A Trump mob carried out a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. They broke windows and doors as they illegally and unlawfully invaded the Senate, which was in a joint session with the House of Representatives.
They disrupted the business of the Congress and hung around all afternoon, and very few were arrested. Why was that? Joy Reid, MSNBC Host of the program, “Reidout,” nailed it as she compared the strikingly different police response when it comes to Black protesters versus these rioters.
I can go back to 2014 when I would appear on Rachel’s show as a correspondent when covering the Freddie Gray uprising in Baltimore. These were reactions to police taking Freddie Gray’s body and treating it like a rag doll, flinging him into the back of a police van, riding around with him in that van until the ragdoll broke—and he died in the back of a car being brutalized for no reason except that he made eye contact with a police officer as he rode his bike.
The uprisings that took place brought in a level of policing that I had never witnessed before. It looked like a war zone. Police brought in tanks, body armor, full-body rubber suits, full gear, enormous powerful weaponry. They were waiting menacingly, waiting to brutalize anyone who looked at them funny.
The level of force, the level of indiscriminate rudeness, cruelty, and hardness of those police officers was fierce. Almost every night, I would go on with you, Rachel, and describe what I saw. It was terrifying. And what terrified me in those moments in Baltimore were never the marchers. I was never afraid of the marchers. They just wanted justice. They didn’t think it was okay to kill a guy because he looked at the police. I was not afraid of them. I was afraid of the cops because they were menacing. They knew the marchers were coming every night. They marchers knew the curfew was coming… I was never scared of them.
I was afraid of the cops.
Claire (McCaskell) said these people today were unafraid of the cops. In our Capitol, which hadn’t been breached since the War 1812, these rioters could go inside, sit in Speaker Pelosi’s chair, take pictures of themselves and have them played on Fox News because they knew they were not in jeopardy. Because the cops are taking selfies with them and walking them down the steps to make sure they were not hurt—unlike how they treated Freddie Gray’s body.
White Americans are never afraid of the cops, even when they are committing insurrection, even when they are engaged in attempting to occupy our Capitol to steal the votes of people who look like me because in their minds they own the country, they own the Capitol, they own the cops—and people like me have no damn right to elect a president because we don’t get to pick the president. They get to pick the president; they own the White House, they own this country.
When you think you own a place, you are not afraid of the police. The police reflect back to them; we are with you; you are good. We are not going to hurt you because you are not them.
If this were a Black Lives Matter protest, people would already be shackled, arrested, or dead.
Put Cunningham on here. She’ll tell you how they treated her in Ferguson. Put Alicia Garza on here. She’ll tell you how they treated her at every Black Lives Matter march. Put Patricia Cullers on. She’ll tell you. They will tell you what it is like to protest peacefully and unarmed and how the police will treat you if you are Black.
