who testified before the Senate include Sund, ex-sergeant-in-arms Paul Irving and ex-sergeant-in-arms Michael Stenger, all of whom were in charge on January 6, but have since resigned.
Echoing the reports of others, Contee told lawmakers that there was intelligence indicating that protests in support of the former President Trump
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“The district had no intelligence pointing to a coordinated attack on Capitol,” says its prepared statement.
Contee said there were 300 unarmed members of the DC National Guard initially deployed on the day of the attack, but only to provide traffic control and other non-interventionist services. He noted that since Washington is not a state, only the president, not DC officials, has the power to deploy the Guard.
Contee emphasized other limitations on the authority of the DC police force, including the fact that it has no jurisdiction to patrol or make arrests at the Capitol without an explicit request from the Capitol Police. That request, Contee testified, came from Sund just before 1 pm on January 6, and the MPD arrived on the scene “in minutes”.
More than 1,100 district police officers would eventually respond to the attack, Contee said, and 65 of them were injured. A 66 would take his own life a few days later.
“These resources were barely enough to contain an event that had never happened in the history of the United States,” he said. “A crowd of thousands of American citizens launching a violent attack on the United States Capitol … in an attempt to prevent the counting of electoral votes.”