A Reporter’s Question: ‘Why Are You Talking to Me?’

NYTimes-Times Insider---by By Susan Dominus and Luke Broadwater

For a New York Times Magazine article on the impact of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol Police, officers shared their experiences for different reasons.​

It’s not uncommon, at some point in the interviewing process, for reporters to ask sources a simple question: “Why are you talking to me?” Sometimes — not always — the answer reveals information that deepens the understanding between source and reporter.

Police officers are known to be tight-lipped, wary of media, faithful to hierarchical rules about who can and can’t speak for the force, and likely to feel underappreciated for the dilemmas and challenges they face in a potentially dangerous job. So as we reported this weekend’s Times Magazine story about the aftermath of Jan. 6 in the lives of the United States Capitol Police officers, the question sometimes came to mind: Why did those officers and former officers agree to cooperate? (Or, at least, what was the reason they would offer?) The answers were as varied as the officers themselves, who had a range of political leanings, and who, not surprisingly, had different motivations for sharing their experiences.

For Harry Dunn, one of the first Capitol Police officers to speak to the press, his initial motive was to counter widespread criticism of the officers in the days immediately after the attack — to speak of how fiercely many of them fought, under unthinkable circumstances. “So many people fought so bravely,” Officer Dunn told Luke, adding, “They’re heroes.”

For Aquilino Gonell, a sergeant with the Capitol Police, speaking to the press was a way to raise awareness, among lawmakers as well as the public, about just how violent the attack was.

One officer’s wife, who asked that we use her middle name to protect her family’s privacy, shared the story of her husband’s extensive traumatic brain injury because, like Officer Dunn, she wanted to make sure the officers who fought bravely received credit. But she also wanted to see the focus of accountability land on the leadership of the Capitol Police — as opposed to on former President Donald J. Trump, for whom she had voted in the past.

Anton, who resigned from the force over the summer, asked that only his middle name be used, because he was still pursuing jobs in the federal government. He suspected that speaking to the press would be considered a mark against him by his possible future employers. But he still wanted to tell his story, a process he considered somewhat cathartic. “This has been robbed from me for so long,” he said, referring to a sense of agency, which he felt was missing from his job in the Capitol Police. “Saying my piece is therapy and my kind of closure for the whole thing.”

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The first time Susan spoke to Dominick Tricoche, an officer who resigned from the force in May, he said at the outset of the interview, “I’ve decided to tell you everything.” By everything, he meant the full extent of his struggles after the attack. When they first spoke, he was still recovering emotionally from a period of psychological distress. He went on to detail, among other things, an attempt he had made to take his own life. The reason he felt compelled to share that story was connected, in some ways, to the reason he became a Capitol Police officer: It gave him a sense of service, and it fulfilled a desire to want to help.

“We always put labels: They were the police officers; they were the rioters. But everyone was a person. And if this was going to help humanize that story instead of making it just a news event, then I had to be as open as possible,” said Mr. Tricoche, who has since enrolled in the College of the Atlantic to study creative writing.

He continued: “2020 especially was a year of crazy divisiveness, and a lot of that divisiveness came down to police behavior. And then you have a very controversial election. Any time you have conflict, you always look at the person on the other side as bad, as wrong — as not human. And that’s not the case. So I hoped that maybe just one person, a reader from either side, would read the piece and go, ‘These are human beings just like me.’”

Knowing why a source has agreed to speak does not always change the way an article is reported or written, but asking the question occasionally opens doors to surprising answers. It enriches reporters’ understanding of the people who are trusting them with their stories — and it helps journalists with their ultimate goal, which is to write a story that is true.