The police officers were taunted and beaten. Some were knocked unconscious and dragged down stone steps, tear gas stinging their throats, to chants of “U.S.A! U.S.A!” on Jan. 6, 2021, as hundreds, then thousands, swarmed the citadel of American democracy.

Now, more than five years later, and three years since Congress ignored its own deadline to install it, a memorial plaque recognizing the service of law enforcement that day is finally on display in the very building they defended from a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters intent on overturning his 2020 election loss.

In the predawn hours Saturday, around 4 a.m., staff with the Architect of the Capitol bolted the bronze plaque to a granite wall near an entrance on the west front, close to where the armed crowd had amassed and scaled scaffolding set up for the inauguration. They wheeled the plaque, stored in plywood, across the stone basement floor and guided it through the double doors. They raised the tribute with a jack table and began fixing it in place, the clang of their tools ringing out through otherwise empty hallways.

There was no announcement, no ceremony, no news cameras — just two employees on their routine overnight shift working while most of Washington slept. The quiet installation, which Congress ordered completed by mid-March 2023, marks the latest turn in the contested effort to remember Jan. 6, as Trump continues to reframe the riot as patriotic and the rioters as victims of a weaponized justice system.

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.....On the wall near the plaque, they affixed a QR code titled “Honored Law Enforcement.” A scan with a smartphone takes the viewer to a list of officers present that day. The list goes on for 45 pages.

By 4:25 a.m. they had finished. They packed up their tools and wheeled the plywood away, leaving the hallway empty once more. Outside, the air was damp and filled with birdsong, the darkness gradually receding with the dawn of a new day.