One year ago today, Mike Fanone, a plainclothes narcotics officer with the DC Metropolitan Police Department, reported to work and answered the call to the Capitol.
What happened next is well known by now: a Trump-voting redneck cop was beaten nearly to death by rioters brandishing Blue Lives Matter flags and calling him a traitor.
Fanone didn’t have to be there—he voluntarily deployed, wearing his 10-year-old uniform for the first time. He received arguably the most severe non-lethal injuries of any officer that day. But it was what he did next that made him extraordinary.
He’d voted for Trump in 2016 because he was tired of Democrats’ anti-police rhetoric. So when he saw commentators questioning the police response to the Capitol, he got pissed and decided to do something.
He decided to speak up—in the Washington Post a series of network appearances, a conversation with @CNN‘s @donlemon.
Fanone believed he was sticking up for his fellow cops. He went to Congress to confront the Republicans trying to whitewash the insurrection, particularly the 21 Reps who voted against medals for the officers who defended them.
None would meet with him. One of them wouldn’t even shake his hand.
Democratic politicians said the right things but didn’t necessarily rush to embrace him. The DC mayor’s office sent catering, with no note, and eventually honored the MPD responders at a regular municipal employee appreciation day, like high-performing sanitation workers.
For months, the White House didn’t respond to a letter he sent, though @PressSec acknowledged it was received. A few days after I started asking why—the day Fanone appeared on the cover of @TIME—he and his fellow officers were finally honored at a Rose Garden ceremony.
“We cannot allow the heroism of these officers to be forgotten,” @POTUS said that August day. “We have to understand what happened—the honest and unvarnished truth. We have to face it. That’s what great nations do, and we are a great nation.”
The officers met with the President before the ceremony, and Biden singled Fanone out for praise. He replied, “Why didn’t you answer my letter?” Biden chuckled and said, “You’re a tough one.”
But the hardest thing for Fanone was the response from his fellow cops—the ones he thought he was sticking up for. They called him names behind his back. They stopped returning his calls. Even the detective assigned to investigate his assault talked shit.
After he testified before the Jan. 6 Committee, cop forums lit up with right-wing memes calling him a liberal plant.
The Trump-supporting @GLFOP union, which often defends police against liberal politicians, has repeatedly refused to denounce the GOP pols who downplay Jan. 6—even as it defends some off-duty officers who participated in the insurrection.
(They did, at least, denounce @gregkellyusa
When Fanone was cleared to return to work in September, he was assigned to a desk job in a civilian department—for his own protection. When he went to the First District to clear out his old locker, his former brothers-in-arms taunted him: “Suck any liberal dicks lately?”
I’ve thought a lot about this: Was Jan. 6 an attempted coup or just a police breakdown? If the police had been properly prepared, Jan. 6 would have been just another rally, a day no one remembers.
I wasn’t surprised that Trump tried to overturn the election, summoned his followers to DC or even sicced them on the Capitol, but I was shocked they got in the building.
What Fanone made me realize was that the police breakdown and the attempted coup were the same thing. Jan. 6 was a test of which side the police were on: Trump’s, or America’s? Not all of them passed the test.
Speaking out was therapeutic for Fanone, but he also saw it as a continuation of his service, the same way officers regularly go to court to testify against the criminals they’ve arrested. Telling the story of what happened is how justice gets done.
Fanone came to realize that it was lies that caused Jan. 6, lies he felt a responsibility to combat. His outspokenness helped embolden others, like @SergeantAqGo and @libradunn, to speak out and keep speaking out.
Last week, Fanone retired from the force and became a CNN analyst. He doesn’t have much hope that those who instigated Jan. 6 will be brought to justice. He fears something like it could happen again. He often feels hopeless about whether he’s making a difference.
But he’s determined to try.
Originally tweeted by Molly Ball (@mollyesque) on January 6, 2022.
I have worried about the right wing cop problem forever, but I thought after January 6th they might get a clue about their supposed allies. But it appears that was too optimistic.
If this devolves into more violence in the next few years as it seems poised to do, I have a strong feeling that the police are going to be, at best, divided and at worst totally on the other side. The military could go that way too. The radicalization of the right wing over the past couple of decades is not confined to the civilian population. In fact, the uniformed institutions are among the most likely to be radicalized with all the militarization of them that’s taken place over the past couple of decades of war.
Think about the cops who gave Rittenhouse water and thanked him and his armed yahoos for being in the streets. Or the ones who put on red MAGA hats and took selfies with Donald Trump. Whatever apolitical professionalism we may have thought these institutions had has been badly frayed.
It is a serious danger and very worrisome. If the attacks on the police on January 6th weren’t enough to shake their loyalties then I’m not sanguine that anything will be. If something like January 6th happens again I don’t know what will happen.