I don’t see it that way. The police on scene would have had little to no part in the planning of security for this event. People who called those shots weren’t actually the ones out there dealing with it.

They were completely understaffed. When you’re that low on manpower, you don’t make arrests if you can avoid it, one cop going in with an arrest is another cop off the street, who now is also no longer assisting with crowd control. Cost benefit analysis.

These cops would have had trouble making arrests whether they wanted to or not. Despite that fact they still made multiple arrests and as far as we can tell, continue to.

This was a failure of planning administratively. If the number of forces who had reached out to Cap Police to assist weren’t initially turned away, you could have had enough for on scene dedicated arrest teams, skirmish lines of riot police who just focused on managing the crowd and didn’t have to also try and grab arrests here and there, etc.

Here (until mutual aid was finally requested) you had cap PD guys in regular patrol uniforms running around putting “fires” out and running to the next one.