All of us in law enforcement
must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty.[1]
~ Former FBI Director James
Comey
I have been saying for a while – and the FBI has been saying
it for years – that far-right extremists are actively infiltrating law
enforcement and the military, and there is rampant and blatant racism within
the ranks of those whose job it is “to serve and to protect.”
Law enforcement has always had its warts, whether in the
“slave patrols” of the 18th and 19th centuries, the
widespread police corruption during Prohibition, the continuing corruption
during the “Serpico Era” in NYC, the Civil Rights conflicts in the 1960s, or
today’s open racism in places like Ferguson, MO.
Years before I entered law enforcement, my great-uncle, who
had been a patrolman with the St. Louis County Police for 40+ years, told me
that law enforcement was “the greatest calling,” about medicine, above the law,
above even the clergy, and certainly far above politics. To paraphrase what Uncle
Fred told me:
We are there on the best days
and the worst days in peoples’ lives. We are there when they are born and when
they die. We tell wives their husbands are never coming home, we tell parents
their sons and daughters have been killed in crashes, we tell young children
that they will never see Mommy and Daddy again. We hear their deepest, darkest
secrets, we see their lives of despair. We see their lives crash around them.
We must be confessors, marriage counsellors, referees, friends, disinterested
strangers, often all at the same time. We must have the wisdom of Solomon and
the compassion of Jesus.
Uncle Fred, by the way, never sought promotion, for in those
days, the higher one’s rank, the greater the exposure to corruption became.
Fred’s reputation for fairness and decency was widespread through St Louis
County in those days: those being sought by the cops would surrender to him,
knowing that he would not brutalize them as they were being booked (remember,
this was before the days of
Miranda and
Brinegar and
Mapp and
Escobedo and
Gideon)
[2]
Police officers, and others in emergency services, see and
hear and smell things no decent person should ever be exposed to. We pull
wax-encapsulated corpses from our waters, we dig through fire scenes for charred
remnants of what used to be living men and women. Sometimes, all we can do is
hold their hand and comfort them as they die, trapped in the mangled wreckage
of their cars, as they cry for their mothers (strangely, never the fathers). Sometimes,
we can’t even do that, and all we can do is listen to them scream in agony as
they burn to death because the Fire Department hasn’t arrived yet. We have cut
down teens who hanged themselves because their parents couldn’t handle the
thought of their children being gay. Yet, through it all, many manage to
maintain the compassion and empathy that drew them to the job in the first
place.
In fact, I believe law
enforcement overwhelmingly attracts people who want to do good for a living –
people who risk their lives because they want to help other people. They
don’t sign up to be cops in New York or Chicago or L.A. to help white people or
black people or Hispanic people or Asian people. They sign up because they want
to help all people.[3]
But here I must respectfully disagree with Director Comey. But
there are others, relatively few compared to the million or so sworn law
enforcement officers in the United States, who enter the field for the wrong
reasons: to address perceived wrongs against them, to settle scores, to make
sure “those” people “know their place.”
There are far-right extremist groups – the Oath Keepers, the
Ku Klux Klan, the Three Percenters, militia movements and other anti-government
extremists – who are actively encouraging their members, both overt and covert,
to enter law enforcement, to bend the mindset of the profession to more closely
reflect their own warped views.
The Verge, an on-line news organization,
reported on research they conducted that identified at least 400 police
officers as member of extremist groups, with approximately 150 being members of
the most extreme groups.
[4]
Back when I was a police officer, back in the 1970s and 1980s, in Connecticut,
there were large numbers of openly racist officers on the job; the situation
has only gotten worse in the intervening 30 years. More recently, 14 San
Francisco police officers were caught exchanging racist and homophobic text
messages, including, “all ni**ers must f**king hang.”
[5]
Most of those officers remain on the job, as a court blocked disciplinary
actions based on a statute of limitations. Even a cursory examination of the
public comments on law enforcement news sites reveal truly vicious racist
opinions being expressed by law enforcement officers and their supporters. For
instance, the far-right website UNZ Review, in an article discussing the murder
of Appleton, WI, firefighter Mitch Lundgaard, comments mentioned “two-legged
brown turds,” and “the Negro,” and “Chicongo” (a racist reference to Chicago).
[6]
We must work – in the words of
New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton – to really see each other.
Perhaps the reason we struggle as a nation is because we’ve come to see only
what we represent, at face value, instead of who we are. We simply must see
the people we serve.[7]
These extremists, however, are often ignored, and their
danger swept under the rug. In part due to a lack of a standardized selection
process or operational standards, “state and local police as well as sheriff’s
departments present ample opportunities for white supremacists and other
right-wing extremists looking to expand their power base.”
[8]
Some of these groups infiltrate members into law enforcement in order to warn
crews of ongoing investigations or potential enforcement actions; others seek
to subvert the agencies to their own ends.
As the Verge article points out, many of these far-right
officers are active on the many racist and hate groups on social media.
Facebook, roundly criticized for its inability – or perceived refusal – to
moderate or block these groups, announced new measures to reduce the impact of
hate groups, extremism, and misinformation on its platform.
But there’s no evidence to
suggest that Facebook is taking a more active role in moderating these groups’
activities – in fact, the opposite appears to be true. And the notion of active
duty police officers with access to firearms participating openly in bigotry
and potentially violent online behavior is worrisome for how it could translate
to offline actions in the future.[9]
It also appears that there is a certain amount of
consideration offered to the far-right posters that is not available to others.
I reported a certain post, possibly written by a law enforcement officer, based
on the use of police 10-codes in his profile, to Facebook for promoting hate
speech; Facebook replied that the post “does not violate our community
standards.” I shared the post to my page, with the comment, “This is how they
talk of us,” and was promptly banned for a month… for “hate speech.”
Law enforcement is a closed society, with outsiders
considered potentially dangerous. The “Thin Blue Line” concept originated to
indicate law enforcement’s stance as the line between order and chaos. These
days, however, it is more of a rallying cry, and like the “Blue Lives Matter”
movement, is used to shield officers from outside scrutiny, by painting those
with grievances as anti-police, and hence, anti-law-and-order. The law
enforcement community today enforces a “code of silence” that makes the Mafia’s
“Omerta” pale by comparison, and effectively forces honest police
officers to help protect corrupt officers from being held accountable for their
actions.
Another major problem with combatting the extremists’
attempts is that there is no general consensus on classification of extremist
actions: some states treat them as hate crimes, others as terrorist activities,
and still others consider extremist activities to be gang-related, relegating
it to the same (low) priority as motorcycle gangs dealing meth. The Federal
government is even more confusing in its treatment of these crimes.
[2] Respectively:
Miranda
v. Arizona, 384 US 436, 1966;
Brinegar v. United States, 338 US 160,
1949;
Mapp v Ohio, 367 US 643, 1961;
Escobedo v Illinois, 378 US
478, 1964;
Gideon v Wainwright, 372 US 335, 1963
[7] Comey, “Hard Truths”
Emphasis
added.
