Current or former police officers and military personnel were prominent in the front lines pushing back the barricades, and among those who got inside. Later investigations concentrated on persons identified by photos and videos or their own on-line posts; among these about one-fifth of the hundred or so investigations were police or military. Most prominent of all was Ashli Babbitt, veteran of many deployments in Iraq, who was a security officer (i.e. military police) in the Air Force.
Two comments: first, it is typical in riots that the great majority of the crowd are onlookers and noise-making supporters; only about 10 percent or less of the persons seen in riot photos are actually doing something violent, engaging the other side. It may well be the case that those who carry the battle are specialists in violence, as Charles Tilly calls them, tough guys, athletes and weapons specialists on either side of the law. (One of those charged at the Capitol was an Olympic gold-medalist swimmer.)
Second: in the overall context of recent years and months, it is not surprising that some substantial portion of American police, as well as military, are disgruntled. Among veterans and active-duty military, the suicide rate has been at a peak; the psychological toll of fighting for almost 20 years in seemingly endless wars in the Middle East; a professional (non-draftee) force repeatedly deployed, isolated from the majority of the home population; wars where victories repeatedly proved temporary and reversible; and where news publicity concentrated more on atrocities against the enemy than on American accomplishments. Since a substantial portion of police are veterans (the job where their training is most relevant), there is a bond of sympathy between the two occupations.
The police themselves have experienced the historically strongest wave of criticism in the media and from liberal politicians. Starting in the 1990s when amateur video of violent police arrests became publicized, protest has accelerated with the proliferation of mobile-phone cameras, CCTV, and near-instantaneous propagation through the Internet. Police shootings and violent arrests have resulted in a series of protest demonstrations nationwide periodically dominating the news cycle since Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, Baltimore in 2015, and others. The most intense protests were those starting in late May 2020, in the midst of dissention over the COVID shut-down; these were the most widespread and long-lasting ever, extending into September and beyond in hot spots such as Seattle and Portland. More than in any previous protests, most news media supported these Black Lives Matter protests and related actions; publicizing and endorsing their calls to defund the police; blaming local police for racism; blaming violence on Federal intervention by the Trump administration; downplaying arson and attacks on police stations, courthouses, and government buildings. Many police felt they were being unfairly blamed for the actions of a few, with little understanding for doing a tough job in a period of sharply rising homicide in minority neighbourhoods.
In the context of an election campaign, both parties rallied to the issue: Democrat politicians on the whole endorsed BLM demands for whole-sale revision not only of policing but the historical legacy of slavery and racism. A wave of tearing down Civil War statues of Confederates expanded into renaming and expunging almost anyone in US history who could be implicated in slave-holding, words or deeds detrimental to Native Americans, or European settlement of North America in general. These included Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, and Teddy Roosevelt. In June 2020, in the midst of the protests over the death of George Floyd, the Democrat controlled House of Representatives voted to change the District of Columbia into a state renamed Douglass Commonwealth, replacing Christopher Columbus with the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Corporations were pressured into re-education programs at which employees were told to avow their guilt in being white.
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