The calculation of the American police entered a new chapter this week with the televised spectacle of federal security agents invaded by a crowd of far-right armed extremists invading the Capitol.
At first glance, the siege was a failure of planning: the United States Capitol Police, which handles all types of protests and demonstrations throughout the year, did not seem to anticipate the threat posed by thousands of people who, at the request of the President Donald Trump – and after sharing his plans online – converged on Capitol Hill to protest electoral defeat. Although some officers fought with them – a rioter was shot and one officer later died of his injuries – others took selfies and appeared to offer no resistance, allowing dozens of protesters to leave without being arrested.
The relatively mild treatment of the invaders was deeply disturbing to many Americans, whose views on Wednesday’s chaos were influenced by their reaction to the anti-police protests that rocked the country over the summer. The attack on the Capitol could end up deepening the divide between those who want to diminish police power and those who warn about illegality, stressing the need for the police to repair their relations with their communities.
For many officers and their right-wing supporters, the performance of the Capitol Police showed how passive police became in the face of a reform movement aimed at reducing the use of force. For them, the disaster showed that, however much they reacted to a mass demonstration, whether it was too hard or too little, they would always be criticized.
For black activists, civil rights defenders and many Democrats – including President-elect Joe Biden – the police response reflected the long history of law enforcement giving passes to whites for behavior that would result in beatings or death if practiced by people of color. . Some pointed to the brutal treatment of many Black Lives Matter protesters in cities across the country after George Floyd’s police murder in Minneapolis on May 25 – including the forced removal of peaceful protesters near the White House to make way for a photo- Trump’s op – and the most measured response to groups of whites who protested the Covid-19 blockade orders. Revelations that Wednesday’s protesters included military veterans and police officers exacerbated feelings of unequal treatment.
And for police, researchers and consultants who are trying to help the American police change, the Capitol fiasco was a stark reminder that the police still have a way to go to adapt to a new era of protests.
“There is a general recognition that the primer that the police used to use for demonstrations is out of date,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based nonprofit that advises police departments.
A few days before the siege of the Capitol, Wexler predicted in an email newsletter that police treatment of mass demonstrations would be one of the profession’s biggest challenges in 2021, with several high-profile trials scheduled for police officers accused of killing. or brutalize people last year. He questioned whether the local departments were prepared.
“The type of unpredictability of the demonstrations has become very worrying for police chiefs,” Wexler said in an interview on Thursday. “The police will have to consider virtually every type of potentially volatile demonstration. It happened here, ”he added, referring to the Capitol.
But the 2020 protests showed that the answer is not a show of overwhelming strength.
Many departments were taken aback by the wave and ferocity of the protests after Floyd’s death, some of which became violent. Some police departments used tactics considered excessive, from putting on riot gear, cornering and beating protesters to using tear gas and “less than lethal” projectiles that left people bloody or maimed. Critics said militaristic tactics violated people’s constitutional rights and sparked violence. In cities where the police took steps to increase public confidence, the response to the protests threatened to delay these efforts.
This experience led to a deep search among some police and law enforcement officials that continued as they faced protests from across the political spectrum: right-wing Americans angry at anti-police protesters, along with pandemic blockades and the loss of Trump. The researchers found that the police are less likely to intervene or use force in these protests, whose participants often identify themselves as being on the side of law enforcement. Amnesty International has accused the police of failing to prevent violence when the two sides clash on the streets.
“The differences we see in the use of force are the political stripes of those being policed,” said Brian Griffey, a researcher and consultant at Amnesty International. This, he said, was on display at the United States Capitol, where he watched the protest turn into a riot.
How this happened is now under investigation by federal authorities and Congress. Department of Defense officials said on Thursday that at planning meetings, local and federal law enforcement agencies did not anticipate such violence, and that the United States Capitol Police and Washington, DC declined offers to expand the number of National Guard troops sent to the area. While protesters were running mad inside the Capitol, the United States Capitol Police were slow to accept offers of help from the United States Department of Justice, a senior law enforcement official told NBC News. Agency chief Steven Sund said on Thursday that he would step down from the end of this month.
In the wake of Floyd’s protests, many cities and police departments have adopted changes in the way they handle mass demonstrations. Most of these reforms focused on reducing the use of tear gas and rubber bullets. But there is also a quieter effort to update police standards on crowd management to reflect the lessons of 2020, with less emphasis on maintaining control of protesters and more on allowing people to exercise their First Amendment rights.
In California, for example, officials are developing new standards for police training in response to recommendations that experts gave Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, in September. They range from lessons on the First Amendment and crowd psychology to improved communication and “use of proportionality of force” that prioritizes containment and reducing intensity.
“Now let’s go back to the drawing board and say, ‘Wait a minute, what are we doing here?’” Said Steven Nottingham, a retired Long Beach, California, police lieutenant who teaches departments across the country to manage civil unrest and is part of the new training effort.
There is widespread frustration among police officers who feel they have received the message in recent months that more strength and less strength are unacceptable, Nottingham said. “We absolutely don’t know what to do. It seems that everything we do is wrong, ”he said.
The answer, he says to police commanders in their crowd management classes, is to do more to understand protesters before they show up, to be more aware of the political environment in which police are working and to respond accordingly to threats.
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Thor Eells, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, teaches a “layered response” – a large contingent of uniformed policemen along with undercover policemen gathering information from the crowd and shock units prepared to respond if protesters became violent – which evidently did not existed at the US Capitol on Wednesday.
The police do not want to risk further erosion of public confidence, said Eells. But on Wednesday there was “extreme restraint, almost to the point of being too restrained”.
Lynda Williams, a professor of criminal justice and a former Secret Service agent who heads the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, said the police also need to recognize that the unequal treatment of protesters has its roots in systemic racism.
This racism doesn’t just affect the police’s response to the protests; it also poisons police planning for events, Williams said. Williams was not involved in the response to Wednesday’s riot. But, based on his experience in helping with the law enforcement plan for previous Capitol protests, Williams said the police gather a lot of information in advance and assess the risk of violence, and black protesters are usually seen as more dangerous than the whites.
“If that were a minority, the black crowd, they would still be putting fingerprints on individuals today,” said Williams of Capitol rioters. “We have to recognize that there is a difference.”
Vera Eidelman, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said she hoped that the US Capitol disaster would not be cited by authorities as a reason to give the police more resources and tools to respond to mass demonstrations.
“It is a danger to think that this is the lesson,” she said.
Kim Dine, a former US Capitol Police chief, said he hoped his agency’s failure would prompt the American police to improve their response to increasingly volatile protests – and the political conflicts that often fuel them.
“It is a stain in our history that will not go away anytime soon,” said Dine. “It is worrying, but I think that the police profession has improved and continues to improve and we have to take responsibility. But we also have to reduce that level of rhetoric that divides people and fans of discord ”.