PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Civil rights leaders are calling out the response by law enforcement to Wednesday’s violent mobs at the U.S. Capitol for what it is: a double standard.
Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were met with overwhelming force from law authorities across the country, including tear gas, rubber bullets, physical assaults, and thousands of arrests.
But the siege of the U.S. Capitol was quite the opposite: Hundreds of Trump supporters breached and vandalized the building. Several weapons and explosive devices were seized. But there were barely any arrests.
“There are two Americas in this country,” said Rev. Kenneth Huston, president of the NAACP Pennsylvania State Conference. “These folks are mostly white. They came from all over the country.
“The part that I wrestle with is how come there wasn’t better preparation.”
The thousands of Capitol building rioters — many who were egged on by the president’s speech at a Wednesday afternoon rally over his election loss — heard a much more compassionate message from their leader, albeit a defiant one.
“I know your pain, I know your hurt,” President Donald Trump said in a now-deleted video posted to his Twitter account. “You have to go home, now. … We love you. You’re very special.”
President-elect Joe Biden echoed civil rights leaders’ sentiments, saying the double standard is evident.
“If there had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday,” he said, “they would have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol.”
“When Black people protest for our lives, we are all too often met by National Guard troops or police equipped with assault rifles, shields, tear gas and battle helmets,” the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation said in a statement. “When white people attempt a coup, they are met by an underwhelming number of law enforcement personnel who act powerless to intervene, going so far as to pose for selfies with terrorists.”
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“For them to be met with the ability to take selfies with the Capitol police — this is beyond reproach,” added Rev. Mark Tyler of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, who regularly organizes protests.
He noted a heavy law enforcement presence — even the National Guard — is a normal response to Black and brown protesters, even when there is no violence.
“The act of just showing up to protest has often led to being tear-gassed, being arrested, being detained, being beaten,” he said.
“The police presence is locked and loaded before we even get there,” echoed Erika Almiron, a longtime immigrants’ rights advocate in Philadelphia. She has little faith that the mob will be prosecuted.
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Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, too, described the Capitol mobs as the last bastion of white privilege. He believes the response from law enforcement would have been very different had the scenario been flipped.
“Can you imagine thousands of Black people attacking the Capitol building? They would have opened fire. There’s no doubt in my mind there’s a double standard about how people are treated relative to law enforcement and in other areas of our country,” he said.
The Capitol insurrection isn’t the first time law enforcement has been criticized for its response efforts, especially within the past year.
However, the response to the mayhem is consistent with a long pattern of society’s coddling of racists and downplaying the violent white supremacist ideology that routinely places the grievances of white people above those of their Black, often disenfranchised and downtrodden countrymen and women.
Since the founding of democracy in the blood and secession of the American Revolution, white people’s destructive and obstructionist conduct has been couched in patriotism. It’s been a fundamental part of a national myth about whose dissent and pursuit of redress for grievance is justified, and whose is not.
Adding to the cruelty of it all, some observers have noted, is the Capitol building’s history. It was built with help from enslaved Africans, whose blood and sweat later allowed the union to meet there and strategize its battle against pro-slavery Confederates. On Wednesday, images emerged showing custodial staffers of color in the Capitol sweeping up the shards of glass and trash left behind by the rioters.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson said the people who violated the Capitol on Wednesday should not be seen as patriotic.
“This is not protesting or activism; this is an insurrection, an assault on our democracy, and a coup incited by President Trump,” Johnson said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.