White supremacist, militias infiltrated US police in last 2 decades but authorities stayed mum: Ex-FBI agent
In what is perceived to be an alert, a former special agent with the FBI has claimed that White supremacist groups have infiltrated the ranks of law-enforcement agencies across the country over the last two decades. Michael German came up with a report for the Brennan Center for Justice which addressed the relations between the serving police officers and far-right groups.
"Racial disparities have long pervaded every step of the criminal justice process, from police stops, searches, arrests, shootings and other uses of force to charging decisions, wrongful convictions, and sentences. As a result, many have concluded that a structural or institutional bias against people of color, shaped by long-standing racial, economic, and social inequities, infects the criminal justice system," he said.
According to German’s report, the law-enforcement officials have been tied to racist militant activities in more than a dozen states since 2000 with several officers found to have posted social media posts that promote racism and bigotry. "Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to White supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and elsewhere," he said.
Authorities are not doing enough to address issue: German
German wrote the "harms" that armed law-enforcement officers having links with violent White supremacist and anti-government militia groups can cause to the American society is something that can’t be “overstated”. He also accused the justice department of not devising a national strategy "to identify White supremacist police officers or to protect the safety and civil rights of the communities they patrol".
German, who is also a writer-scholar and has worked in FBI for 16 years, also said that none of the governments — federal, state and local — are doing enough to proactively identify the racist officers or report their behavior to the prosecutors. Predicting a less-than-hopeful future, German said: "Efforts to address systemic and implicit biases in law enforcement are unlikely to be effective in reducing the racial disparities in the criminal justice system as long as explicit racism in law enforcement continues to endure. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that it does."
Recently, a deputy sheriff in Los Angeles claimed that the sheriff’s department has a gang of deputies who display tattoos of Nazi imagery and abused people’s civil rights at will. According to Ausrteberto Gonzalez, roughly a fifth of the 100 deputies at the Compton patrol station belong to the gang which is called the ‘Executioners’. The filing also claimed that another 20 deputies were also considered to be ‘prospects’ or associates close to the gang.
The former FBI agent also gave a number of other examples. For example, he wrote how in 2001, two sheriffs’ deputies in Williams County in Texas were sacked after it was found that they were active members of the Ku Klux Klan. Their affiliation got revealed after they tried to get other officers of the department to join them. There have been such cases in other states as well and all of them resulted in removal of officers.
Law-enforcement officers’ alleged racist treatment of people of color has come to the fore in the wake of the deaths of Breyonna Taylor, George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks at the hands of the police. This year, three officers from the Wilmington Police Department in North Carolina have been fired after a routine audit of camera recordings showed conversations in which they used racial and other disparaging remarks about Black people. Michael Piner, Jesse Moore and James Gilmore had conversations about slaughtering Black residents and deriding Black Lives Matter protesters.
Beyond harboring racial hatred, the report also accuses the cops of actively collaborating with far-right groups. In 2018, as German pointed out, the police in Sacramento were found to be working in tandem with neo-Nazis to charge anti-racist activities who were attacked during a far-right rally in 2016. Instead of going after the White supremacists, the law enforcement officers started probing 100 anti-fascist protesters, recommending as many as 500 charges against them.
The sinister ties between the law-keepers and people harboring the ideology of hatred have become a hot topic of discussion after 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse came to the rescue of the police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an assault rifle to take on Black Lives Matter protesters who were demonstrating the shooting of Jacob Blake, an African-American, who has been left paralyzed from the waist down.