Crowd control is very, very tricky. What would these armed police officers do, in your opinion? Shoot everyone? Arguably not. So what other options do they have? Without riot gear, that very difficult, and even with riot gear, the insurgents were partially armed. So yeah, evacuate and wait for superior numbers to show up was the smarter decision once things already did go south. Now follow it up with aggressive prosecution of those i taking selfies in senator offices would be a good thing, too.
Then there would be the question, of why there was no riot gear, when riots or riot-like situation could be expected. And since this was a planned event - and protestors openly planned to storm it - then maybe there should have been some better preparation?
And crowd control is indeed tricky, but it is still standard procedure for police.
You have fences.
You have lines of strong policemen with shields and tonfa.
You have tear gas.
Watercannon.
Beanbag.
Taser.
And ultimately, if rioters are indeed shooting or preparing to do so: there are guns with the police, too.
Many others brought the point: there probably would have been rivers of blood, if the black life matters movement, would have tried to storm the capitol.
I would expect them to have a plan for crowd control. How do other security organizations handle this? I would expect they do have an armory with riot gear and crowd control equipment.
That’s what I mean about odd that they don’t have a plan for this. I live near a top 50 city and the local police has crowd control equipment. Seems like the National capitol police would have some capability for this.
