DC police officer says Capitol rioters tried to recruit him because he was white

Officers of colour, meanwhile, described being taunted with racist epithets

Members of the mob that stormed the Capitol on 6 January tried to recruit a Washington police officer to join them in their “white nationalist insurrection” because he was white, according to testimony heard during the first day of the 6 January committee in Congress.

Washington DC Metropolitan Police officer Daniel Hodges told the panel that members of the mob, which included white supremacists and far-right groups, asked if he was one of their “brothers” and whether he would join them.

"Some of them would try to, try to recruit me," he told the committee, after one member asked why the officer referred to the events of the day as a “white nationalist insurrection.” "One of them came up to me and said, ‘Are you my brother?’"

Officer Hodges also noted that the angry crowd was “overwhelmingly white males,” and that they treated him far differently from his fellow non-white officers, who faced what they called a “torrent” of racist abuse during the attack.

"People who associate with Donald Trump, I find more likely to subscribe to that kind of belief system," he added.

Capitol police office Harry Dunn told the investigative select committee in his statement that during the riot, it was the first time he was ever called the n-word in uniform, after he told the crowd of insurrectionists he had voted for Joe Biden.

"You hear that, guys, this n***** voted for Joe Biden!" he described one of the rioters saying.

Officers on the scene that day aren’t the only ones to link the attack on the Capitol to white violence. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outraged conservatives earlier this year when he said that “white rage” helped power the attack, and that reading critical race theory could help him understand why.

“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it,” he testified before Congress. “What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the constitution of the United States of America, what caused that? I want to find that out.”