However, during an episode described as an insurrection and an attempted coup, the police made only 61 “riot-related” arrests that day – and only about half of them occurred on Capitol Hill, said Metropolitan Police Department chief Robert Tell me, last week.
It is a valuable context, to be sure, and raises important discussions about police and race, but a broader view shows that the BLM protests were just one example in which the police in the country’s capital seemed ready to respond with all the force of the law. .
Here are some examples, by the numbers:
133 LGBTQ Activists, October 8, 2019
Across Capitol’s First Street, the United States Supreme Court was set to hear arguments in three cases that many gay rights advocates thought would dictate the level of protection they would receive under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the rules of Title VII employment.
Activists sat on First Street in an act of civil disobedience, reported Washington Blade, an LGBTQ news agency that quoted the United States Capitol Police, saying the protesters were accused of agglomeration, obstruction and inconvenience.
147 climate change protesters, January 10, 2020
Actor Jane Fonda’s “Friday fire drill” produced countless arrests – many of them celebrities – in late 2019 and early 2020, when CNN founder Ted Turner’s ex-wife took her anger out on the tion of climate change for the capital.
In the 14th week of protests, Joaquin Phoenix and Martin Sheen were among the stars who found themselves in custody, while the Capitol Police found that dozens of people were charged with agglomeration, obstruction or inconvenience.
181 Obamacare supporters, September 25, 2017
When the GOP started trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act in the summer of 2017, protests broke out week after week in the capital, generating several days of arrests. On two separate days in July, the Capitol Police confirmed to CNN that CNN officers arrested 80 and then 155 protesters who entered the corridors of Congress to engage in peaceful protests – demonstrations, shouting, lying on the floor and so on.
The highest count of single-day arrests in the protests, however, occurred in September, when protesters – many of whom, Reuters reported, were in wheelchairs (most of them belonged to a disability rights group ) – delayed a hearing in the Senate. The Capitol Police began to arrest them en masse.
Fifteen were charged with disturbing Congress and 166 were charged with agglomeration, disturbance or inconvenience, with 23 of them facing an additional charge of resisting arrest, according to Capitol Police.
217 Trump inauguration protesters, January 20, 2017
As demonstrations erupted across the country, the police in the nation’s capital handled ugly street clashes between the police and the antifa in central Washington.
Six policemen were injured and the police applied pepper spray afterwards, reported CNN, “Explosions of chaos erupted on 12th and K streets while black-clad ‘anti-fascist’ protesters smashed storefronts and bus stops, smashed the windows of a limousine and eventually threw stones at a phalanx of police lined up on a pedestrian crossing to the east. The police responded by throwing smoke and flash-bang devices, which could be heard blocks away, into the street to disperse the crowd. “
302 Opponents of Brett Kavanaugh, October 4, 2018
Several days of protest against Kavanaugh’s appointment to the United States Supreme Court yielded hundreds of arrests, but many of them occurred in a single day, while lawmakers analyzed an FBI report describing the allegations against the candidate for justice.
It was another case full of stars, as comedian Amy Schumer and model Emily Ratajkowski were among those arrested.
The arrests began in the middle of the afternoon with 293 people arrested for demonstrating illegally in one Senate building and nine others later arrested in another Senate building, a Capitol Police spokeswoman said. All were accused of agglomeration, obstruction or inconvenience, the department said.
316 Black Lives Matter protesters, June 1, 2020
Many asked themselves Wednesday: Where are the police and the military?
No one asked these questions in June, when Black Lives Matter protesters, condemning the deaths of George Floyd and other African Americans at the hands of the police, took to the streets to find military helicopters hovering over the city, National Guard troops patrolling the streets and tear gas filling the air.
An analysis of data from the Metropolitan Police Department shows that local police arrested five times more people during Floyd’s protests than during last week’s insurrection.
372 Keystone Pipeline Protesters, March 2, 2014
As President Barack Obama’s administration revised plans for the $ 5.3 billion Keystone XL pipeline, nearly 1,000 protesters marched from Georgetown University to Secretary of State John Kerry’s home and then to the White House, where they staged a “human oil spill”.
Other protesters tied their hands to the White House fence and placed them on tarpaulins in front of the White House, urging Obama to reject the bill. In the end, Lelani Woods, a spokesman for the U.S. Park Police, told The Washington Post that 372 people were arrested.
400+ Activists of the ‘Spring of Democracy’, April 11, 2016
It all started in Philadelphia with protesters from various groups marching 150 miles south to stage a demonstration on the Capitol steps, denouncing the influence of a lot of money on politics and Congress’ refusal to reverse it. In a single day of long protests, the Capitol Police arrested more than 400 people for “illegal demonstration activity” and they were charged with agglomeration, obstruction and inconvenience.
While the Progressive Change Campaign Committee classified the demonstrations as “non-violent civil disobedience”, with the aim of starting talks on “fundamental democracy issues”, several media outlets reported more than 900 arrests during the protests. Salon scored the final count of 1,240 in a week of protests.
575 immigration policy protesters, June 28, 2018
More than 1,000 women marched through Washington, protesting the Trump administration’s policy of separating the children of their parents on the U.S. border with Mexico. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat, was among hundreds of prisoners, according to Capitol Police.
The demonstrations were largely peaceful. The protesters barely argued with the police who arrested them, who in most cases refused to use handcuffs to take women into custody. Several Democratic lawmakers – including Senator Tammy Duckworth, who arrived with her son in tow – attended to express their support for the demonstration.
12,000+ Opponents of the Vietnam War, May 1, 1971
This is not officially included in this list. It is not the fairest comparison, given that half a century has passed and the country looks very different from what it was in 1971. But the May Day protests against the Vietnam War were described as the “biggest mass prison” and “the largest absolution mass “of protesters in the history of the United States.
Five thousand police officers, supported by 1,400 National Guards, greeted the 35,000 protesters who descended on Washington that day, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Anyone who looked at everything weird … was caught on the street,” said one protester, according to an ACLU article. A federal court later agreed, saying: “The innocent, as well as the guilty, have been largely swept off the streets and placed in detention centers.”
An ACLU victory resulted in the acquittal of almost all protesters, allowing them to collect compensation for their ill-treatment, the civil rights group said.
CNN’s Casey Tolan, Gregory Krieg, Leah Asmelash, Sophie Tatum and Mary Grace Lucas contributed to this report.
