TL;DR: the crowd surrounded the officer. He attempted to drive out of the crowd, not into it.
Allow me to provide the context that CNN omitted:
Since COVID started, western Washington has seen a lot of misbehavior on the roads: people driving over 100 mph on the interstate, people driving twice the speed limit on city streets, and crowds of "Fast & Furious" fans (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_%26_Furious) gathering to race in the street, make noise, and generally act like children. The first two types of behavior tapered off after coverage from local news outlets and aggressive ticketing by LE.
The third is growing. At first, these people gathered late on weekend nights in warehouse districts away from people. Now they're racing in more populated areas, including a couple of rallies in downtown Seattle, blocking off stretches of highway to race, and racing through residential neighborhoods. This has also gotten a fair amount of coverage from local news outlets, including when these guys do doughnuts while surrounded by a crowd and injure onlookers when a driver loses control. Again, if these folks confined this activity to the edges of town, I doubt that anyone would care.
This crowd chose to block the intersection of Pacific Avenue, the biggest street in downtown Tacoma, and 9th Avenue, one of the biggest arterials in the city. When the police showed up, the crowd surrounded an officer's vehicle and began to beat on it. The officer hit the siren and lights then tried to drive out of the problem. That's where CNN picks up the story.
With any luck, the Tacoma PD can leverage some of the new support for using facial recognition technology to identify and arrest the rioters at the Capitol to sort out this mess. I'd bet that there were any number of outstanding warrants in that entire crowd, and especially among those who chose to assault the officer's vehicle.
But we'll have to wait and see whether what's good for the goose is also good for the gander.
Okie John