In Which I Hit a Police Officer in the Head with a Tennis Ball

So a professor from Rogers told me not to throw anything at anyone while I'm in D.C. Luckily for me, my supervisor at my internship told me otherwise and I got to chunk a lot of stuff at police officers and the horses they were riding. The U.S. Park Police are part of my Department, and they're brushing up on their training and drills before the  4th of July celebrations next week. The past two days, I was sent out to their training stables to be a "demonstrator," and got to throw tennis balls, water bottles, and Frisbees at the officers. They told us to try and get past the shields of the ground officers and peg them if we could. I did. I also got to mock sword fight other demonstrators with wooden canes, shove and be shoved by police shields, and verbally assault the officers. And they let us pet the ponies! It was definitely a change of scenery from sitting in the office and writing/editing stuff. The Chevy Suburban we took there and back was one of the dark-tinted government ones, and it was cool to see the tourists rubbernecking as they tried to see if we were part of a motorcade, frantically looking up and down the street we were on. The first time I was at the stables, we made it about three hours before the officers were called out for an emergency in front of the White House. I learned today that there was a massive group of protesters who had chained themselves to the White House fence and one guy who jumped it and got tackled by the Secret Service. Park Police went to lend a hand to the Secret Service, and they brought the horses and some bolt cutters to clear the mess up. 'Murica.