Officer repeatedly seen on camera in DC crackdown shows Trump agents' impunity

This piece was co-produced by Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket and Jacqueline Sweet, an independent investigative journalist. If you want to support The Handbasket’s 100% independent journalism, become a paid subscriber or leave a tip.

In Trump’s DC, one moment you’re hanging out with a friend while he eats some crabs, and the next you’re violently tackled to the ground by members of multiple law enforcement agencies. There is infrequently rhyme or reason to the violence proliferating in this wholly unnecessary takeover, other than being Black or Brown, and it’s happened both in broad daylight and the cover of darkness. But one thing appears to be certain: Agents are out for blood.

On August 21st, a video went viral showing half a dozen local DC and federal officers throwing a man onto a curb and bloodying his face. The DC resident who took the video told The Handbasket that she saw three men walking from the Minnesota Avenue Metro on Thursday who then stopped to take a break—one eating, one scrolling on his phone, and the one who was attacked holding an open can of alcohol. Among the many officers, a young, bearded, red-headed agent with “O’HANLON, P.” on the front of his bulletproof vest and “US PARK POLICE” on the back stood out. And when videos later emerged of various officers threatening bystanders at other points around DC, there he was again. So who is this Forrest Gump of federal agents and what does his impunity say about the mandate federal and local law enforcement believe Trump has given them?

As the witness filmed and attempted to reassure the bloodied man, O’HANLON, P. can be seen turning around and appears to attempt to knock her phone out of her hand. “Get out of my face, get out of my face, don’t shove a camera in my face,” O’Hanlon said to the woman filming. He then gave her what he called a “lawful order” to stay behind a line on the ground. The woman told The Handbasket that after the man was arrested, he was put in handcuffs for an hour before the officers even asked him for his name or identification. At some point she says additional ICE officers were called to the scene. 

“How many people and how they handled it was unacceptable,” the witness said.

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O’Hanlon, P. appears to be a 26-year-old US Park Police officer named Patrick Jude Michael O’Hanlon, according to government sources and an analysis of his emails and social media. He’s listed in the National Parks Service (NPS) internal directory as working in the Icon Protection Branch/Homeland Security Unit, a source confirms. And an email for a “Patrick J. O’Hanlon” is active on a federal Microsoft Teams NPS account.

According to the NPS website, officers with the Icon Protection Branch “patrol the monuments and memorials in downtown areas of the District of Columbia and inner city parks such as Dupont Circle and Franklin Park.” The Special Forces team in the unit is “responsible for crowd management and mitigation at First Amendment demonstrations, large-scale permitted special events, and other scheduled and unscheduled activities.” It’s not clear whether or not O’Hanlon is part of Special Forces.

A LinkedIn account for a Patrick O’Hanlon that was deleted at some point before Saturday lists positions at the National Park Service as a park ranger and emergency management specialist based in Silver Spring, Maryland. A phone number connected to the LinkedIn account belongs to a 26-year-old Silver Spring, Maryland resident named Patrick Jude Michael O’Hanlon who has posted about working at the NPS and as a firefighter and EMT on his Facebook and X accounts, whose photographs match park police officer P. O’Hanlon from this week’s viral videos. 

Our reporting found that O’Hanlon is a 2021 graduate of Mount Saint Mary’s University in Maryland. He has posted about his devout Catholicism, and appears to be a Donald Trump fan: In 2017, O’Hanlon was captured at Trump’s first inauguration festivities in DC decked out in his full Eagle Scouts uniform. The photographer wrote on his personal website of “the Boy Scout kid that looked like a Brownshirt.” That same year, O’Hanlon retweeted Trump saying Hilary Clinton is not above the law. 

When reached by phone on Friday via a number associated with his name, O’Hanlon confirmed he was the officer in the videos and said he was just doing the job he was told to do. He would not confirm or deny the biographical details we found for him. The NPS Public Information Officer did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment on O’Hanlon’s conduct and whether it fell within the purview of his job.

O’Hanlon popped up again on August 22nd in videos posted on social media by independent reporter Amanda Moore and The Handbasket’s Marisa Kabas: As a bystander at the Rhode Island Avenue Metro station called out to commuters “ICE is here,” Moore recorded O’Hanlon, along with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Metro Transit Police officers, forcing the volunteer to leave the station. (The video separately provided to Kabas shows the same.) O’Hanlon and the other officers claimed the volunteer was disrupting passengers entering and exiting the station. In this video, O’Hanlon can be heard issuing another so-called “lawful order” for her to leave. (Outside the station later that day, a protester asked him “How do you feel knowing the whole city hates you?” “The whole city doesn’t hate me,” he answered.)

