Report: Park Police didn’t clear Lafayette Square protesters for Trump visit

When the U.S. Park Police led law enforcement officers into a crowd of mostly peaceful protesters outside Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020, including officers equipped with chemical irritants and officers on horseback, they did so as part of a plan made days earlier to build a fence around the park to protect officers, not to facilitate the visit minutes later by President Donald Trump to a nearby church, an inspector general’s report released Wednesday concluded.

The report also found that D.C. police officers fired tear gas at protesters as they moved away from the park toward 17th Street, the Park Police did not deploy tear gas on June 1, but did on previous days, and Bureau of Prisons officers fired pepper spray munitions from the park without provocation during the clearing. Investigators also found that the audio warnings issued by the Park Police before the operation were not widely heard by the crowd and mostly ineffective.