When a crowd of President Trump supporters invaded the United States Capitol on Wednesday, they were confronted by a much smaller police presence – and at the end of the day, far fewer protesters ended up in jail.
The glaring disparity in prisons came even though more DC police officers were injured during the Capitol chaos, which left five people dead, including a police officer.
Even including 14 more people who were arrested by the United States Capitol Police, a separate agency, the number of people that both agencies arrested in the midst of Wednesday’s riot was less than a quarter of those detained by city officials alone in June 1st.
Activists in DC said they were shocked that a deadly attack on the heart of American democracy had led to far fewer people in police custody than the clashes that broke out during protests against police brutality.
“It is so, so insulting to racial justice activists that they have drawn attention to lost black lives,” said Anthony Lorenzo Green, one of the activists who lead the Black Lives Matter DC group. “The way they chose to protect the Capitol was to let everyone go – they let these people go back to our streets.”
If Black Lives Matter protesters had tried to enter the Capitol instead of the predominantly White pro-Trump crowd, Green said, “we would be handcuffed, we would be taken away, we would be shot, we would be dead.”
Fewer arrests, more police injuries
No police officers died in DC while responding to protests and riots over the summer.
Of course, the protests over the summer and the Capitol uprising this week were very different events – for example, there were probably a lot more protesters spread out over a wider area of the city last summer than on Wednesday.
Kristen Metzger, a spokesman for MPD, said the department did not make further arrests on Wednesday in part because, unlike summer protests, the city’s curfew was not announced before the incident.
“When we announce (a curfew) in advance, we have enough resources to put people in the vans and we are ready to make mass arrests,” Metzger told CNN. “As this was done later in the day, we were not ready to make mass arrests like this until the curfew was established in the late afternoon.”
Metzger also noted that the Capitol is the jurisdiction of the US Capitol Police and that the district police were not called in for assistance until the protesters breached the building’s security.
“At that point, it was just to control the situation and get them out of the Capitol building,” she said.
“We are a city that deals with mass demonstrations all the time,” said Hopkins. “For any law enforcement agency in this city to say that they were taken by surprise or that they didn’t know what was coming, it is incredibly false.”
There will likely be additional arrests related to the Capitol’s intrusion. Michael Sherwin, the acting US attorney, said on Thursday that federal officials plan to review the social media images of the riot and arrest the people they identify. Federal prosecutors have already charged 15 people, Sherwin said.
Capitol protesters face less harsh accusations
So far, at least, there have also been noticeable disparities in the seriousness of the charges faced by Capitol inmates and inmates during the summer protests.
Most people arrested on Wednesday were detained for curfew violations or accusations of illegal entry. DC police arrested only one person on a charge that they specifically listed as a crime: a 39-year-old man accused of unrest and illegal entry to the Capitol. His arrest does not necessarily represent all of the criminal arrests made on Wednesday, as the DC police did not always include this information in their data. It is possible that more people face criminal charges as prosecutors proceed with their cases.
Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office did not respond to requests for comment on the disparity in the prisons and the charges. Bowser criticized the federal response to the insurrection, noting at a news conference on Wednesday that “we saw a different stance used” by federal officials compared to the highly militarized response to the summer protests.
President-elect Joe Biden focused on racial disparities in a speech on Thursday, saying “no one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they would not have been treated very, very differently from the crowd of bandits who invaded the Capitol. “
Data released by the police department also shows that people arrested during the Black Lives Matter protests were more local than those arrested this week, most of whom migrated to the capital from other parts of the country.
Among inmates whose state of residence was available, police data showed that 94% of inmates between late May and August were from DC, Maryland or Virginia. Only 25% of those arrested on Wednesday or Thursday morning were from the same region.
Hopkins, the ACLU executive, said the disparity between the treatment of “white supremacists who come to our city” and black protesters is a classic example of disparities in policing.
The events show that police reformers must pay attention “not only to what the police do,” she said, but also “when the police decide to do something and when they choose to do nothing”.