Four Hours at the Capitol, review: a vivid account of the day the police were scared for their lives
One of the narratives accompanying the invasion of the Capitol on January 6 was that the police didn’t do much to stop it. Mobile phone footage showed officers calmly talking to the protesters. The insurrectionists encountered little resistance as they stormed the building. The police’s fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt appeared to be their first decisive act.
Four Hours at the Capitol (BBC Two) showed just how false that narrative was, through the testimonies of officers who were there and from video taken at the scene. We had seen only a fraction of this on the news reports at the time, and in viral social media posts. The police, it was plain from this gripping, vivid documentary, were vastly outnumbered and afraid for their lives.
Never mind the supposed comic elements – the “shaman” in his horned helmet, or the protester whose main act on getting inside the chamber was to hand out marijuana joints. Jamie Roberts’s film made clear that this was a war zone, and it took us right into the heart of the battle. In a tunnel-like entrance on the lower west terrace, 40-50 officers fought to hold back a crowd of thousands. “It looked like some medieval battle scene,” said officer Mike Fanone, who had turned up as part of the reinforcements. He was grabbed by the mob, beaten and tased, and was lucky to survive.
The anger of the protesters that day was clear but in this documentary they were a variety of calm, smug and deluded. It was the police and politicians who were the angry ones. Fanone’s partner, Jimmy Albright, was incandescent that the mob were calling him a traitor: “I have literally bled for this country in combat in Afghanistan… how f---ing dare you.”
It was startling to hear Democrat Congressman Ruben Gallego, an Iraq veteran, say of that day: “I was not going to die on the floor of the f---ing House of Representatives. I was not going to get taken out by some insurrectionist b------. My plan was to stab somebody in the eye or throat and take their weapon. Fight to survive.”
There was no authorial voice interrogating the contributors, so no one to ask the Trump supporters who were there that day if they had any regrets. But they were allowed to damn themselves, whether by declaring that Trump was “anointed by God” or sharing crazed conspiracy theories.
A wheelchair-bound follower of the far-Right Proud Boys declared that he was “the last man standing” outside the Capitol building. That was only because his fellow patriots had left him behind without a second thought.
