Andrea Cabral, Massachusetts' former secretary of public safety, told Boston Public Radio on Thursday that while the Capitol Police were clearly overwhelmed by the sheer number of pro-Trump extremists attempting to gain access to the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, questions about law enforcement conduct throughout the incident remain.
"You read all the initial reports that (rioters) stormed the barricades, which I think they did at some parts of the Capitol," Cabral said. "But it's hard to look at that footage where they're literally let in, and there are at least three Capitol Police that appear to be letting them get access to the Capitol."
Cabral questioned whether some officers may have supported the pro-Trump extremists, citing a federal report that detailed white-supremacist infiltration of law enforcement agencies. She said Congress should conduct an investigation into how the Capitol was breached and the totality of events on Wednesday.
Cabral said law enforcement agencies — especially when coordinating with federal agencies — always have some level of intelligence about protests and incidents.
"I'm wondering where the intelligence is," she said, noting the police response just didn't match the level of threat. "They organized this through social media."
Capitol Police have organized a bigger response for far more peaceful events in the past, Cabral said, like the Million Woman March and the protests over George Floyd's death in the summer.
"The idea that you could know that you're dealing with Trump supporters in particular, who he's been churning up, you know who you're dealing with," she said. "So that's what makes this particularly disturbing ... How on that day this could have developed the way it did, and everybody had been so vulnerable?"
