Democracy watchThe Uncomfortable Questions Facing Capitol Police over the Security Breach by MAGA Mob

By Tom Nolan

Published 8 January 2021

When die-hard Trump supporters are able to storm the U.S. Capitol and forcefully occupy offices in the House and the Senate, questions over security are going to be asked. Something clearly didn’t go to plan on Wednesday. The man in charge of policing that day, U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, has since announced he is resigning. But even with him gone, what will remain are serious questions that will need to be answered about how an angry mob was able to circumvent security and enter the Capitol building.

When die-hard Trump supporters are able to storm the U.S. Capitol and forcefully occupy offices in the House and the Senate, questions over security are going to be asked.

I am an academic criminologist who in an earlier life served as a senior policy adviser at the Department of Homeland Security. Moreover, as a 27-year veteran of the Boston Police Department, I have firsthand experience of major policing operations.

Something clearly didn’t go to plan on Wednesday. The man in charge of policing that day, U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, has since announced he is resigning. But even with him gone, what will remain are serious questions that will need to be answered about how an angry mob was able to circumvent security and enter the Capitol building.

Was There a Failure of Intelligence?
Washington, D.C., is one of the most heavily policed cities in the world. The U.S. Capitol Police is a force that numbers around 2,000 officers and operates with an annual budget of US$460 million. Their job is to protect the U.S. Congress. There is every reason to believe that they should have known that Trump supporters intended to descend upon the Capitol with the intention of thwarting the peaceful transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden.

After all, Trump has been signaling his followers on Twitter for weeks, promising on Dec. 19 that the day would “be wild.” Meanwhile some of his supporters in the MAGA world have made no secret of their intention to disrupt the ratification of the Electoral College votes by the Congress. And on the day itself, Trump urged a crowd to march on the Capitol.

And police in D.C. would not have been operating on their own. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis coordinates intelligence-gathering activities between and among state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement agencies and likely would have – or certainly should have – been aware of the activities of some of the attackers and their plans to storm the Capitol on Wednesday.

Additionally, the U.S. Capitol has its own dedicated intelligence “fusion center” – the National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium. This center serves to identify, collect, analyze and disseminate threat-related intelligence to law enforcement. It is certainly fair to question whether these intelligence-gathering organizations were aware of plans to attack the Capitol and whether they communicated that information to the Capitol Police.

The ease with which assailants were able to breach security at the Capitol