Cmdr. Robert Glover of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department was severely outnumbered on Jan. 6, when thousands of insurrectionists stormed the Capitol.
At 1:13 p.m., he asked for backup.
“Hard gear at the Capitol! Hard gear at the Capitol!” Glover shouted into his radio. He had arrived moments earlier at the request of the Capitol Police, who themselves were overwhelmed. The Capitol grounds were already overtaken by the MAGA crowd, who were determined to violently overturn the 2020 election results that declared Joe Biden the winner. The insurrectionists on the west side of the grounds grew to at least 9,400 people, outnumbering cops by more than 58 to 1.
At least 17 times in 78 minutes ,Glover asked for backup, according to a Washington Post analysis.
The Post worked together with a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to analyze imagery to figure out how many people were outside of the Capitol at different moments. Additionally, the Post reviewed radio communications and synchronized them with hours of footage. The Post also used testimony and interviews with police officials to understand how weak preparation and planning affected that day.
The project shows how the dearth of police force, weapons and protective gear impacted the breakdowns in the response to the mob.
Here is more on how the Post reconstructed the events of Jan. 6:
To visualize those numbers more clearly, The Post created a 3-D model of the Capitol grounds that approximated the crowd from a bird’s-eye view using data from the researchers’ crowd-counting software.
The audio recordings primarily capture the communications from Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, or MPD. The recordings were turned over to Congress during Trump’s impeachment.
At 12:53 p.m., video shows, protesters were breaking through a perimeter of mesh fencing on the west side of the Capitol and beginning to advance toward the inaugural stage.
In footage reviewed by The Post, Glover and his team of at least 30 MPD officers, identifiable by their yellow-sleeved jackets, can be seen arriving at 1:12 p.m. Within minutes, police managed to push back the protesters and set up a new barrier.
But officers quickly suffered injuries as the mob grew in size and became more violent, according to video and audio recordings.
Here is the 18-minute video of how things looked that day: