How police failures let a violent insurrection into the Capitol
Decisions made long before rioters stormed Congress cast the die for the security collapse, which played out in critical points analyzed by USA TODAY.
Cara Kelly, Daphne Duret, Ramon Padilla, Erin Mansfield, Stephen J. Beard and Jayme Fraser, USA TODAY
Published
8:52 pm UTC Jan. 15, 2021
President Donald Trump was still in the midst of an incendiary speech outside the White House last Wednesday when some of his supporters began milling around the front of the U.S. Capitol a mile and a half away.
More followed in waves, their ranks soon multiplying into an angry crowd of thousands who felled the temporary perimeter fencing as if it were made of toothpicks and charged toward the marbled facade.