A police officer who battled the rioters in the Capitol last month was stunned by the racist slurs hurled at him, he said in an emotional interview Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“I got called a [racist slur] a couple dozen times … protecting this building,” said Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn. One woman spewing abuse was wearing a “pink MAGA shirt,” he recalled.
“Is this America? What the hell just happened?” he asked a fellow officer when it was over.
“I got angry, I got sad, I got hurt,” Dunn said.
“Everybody wants to say that it was about politics — but [there] was a large number of people in that crowd that were racist,” added the 13-year police veteran.
“They beat police officers with Blue Lives Matter flags. They fought us. They had Confederate flags in the U.S. Capitol.”
When he saw the Blue Lives Matter flags, Dunn thought: “We got dozens of officers down … and you got the nerve to be holding a Blue Lives Matter flag?”
Amid the chaos, he was gasping for breath in the pepper spray and bear mace, with blood on his knuckles, Dunn recounted. At one point he was so overcome by what was happening that he broke down in tears.
Dunn said police were battling people who were obviously “prepared for a fight,” with gas masks, bulletproof vests, two-way radios and body armor. “They were ready to go,” he said. “I was scared. I was absolutely scared.”
He added: “We had our guns out … and I’m thinking: ‘All these people out there, they’re armed, too.’ And I’m like: ‘I’m gonna get shot. They’re gonna take me out.’”
They “were terrorists,” Dunn said. “They tried to disrupt this country’s democracy — that was their goal. And you know what? Y’all failed,” Dunn said.
Check out the full interview in the video up top.
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