The head of the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) told senators on Tuesday that there was initially a “reluctance” to send the National Guard to the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 riot – a resistance that “surprised” and “stunned”, given the seriousness of the violent attack.
Acting Chief Robert Contee testified before several Senate committees that on January 6 at 14:22 – more than an hour after his powers were called to the Capitol – he was part of an emergency call that leaders of the Capitol police, the national guard and the department of the army.
“I was amazed at the reluctance to send the national guard immediately to the Capitol site,” Contee told senators in the Committees on Rules and Homeland Security.
Nearly an hour would pass before the Pentagon would approve the deployment of more guard troops to defuse the violent crowd, and those troops would arrive at the Capitol only at 5:40 p.m. – more than four hours after Steven Sund, then head of the Capitol Police, requested the federal reinforcement.
That long delay has become a central focus of Congress’s inquiry into the deadly assault, an inquiry that began in public with the Senate hearing on Tuesday.
Contee said his office at 14:30, within minutes of the emergency call with the Pentagon, asked for help from police departments as far away as New Jersey.
“From that time on, it took another 3 1/2 hours until all rioters were removed from the Capitol,” Contee said.
Other witnesses testifying before the Senate include Sund, former arms sergeant Paul Irving and former senate sergeant Michael Stenger, all of whom were in charge on January 6 but have since resigned.
Contee told lawmakers there is intelligence suggesting protests in support of former president President Trump
Donald TrumpFauci: US political divisions over masks lead to half a million COVID-19 deaths, Georgia’s bishop says the GOP state election bill is an ‘attempt to suppress the black vote’ Trump closer to legal danger after court ruling on tax returns MORE on Jan. 6 could include “violent action in the streets” of Washington – and that could include armed protesters. But there were no signs of a violent uprising of the Capitol building.
“The district did not have any information indicating a coordinated assault on the Capitol,” he said in a prepared statement.
Contee said there were 300 unarmed members of the DC National Guard who initially deployed on the day of the attack, but only to provide traffic control and other non-interventional services. He noted that because Washington is not a state, only the president, and not DC officials, have the power to deploy the guard.
Contee emphasizes other limitations of the authority of the DC Police Force, including the fact that it has no jurisdiction to patrol or arrest in the Capitol without an express request from the Capitol Police. The request, Contee testified, came from Sund just before 1pm on January 6 and MPD arrived on the scene within minutes.
More than 1,100 district police officers would eventually respond to the attack, Contee said, and 65 of them were injured. A 66th would take his own life a few days later.
“These resources were scarce enough 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 attack on the American Capitol … in an attempt to stop the counting of ballot papers.”