Officer Michael Fanone was not assigned to the Capitol for January 6. He rushed to the riot to give help where he could. He was dragged down the Capitol steps, beaten with an American flag, heard someone in the mob shout, “Kill him with his own gun.”
Officer Eugene Goodman, alone and isolated, faced a part of the mob on the steps that led to the Senate floor. He used his own body to lure them away from the open doors where the Senate was in session counting Electoral votes. If he had not been successful, it is probable that the Secret Service would have drawn their weapons, and in attempting to protect VP Pence, then presiding, would have had to open fire. Some members of the mob were armed. No one can say how many would have died.
When I started watching and first saw that flow of the mob up the Capitol steps, Trump flags flying, I thought of the assault of the Bolsheviks on the Winter Palace, of Nazi Brown Shirts rioting in Berlin, and as the day wore on I thought of hoplites and phalanxes as the police fought hand to hand for hours at building entrances and on stairwells. The mob came at the police with bear spray, baseball bats, flagpoles, batons, fire extinguishers, metal poles torn from scaffolding, tear gas, fists, helmets, plexiglass shields — any blunt object they could find.
And I thought of my father.
As far as my research has taken me, and it has taken me a long, long way deep into his 35 year career, my father never had to face anything like January 6. He encountered every other kind of threat but not a full blown mob attack.
My father died in 2004. At 15, in 1929, as the oldest son, he dropped out of school to go to work to support his mother and brothers and sisters because his father had died suddenly as a result of a terrible accident. He scrambled to find a foothold until 1938 when he became a Pennsylvania State Policeman. Before his marriage in 1946, he regularly sent a large percentage of his pay back to his mother to help keep his family together. During the War he raided gatherings of the Nazi Bund and was part of a flying squad of Troopers organized to fight a German invasion force. He was an honorable man who believed in order and in the law.
The last four years have crystalized, again, the troubling nature of policing in America — how too many officers are poorly screened and trained, how often the police are used to occupy communities as opposed to protecting and serving them, how police unions prevent reform, how Departments can be infiltrated by white supremacists. There were police officers in the Trumpist mob who fought against the police officers battling the assault.
However, I also keep thinking of a letter in response to a Times article about the Insurrection, a letter from the husband of a police officer who said that “No one mortal can do the job.”
We ask everything of police officers — that they be counselors, warriors, priests, defenders of protestors, defenders of the status quo, that they take abuse and not return it, that they be ready to use deadly force but only under very specific circumstances, that they both defuse potential violence and that they exercise violence on behalf of the State. We send them into crime scenes drenched in blood, to accident scenes of great carnage. How many times a week do they encounter victims of predators, victims of abuse, suffering women, suffering children? We expect them to sacrifice their one and only life on our behalf. And after all that, we ask them to remain calm, measured, and always in control of their emotions and actions.
I cannot separate my memories and my emotions from what I saw on January 6. Memory is a sympathetic instrument. My father has been dead for 16 years but I imagined him there, the ghost come back in uniform. Whatever his flaws, everything I have discovered about him makes me certain that he would have been one of the cops protecting the doors and hallways and stair wells of the Capitol. He was an honorable man.
Officer Daniel Hodges of the DC Metro Police, caught on camera being crushed by the mob against a door, one man wrenching off his gas mask, later beaten with his own nightstick, had this to say later in an interview with NBC “If it wasn’t my job I would’ve done that for free. It was absolutely my pleasure to crush a white nationalist insurrection … We’ll do it as many times as it takes.”
My father would have liked Officer Hodges. I think he would have been happy to stand by his side.