That same bystander went back to the same station on Sunday to once again warn people of the reported presence of ICE, only to find O’Hanlon and approximately 10 other officers there once again. She tells The Handbasket that this time O’Hanlon took a photo of her license plate as she pulled up to the station, realized the parking spot she was attempting to park in wasn’t legal, and continued onto a legal spot. 

Moments later she recorded herself asking O’Hanlon why he did that. First O’Hanlon replies “No.” When she asks again, he shrugs his shoulders. When she asks a third time, he shoots back “Do you want a legal citation?” She explains she never actually parked there, but O’Hanlon is unfazed. “You just admitted to a traffic violation,” he tells her. “Do you want a legal citation?” After further prodding, he says “You have no reasonable expectation of privacy to your license plate.”

Another DC resident told The Handbasket that O’Hanlon stood out to her when she witnessed him around that same time period among a group of officers performing a sobriety test on an Amazon driver in Columbia Heights. As a crowd gathered around to watch, “He was yelling a bunch of stuff, saying ‘don’t talk to them [the masked ICE agents present] just talk to me,’” she said. “He was definitely putting on a show for the cameras.”

On Sunday the 24th, O’Hanlon was seen in photographs shared by a DC homeless advocacy group, part of a group of HSI, Metro, MPD and Treasury officers allegedly pulling people off public buses for suspected fare evasion. It’s unknown if the running tally of DC arrests promoted by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice (on last week, Bondi boasted of over 1,000 arrests) includes arrests for bus fare evasion or open container violations.

Sophia Cope, a Senior Staff Attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) civil liberties team and an expert on the legality of filming law enforcement, told The Handbasket that impeding someone’s legal filming is unconstitutional under the First Amendment, as O’Hanlon is apparently seen doing. Police are also not allowed to grab someone’s phone to review its contents without a warrant, nor are they allowed to force them to delete recordings or content. Cope and the EFF have written guidelines for how to safely, and legally, record ICE and other law enforcement officers with precautions.

The US Department of the Interior itself issued a memo in 2010 (which was reviewed by The Handbasket) that states, “It is the policy of the United States Park Police that members of the public who are not involved in an incident may be allowed to remain in proximity of a police stop, detention, arrest, or any other incident that occurs in public, so long as their presence is lawful and their actions, including verbal comments, do not unreasonably obstruct, hinder, delay, or threaten the safety or compromise the outcome of legitimate police actions and/or rescue efforts.”

The source who confirmed O’Hanlon’s employment by the NPS says Interior Secretary Doug Burnum, who oversees the NPS, is currently quite fixated on the unit in which O’Hanlon works. In an executive order signed by President Trump on Monday titled “Additional Measures to address the crime emergency in the District of Columbia,” he specifically calls to expand the power of the Park Police. 

“The Director of the National Park Service shall, subject to the availability of appropriations and applicable law, hire additional members of the United States Park Police in the District of Columbia to support the policy goals described in Executive Order 14333,” it states, referencing the earlier EO that declared a “crime emergency” in DC. “The United States Park Police shall ensure enforcement of all applicable laws within their jurisdiction, including the Code of the District of Columbia, to help maintain public safety and proper order.”

And in Trump’s televised Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Sec. Burgum gushed about Trump allowing a rule change so that US Park Police could engage in vehicle pursuits. “I was shocked to find out when we were talking to him, like, ‘oh, you pull somebody over and they just drive away and you can't pursue them?’” Burgum said. “And they said ‘no, we can't.’ We got that rule changed in 24 hours because of President Trump's leadership. The next night they had so much fun. They pulled people over.”

And in the end, fun really is the name of the game for Trump and his administration. It’s fun for them to see a majority-Democratic city like DC live in fear of violence and/or deportation; it’s fun to flood the trains and buses with armed law enforcement just because they can; it’s fun to unleash troops who understand that they will not be held accountable for their brutality (by this president, at least.) 

As Trump seeks to expand the powers of his many federal law enforcement agencies to other cities like Chicago and New York, the unbridled violence committed on his behalf will continue to flourish. Officer O’Hanlon isn’t unique in his behavior; the only thing that sets him apart is that he got caught on camera. And if the history of the Trump regime is any indicator, he may even be rewarded for it. 

Jacqueline Sweet is an independent investigative journalist whose work has been published in The Guardian, POLITICO and The Intercept. You can follow her on Bluesky. Leave her a tip here!