The cops needed only to defend the stairwell from above to contain the crowd.
Instead of staying on the high ground, the police defied all tactical logic by going to ground level and directly engaging the peaceful crowd.

They weren't trying to "contain" the crowd - which, again, was not peaceful as it had already overrun three separate layers of police barricades. They were trying to disperse it.

This wasn't a tactical military situation, where you can "defend" a fortified building by using deadly force at key chokepoints. This was a mob, a riot - and the key objective was to try to avoid a situation where a large press of people try to gain access to the building, where they only way to stop them would be to use deadly force rather than non-lethal crowd control methods. So yes, you absolutely engage the already-not-peaceful crowd to try to disperse them before they do what they did. Which is to use their overwhelming numbers to push into the Capitol building, as shown in the below photo (which is what I think he was describing)

I read the article, and reviewed the videos. These folks are upset because they were treated like a rioting mob that had breached the security perimeter, torn through police barricades, and overrun the television towers and scaffolding. The police deployed pretty standard mob-dispersal techniques - tear gas and other non-lethal methods. The J6 participants may feel that they were entitled to do all of this, and that having taken over all the area inside the security perimeter they should have been allowed to stay there without the police doing anything to disperse the crowd. But that's not a reasonable position, and they should neither have been surprised nor aggrieved when the police actually tried to do something to get them to leave.

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106820200-16...