In more typical circumstances, some cities employ police on horseback. This provides visibility (the police can watch the crowd better — and the crowd is also hyper aware that the police are watching them). It’s generally seen as good crowd control and can help encourage people to behave better.
It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty effective.
If the Jan 6 crowd at the Capitol included about 300 police officers on horseback, I suspect that things would have been very quiet.
Instead, the crowd had 300 hidden agents encouraging people to do stupid stuff.
So it was a "manufactured" riot. The American People need to know so our Congress should be holding hearings on this subject.
If only Nancy Pelosi and the other anti-Trumper’s had actually wanted to deter any misbehavior by people who had attended Trump’s speech, they could have had LEOs on horseback. Even people who might have been wearing masks for nefarious reasons are not quite sure what a very big horse is about to do to them.
I remember attending a March for Life in Washington. During the entire day, I saw very few LEOs as there were usually no people misbehaving There was one group of about eight uniformed LEOs sitting on their horses away from the March just chatting with each other. Even if there had been anyone there who thought they might break any laws, they probably would have reconsidered having seen those large horses.