I come out and this man is a Capitol police officer. But the story doesn’t end. It’s a Capitol police officer, there was no partner, [he] was not yelling, you know ‘Capitol Police, etc., etc.’ But then it didn’t feel right, because he was looking at me with a tremendous amount of anger and hostility. And things weren’t adding up. Like there was no partner there and no one was yelling, he wasn’t yelling ‘this is Capitol Police, this is Capitol Police!’ And he was looking at me in all of this anger and hostility and at first, in my brain, and in my mind, I’m thinking ‘OK I just came from this super intense experience just now, maybe I’m reading into this. Maybe I’m projecting something onto him, maybe I’m just seeing anger but he’s not trying to be angry.’ But I talked to G, my legislative director, after the fact and he said ‘No, I didn’t know if he was there to help us or hurt us either’ and G was actually like this man came with so much hostility that G was sizing him up and didn’t know if he was going to have to fight him. Like that is how aggressive the situation was in that moment and we couldn’t even tell, we couldn’t read if this was a good situation or a bad situation. Like so many other communities in this country, just that presence doesn’t necessarily give you a clear signal if you’re safe or not. And so the situation did not feel okay.
[Post edited by JMHoo at 02/03/2021 1:55PM]