The Metropolitan Police are good at kettling; see, for example, the Swann Street Siege during protests this summer. The objective was to arrest every protestor. That so many people just walked away is mind boggling.
Underestimating the police necessary is a form of allowing this to happen.
Yeah, maybe there were individuals holding the line, but the police definitely, irrefutably allowed this to happen.
As a practical matter, what should the police officer have done in this situation, outnumbered in a potentially hostile crowd?
I'm agnostic on what was actually going on here. I feel cautious about how narrative quickly outpaces the evidence to support it. And I'm honestly not so concerned here about what individual cops do, but whether there was a coordinated conspiracy to insurrection. A coup.
Here is what I believe. This is really very Trump. He riles up the crowd, says he'll go lead them up to the steps of the Capitol, but then gets in his limo and goes to the White House instead. Perhaps he gets the assistance of the capitol police, but that is not established. But he is slow or refuses to provide them National Guard backup (apparently it was Pence who got it done, going around Trump).
All of this is to get a coup with plausible deniability.
I might be wrong.
If there's evidence that you broke into a building anywhere in Washington, like, your face or outfit matching 100% the one of someone that was seen on national TV desecrating the building, the Metro police has cause to arrest you anywhere in Washington. There's so much precedent to this it's completely mind-blowing they didn't do anything. If it was so easy to get away with storming the Capitol we would already have a hippie commune in there. The Capitol Police is a joke.
This was the chance for the government to show a response of hollywoodesque proportions and they didn't. This makes the US government look like a joke, it's not a functional democracy. If the government actually relied of this nut-jobs to function, as in like if Trump was actually throwing a coup, it's understandable to act in this way. But the fact that no one on the Metro decided to go all in against this clowns is something that I can't understand.
The crazy progressives that think that Trump is literally the reincarnation of Hitler are saying that it's because they are white and this is Trump's paramilitary. I thought that they were crazy living in their own reality but after seeing how they got away with storming the Capitol I'm starting to think that the woke conspiracy theories are truer than I thought.