DC police chief stunned by ‘reluctance’ to deploy guard in January 6 attack

The head of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) told senators on Tuesday that there had been an initial “reluctance” to send the National Guard during the January 6 riots on the United States Capitol – resistance that left him “surprised” and “stunned”, given the severity of the violent attack.

Testifying before two Senate committees, Acting Leader Robert Contee said that at 2:22 p.m. on Jan.6 – more than an hour after his forces were summoned to Capitol Hill – he was part of an emergency phone call to which attended by leaders of the Capitol Police, the National Guard and the Army Department.

“I was surprised at the reluctance to immediately send the National Guard to Capitol grounds,” Contee told senators on the Rules and Homeland Security committees.

Almost an hour would pass before the Pentagon approves the deployment of more Guard troops to defuse the violent mob, and those troops would not arrive on Capitol Hill until 5:40 p.m. – more than four hours after Steven Sund, so Head of the Capitol Police, had requested federal reinforcements.

This long delay has become a focal point of the Congressional inquiry into the deadly assault, an inquiry which was launched publicly during the Senate hearing on Tuesday.

Contee said that at 2:30 p.m., minutes after the emergency call with the Pentagon, his office had requested help from law enforcement agencies as far away as New Jersey.

“From that point on, it took another 3.5 hours for all the rioters to be kicked out of the Capitol,” Contee said.

Other witnesses who testified in the Senate included Sund, former House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving and former Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger, all of whom were in charge on January 6 but have since resigned.

Echoing the accounts of others, Contee told lawmakers there was information that protests in favor of the former President TrumpDonald TrumpFauci: US political divide over masks led to half a million COVID-19 deaths Bishop of Georgia says GOP’s state election bill is an “ attempt to suppress the black vote ‘Trump closer to legal threat after court ruling on tax returns January 6 could include “violent actions on the streets” of Washington – and could include armed protesters. But there was no sign of a violent insurgency from the Capitol building.

“The district had no information indicating a coordinated assault on Capitol Hill,” one read in its prepared statement.

Contee said 300 unarmed members of the DC National Guard were initially deployed on the day of the attack, but only to provide traffic control and other non-interventionist services. He noted that because Washington is not a state, only the president, not DC officials, has the power to deploy the guard.

Contee pointed out other limitations on the authority of the DC Police Force, including the fact that it has no jurisdiction to patrol or make arrests on the Capitol without an explicit request from the Capitol Police. This request, Contee said, came from Sund just before 1 p.m. on January 6, and MPD arrived at the scene “within minutes.”

More than 1,100 district police officers eventually responded to the attack, Contee said, and 65 of them were injured. A 66th would commit suicide a few days later.

“These resources were barely sufficient to counter an event that had never happened in the history of the United States,” he said. “A crowd of thousands of American citizens launching a violent assault on the United States Capitol … in an attempt to stop the counting of the ballots.”