Yeah, I think that’s basically what I’m saying, K9.
I don’t know if I would say that the police are stupider than gravel; rather, I think what we have seen from the Capitol Police is the same thing we’ve seen over and over and over again in police department after police department, and from institutions generally. Police are a white institution, like most governmental and public institutions across this country. Police inherently have a much higher degree of trust in white people, and in particular white conservatives, than in non-whites and/or white liberals. Most of your cops are themselves whites who come from a working class, socially conservative background. Indeed, police everywhere on the planet tend to have an authoritarian psychological orientation, so pretty much everywhere you go on this earth, police officers are more likely to be people who naturally try to enforce rules, who are more interested in regulating the behavior of other people than your average person. Some just need a paycheck, but more often than not, police officers identify with like minded people, and it’s no secret that Trumpists are themselves authoritarians and traditionalists, and most likely, from a similar cultural background.
So my take is, back in the summer, when the BLM protests were going on, were first of all inherently put off by the message, which is pretty predictable. People in power don’t like being criticized, right? In this case, the police officers themselves have become the subject of a movement that challenges their long-held authority and charges that they have abused their public trust, and have therefore lost their trustworthiness – nobody likes hearing that message, even if they acknowledge it’s true (which they do not of course). But there’s naturally some degree of bias that officers held coming into that situation.
Worse yet, the political leaders (i.e. the Trump administration) who direct policies and are responsible for oversight of their conduct were also criticized. Consequently, Trump and his minions had an incentive to incite the police to approach the situation in a political manner. Moreover, it is no secret that Trump has romanticized old school roughhousing that these police departments have been criticized for, and Trump very much wanted police to express their appreciation for his loyalty, which they probably did in their own way in some cases. So there’s that – that explains why they had such a police presence back in the summer. The cultural distance between them and the protesters inevitably created a gap in trust. Moreover, because the police didn’t like the message, they were motivated to demonstrate their authority to their critics. I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s what it was.
By contrast, in dealing with the insurrectionists, these police officers probably thought that they could trust their fellow white man “not to go too far,” which is why they gave them more latitude than they gave BLM and other protesters. Unfortunately for them, they got burned; they quickly found out that they shouldn’t have trusted them. They completely misjudged the situation, with the caveat that it is possible that some individual police officers might have in fact secretly been part of this whole QAnon thing and acted in concert with the mob. I concede that some individuals within the department could be radicalized, but I think the department as a whole, particularly the leadership, simply thought “Meh, just angry white guys (like me). I mean, they might beat up some n*****s and some punk snowflakes, <heh heh!> But they wouldn’t do anything outrageous like storm the Capitol.”