The weeks that come will hopefully see a serious investigation into the decision-making that allowed the Capitol police to be drastically overmatched and overrun by a Trumpist mob. When that happens, part of the evidence that it was at a minimum gross negligence and perhaps outright intentional will come in the form of all the public planning these domestic terrorists did. No law enforcement organization can credibly claim that it was both competent and taken by surprise—unless it wants to admit to having allowed this to happen.
On the website TheDonald, a post proposing to “Storm the Capitol” if Congress didn’t bend to Trump’s wishes got 500 upvotes, Buzzfeed’s Jane Lytvynenko and Molly Hensley-Clancy report. Research found that more than half of the top posts at TheDonald and far-right social media site Parler “featured unmoderated calls for violence in the top five responses.”
”Tomorrow—I don’t even like to say it because I’ll be arrested—I’ll say it. Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol,” someone said on a far-right livestream Tuesday night.
A Facebook page called Red-State Secession “asked its roughly 8,000 followers to share addresses of perceived ‘enemies’ in the nation’s capital, including the home addresses of federal judges, members of Congress and prominent progressive politicians,” The New York Times reports, and commenters openly talked about violence.
This is all in a city where peaceful protests for racial justice were met by heavily militarized police within the last year. We know Washington, D.C., is more than capable of disproportionate response. Yet here the District’s law enforcement agencies, led by the Capitol Police, ignored overt threats of violence targeting the homes and workplaces of top officials, including the U.S. Capitol itself. This was a refusal to protect the Capitol and the Congress, a decision to ignore or embrace the threat. Police officials can either tell us they were too incompetent to have found these public threats of violence, or they can explain to us why they ignored the public threats. Ignorance is not exonerating here.
