‘Kill him with his own gun’: Police officers reveal what it was like to face MAGA mob
'It was difficult to offer any resistance when you're only about 30 guys going up against 15,000,' officer says
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Your support makes all the difference.A veteran of the police force for almost two decades almost had his gun stolen from him during the Capitol riots.
"Some guys started getting a hold of my gun and they were screaming out, 'Kill him with his own gun,'" DC Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone told CNN.
Office Fanone said was lying on the ground injured, after being tasered in the back of the neck several times, as rioters stole his badge, police radio and ammunition.
The 40-year-old father of four, usually a plain-clothed narcotics detective, left his desk when he heard what was happening at the Capitol and put on his new uniform for the first time that day.
As he was being battered by rioters, he considered using deadly force, but decided against it, thinking it wouldn't be long before he was outnumbered yet again.
"So, the other option I thought of was to try to appeal to somebody's humanity. And I just remember yelling out that I have kids. And it seemed to work," Mr Fanone told CNN. Some of the rioters protected him until help arrived.
"Thank you, but f*** you for being there," he said about the rioters who protected him.
"We were getting chemical irritants sprayed. They had pipes and different metal objects, batons, some of which I think they had taken from law enforcement personnel. They had been striking us with those," Mr Fanone said.
"And then it was just the sheer number of rioters ... It was difficult to offer any resistance when you're only about 30 guys going up against 15,000."
Officer Christina Laury of the Metropolitan Police got to the Capitol around 12:30 pm, as rioters were advancing. She said she was hit with pepper spray meant for bears.
"The individuals were pushing officers, hitting officers. They were spraying us with what we were calling, essentially, bear mace, because you use it on bears," she told CNN.
"Unfortunately, it shuts you down for a while. It's way worse than pepper spray. It seals your eyes shut ... You've got to spray and douse yourself with water. And in those moments it's scary because you can't see anything and have people that are fighting to get through."
While she was not beaten, she saw others being hit. "They were getting hit with metal objects. Metal poles. I remember seeing pitchforks. They're getting sprayed, knocked down," she said of her fellow officers.
Officer Daniel Hodges, who could be seen being crushed in a door in a video that was widely shared online, told CNN: "Some of them felt like we would be fast friends because so many of them have been vocal.
"They say things like, 'Yeah, we've been supporting you through all this Black Lives Matter stuff, you should have our back' and they felt entitled.
"They felt like they would just walk up there and tell us that they're here to take back Congress and we would agree with them and we'd walk in hand in hand and just take over the nation. But obviously that's not the case and it will never be the case."
Speaking about the moment when he was trapped in the doorway, Mr Hodges said: "There's a guy ripping my mask off, he was able to rip away my baton and beat me with it. He was practically foaming at the mouth ... these people were true believers in the worst way.
"Things were looking bad. I was calling out for all I was worth, and an officer behind me was able to get me enough room to pull me out of there and get me to the rear so I was able to extricate myself."
One anonymous officer told Buzzfeed News that he first found out that there could be violence from an Instagram screenshot sent by a friend.
“I found out what they were planning when a friend of mine screenshot me an Instagram story from the Proud Boys saying, ‘We’re breaching the Capitol today, guys. I hope y’all ready.’”
Black officers suffered racist abuse from the mob, including frequently being called the n-word, Buzzfeed News reported. Officers had been fighting off the mob for two hours when they finally broke through.
“That was a heavily trained group of militia terrorists that attacked us,” one officer said.
“They had radios, we found them, they had two-way communicators and earpieces. They had bear spray. They had flashbangs."
"They were prepared. They strategically put two IEDs, pipe bombs, in two different locations. These guys were military trained. A lot of them were former military." Pipebombs were found outside the DNC and RNC.
The officer said he encountered fellow police officers from around the country who were part of the mob.
“You have the nerve to be holding a Blue Lives Matter flag, and you are out there f****** us up,” the officer told part of the mob. One man “pulled out his badge and he said, ‘We’re doing this for you.’ Another guy had his badge. So I was like, ‘Well, you gotta be kidding.’”
Another anonymous officer told Buzzfeed News: “We were telling them to back up and get away and stop, and they’re telling us they are on our side, and they’re doing this for us, and they’re saying this as I’m getting punched in my face by one of them."
"That happened to a lot of us. We were getting pepper-sprayed in the face by those protesters, I'm not going to even call them protesters, by those domestic terrorists."
The officer said "some officers were catering to the rioters," and that seeing images of an officer taking selfies with rioters "hurt me the most because I was on the other side of the Capitol getting my ass kicked".
“If you’re going to treat a group of demonstrators for Black Lives Matters one way, then you should treat this group the same goddamn way. With this group, you were being kind and nice and letting them walk back out. Some of them got arrested but a lot of them didn’t. Everyone who came into that Capitol should have been arrested regardless if they didn’t take anything.”
A long-time Black officer of the Capitol Police told Buzzfeed News: “I sat down with one of my buddies, another Black guy, and tears just started streaming down my face. I said, ‘What the fuck, man? Is this America? What the fuck just happened? I’m so sick and tired of this shit.’”
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