Briggs testified the following morning.
He spoke more softly than he had in the corridor. Price guided him through his service record, courthouse duties, and the difficulty of locating people who did not always remain where staff expected them.
Some of what he said was true.
Courthouses were crowded. Lists changed. People sometimes gave false names. Security staff encountered genuine risks that visitors and lawyers might never see.
None of those facts identified me as Talia Brooks.
Briggs said he believed I matched a general description and became more suspicious when I declined the physical identification request.
He said he had been attempting to control an uncertain situation.
I heard the word control so often that I began noting each use on a blank page.
Paul put a hand beside the page, and I stopped.
This was not my cross-examination.
Across the room, a witness waiting outside the session looked through the glass before a staff member directed her to the proper seat. Ordinary arrangements continued around the testimony: water refilled, exhibits numbered, a break scheduled for someone who needed medication. The case carried my injury, but the process belonged to more people than my need for an answer.
Lin began with the dispatch recording.
Briggs acknowledged his voice. He maintained that he did not absorb the full description because attention in an active courthouse could be divided.
She distinguished that explanation from the earlier account involving radio interference.
He said the phrase had not expressed his meaning precisely.
Lin did not argue about the phrase for ten minutes. She moved to the available checks.
“Did you call the extension Judge Archer supplied?”
“No.”
“Did you contact Courtroom 5B?”
“No.”
“Did you ask dispatch to repeat the description?”
“No.”
“Did you ask a clerk whether she worked there?”
“No.”
“Did you consult the directory outside the lift?”
He looked toward Price.
“No.”
“What information would have caused you to question your initial identification?”
Briggs hesitated.
“Valid identification.”
“Only the card?”
“I needed to know who she was.”
“Was calling chambers an available way to check?”
“It could have been.”
“Why didn't you?”
“She was refusing instructions.”
The answer returned to the beginning without passing through the question.
Lin let the silence remain long enough for everyone to hear that.
Then she asked about his first grip on my arm.
He said I was moving away.
“What offense had you established at that point?”
“I believed she was the person we were looking for.”
“Was the request a report that Talia Brooks had escaped custody?”
“No.”
“Was it an instruction to arrest any Black woman near the third-floor lifts?”
Price objected.
Ward directed Lin to rephrase without embedding the conclusion.
“What did the request authorize you to investigate?”
“Her location and whether she was the defendant.”
Lin returned to the visible differences.
Briggs could not identify long braids, a camel coat, an age near twenty-eight, or a height near five feet ten in the woman he stopped.
He said estimates could be wrong.
Lin agreed and asked what he did when several estimates and features failed to fit.
He had no new answer.
The force instructor testified later. He explained the department's policy and what could and could not be inferred from a witness moving an officer's hand away after unwanted contact.
He did not declare that officers could never use physical force in an identity encounter. He described necessity, proportionality, available alternatives, and the specific sequence presented in the evidence.
The strike Briggs described was not supported as an authorized response to those established circumstances.
Price questioned the instructor closely about uncertainty and the limitations of reviewing events afterward.
The instructor accepted the limitations without abandoning the policy.
By the afternoon recess, Briggs had returned to his table with a cup of water he barely touched.
I looked at him once and realized I had been waiting for the hearing to make him look like a different kind of person.
It did not.
He remained an ordinary man who had made choices with extraordinary consequences because his job gave those choices force.
As we left, Price asked Ward to allow additional evidence concerning supervisory directions Briggs had received.
Lin requested time to review the material rather than oppose it unread.
Ward set a further session.
The employment case was reaching beyond the hand that struck me.
The additional material was a series of messages from Sloane.
They concerned missed appearances, people moving between floors, and complaints from court staff that officers were not locating defendants quickly enough.