I used to work the cop beat at The Washington Post. I covered the overnight shift of the Metro Washington Police Department, and the day shift of the sheriff’s department of neighboring Montgomery County. But when you cover law enforcement in that area, you cover countless police beats: Secret Service, FBI, CIA, etc.

But when I tried to get a “ride along” with The Capitol Police when I joined the paper in the early 90’s, my editors told me not to waste my time: the CP, they said, was so bureaucratic I would spend more time getting government clearance than I would covering real news. Besides, the lead cop reporter told me, they were mall cops anyway.

And true enough, I rarely came across them in crime scenes, though I bumped into them more than a few when I took my motorcycle though the picturesque city at night. In the early 90’s, you could park only a couple blocks from the Capitol, and ascend the stairs leading to a sweeping vista of the city.

They may have been mall cops, but they had the authority of any other cop in their jurisdiction: They carried guns, drove patrol bikes and cars, and ran traffic checkpoints if there was any disturbance of note in Northwest DC, where lawmakers live.

In other words, these weren’t Paul Blart wannabes. If anything, they were Secret Service washouts: capable, if not superlative.

And they handle their share of real crime. Because they’re responsible for lawmakers’ safety, they have to patrol NW DC just like Metro police, and the crime there is real. They have seen their share of terrorism, from gunmen seeking lawmakers in the Capitol to a shooting at The Holocaust Museum.

So how were they so ill-prepared for Wednesday’s attempted overthrow?

I suggest they weren’t.

All it took was five minutes of TV viewing Wednesday to see that the CP were in no mood to enforce law during the riot. Social media provide countless pictures and videos of insurrectionists and the CP posing for selfies, and the CP ushering in seditionists as if they were leading a White House tour.

Which they may have been trying to do. Because the CP know how to secure a perimeter when it is instructed to do so.

Perhaps it never received instructions. Remember: The chief of police, Steven A. Sund, took office in 2019. He resigned in disgrace a day after the riot, having only described his department’s response as “valiant” on his way out.

How Trumpian. And would it surprise anyone if Trump left a Capitol Police force understaffed and overwhelmed in the face of a rally he promised to be “wild?”

After all, the president needed security to be weak to deliver the chaos he wanted unleashed on lawmakers counting electoral ballots. Perhaps he found his own Watergate burglars.