In 2016 when a protester burned an American flag outside the Republican Convention in Cleveland, the man who would become the leader of the far-right Proud Boys received a pass from the cops. Joseph Biggs attacked the protester, but in the end cops would falsify their reports and charge the flag burner. The city later paid $225,000 for falsifying the report, but it empowered Biggs to carry on, according to The New York Times. The same thing happened in Portland, Oregon in 2018, when another rising Proud Boy star got away with a similar assault, with police siding with Ethan Nordean rather than the man he was videotaped assaulting. Now both Biggs and Nordean are under investigation for inciting the Jan. 6 insurgency on Capitol Hill, and the Times report suggests that had they been stopped earlier, the violence might have been averted. “Local police officers have appeared at times to side with the Proud Boys, especially when they have squared off against leftists openly critical of law enforcement,” the Times reported. “Some local officials have complained that without guidance from federal agencies, their police departments were ill equipped to understand the dangers of a national movement like the group.”