Last summer,peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters were met with rubber bullets and tear gasoutside the White House to clear the way for President Donald Trump’s photo-op with military leaders and a Bible at a nearby church.
But on Wednesday, law enforcement officials allowed a mob of pro-Trump extremists to storm into a locked-down Capitol. One Trump fan even made his way inside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, getting comfortable enough to prop his feet up on her desk.
The chaos on Capitol Hill — and the radically different responses from law enforcement — showcased a reality many activists, journalists and Trump opponents have long argued exists: Trump never really stood for law and order, even if he repeatedly used the phrase in his campaign last year while diverting attention from the escalating pandemic. And the chaos demonstrated another reality laid bare last summer by the death of George Floyd: law enforcement is applied very differently based on race.
Journalists inside the Capitol captured rioters breaking windows and attempting to replace an American flag outside the building with a Trump flag. They recorded Trump supporters roaming the halls of the building. And how Capitol Police handled it — or didn’t — did not go unnoticed across social media, where reporters, historians and activists spoke out against what they see as hypocrisy: An overwhelmingly white crowd acting violently was handled gently compared to peaceful protesters in Washington and across the country during the protests over Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer.
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri), a veteran of Black Lives Matters protests in Ferguson, Missouri, appeared on MSNBC Wednesday night and criticized the disparate treatment.
“It was almost like there was this call [for the police] to not use force,” Bush said. “There are pictures and videos of police officers just walking away. …. Had it been people who looked like me. Had it been the same amount of people but had they been Black and brown. We wouldn’t have made it up those steps. We wouldn’t have made it to get into the door and bust windows and go put our feet up on desks of Congress members. We wouldn’t have made it that far. We would’ve been shot. We would’ve been tear gassed. …. We need to call it what it is. It’s white supremacy.”
Politicians, former officials, activists and others on social media vented their fury, tweeting “#ThisisAmerica” posting pictures and videos that highlighted the different ways Black and Brown protesters were treated by police compared to the Capitol insurrectionists.
Police treatment of the rioters “says a lot about who is an enemy combatant and who is not — and how the Capitol Hill police were not ready for this,” said Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, the country’s largest online racial justice organization.
“It’s an example of all of the ways in which these folks who have at every turn advanced some of the ugliest, most hateful and most violent interactions — that they were still given the benefit of the doubt when they showed up to Washington,” he added.
Robinson said the extremists who stormed the Capitol should not be regarded as protesters. “It was domestic terrorism,” he said.
On Wednesday, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who is charged with funding the Capitol Police as the House Appropriations Legislative Branch subcommittee chair, promised to investigate the law enforcement response to the rioters who seized the Capitol building. Ryan said that officers made “strategic mistakes” and promised there would “be a number of people who are going to be without employment very, very soon.”
