MPD Officer Michael Dowling, on Bodycam in the Tunnel: the Flagpole "Was Like a Weapon"

The body-worn camera footage above is labeled, on its own face, Officer Michael Dowling — Axon Body 3. The timestamp burned into it reads January 6, 2021, 3:19 p.m. The place is the tunnel on the Capitol's Lower West Terrace.

I was in that tunnel. I was on the receiving end of what happened in it. So when I tell you this is one of the officers who assaulted me that day, I'm not reading it off a report — I lived it.

I'm not going to put words in anyone's mouth. I don't have to. Play the tape and listen.

Listen to what's on the tape

Over the noise, on a Metropolitan Police body-worn camera, you can hear them talking about a flagpole — and calling it, out loud, "like a weapon." You can hear one voice say he "got a few people with it," that he "kept hitting" someone who "wasn't doing anything," while another voice answers him: "you put in work," "you did well with that, sir." You can hear the laughing. You can hear the chopping — the karate-style noises on the downswing.

In the footage I flag what it shows: forty minutes later, that same flagpole — his "best weapon" — is still in his hand.

I set a second angle next to the bodycam so you can stand where I stood and see it from inside the tunnel too. Watch both. Decide for yourself what you're hearing.

How I found this

Here's the part I need you to sit with, because it's the whole point.

I assembled this at home, on release, waiting for trial. But the first thread of it I pulled in the D.C. jail — in a cell, with a pencil and a piece of paper, because that's what they give you in there. I wrote down what I couldn't afford to forget, and I carried that paper home.

Then I went into my own case evidence — the mountain of body-worn camera discovery they bury you in and dare you to make sense of — and I found it. The camera. The name. The day. I put it together myself.

That is the work I do. Nobody handed me this. I dug it out by hand — first from inside a cell, then from inside my own discovery.

Why being online is not a luxury for me

People ask why I fight so hard to keep my phone, my accounts, my access — why it matters this much to a man in my position.

This is why.

The ability to research, to publish, to put a name to a face to a date to a file — that access is the only reason this footage isn't still sitting in a folder nobody opened. It is how I defend myself. For a long stretch it was, very literally, how I stayed alive: it kept me tied to the people who kept me here.

So hear me on what it means when a court tells me I can't be online. To me that is not a rule about a website. It is a hand reaching for the one tool that lets me investigate the case against me, document the truth, and stay safe — and trying to pull it out of my grip. Strip a man of the ability to defend himself and you have not regulated him. You have exposed him. I treat any attempt to do it the way I would treat a threat to my life, because that is how it functions.

This is one tape. There are a lot more.

I'll say it the way the video says it: there's much more to come.

Names. Dates. Footage. Documents — found the same way I found this, patiently and by hand, out of the same system that tried to drown me in it. It is time to release all of it. This is where that starts.

Right of reply — every time, no exceptions

I give everyone the same deal, and I mean it.

Officer Dowling: if you believe I have any part of this wrong, my inbox is open — ryan@realryannichols.com. Send me your side and I will publish it here in full, unedited. The Metropolitan Police Department, anyone named, anyone watching: the same offer stands.

But the tape is the tape. Play it again.

— Ryan Nichols