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White supremacists and militias have infiltrated police across US, report says

94 points by vanusa 6y ago

threatofrain 6y ago
Link to the report: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...
- verylittlemeat 6y ago
  >Obviously, only a tiny percentage of law enforcement officials are likely to be active members of white supremacist groups. Quoted directly from the report itself. More fear, uncertainty and doubt to stir the pot. The author also resigned from the FBI as a whistleblower unrelated to this topic, so it seems he has a bit of an axe to grind.
  - notacoward 6y ago
    Quoted out of context from the report. The point was that they're not likely to be out in the open about their affiliation with white supremacists, which is not the same as there being no affiliation at all. Of course infiltrators don't announce that they're infiltrators. Blending in is part of the game. Supremacists even have a name for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_skin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_skin Note the particular reference to law enforcement. That plus the ad hominem at the end of your comment adds up to a whole lot of Not Convincing. BTW here's another report on the same topic, from 2006. Can't wait to see what reason you come up with for dismissing it as well. http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/402521/doc-26-white-supremacist-infiltration.pdf http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/402521/doc-26-white-su...
    - verylittlemeat 6y ago
      Most of that document is redacted. The first key judgment even seems to be in the spirit of my quote, contradicting that there's any real infiltration. Aside from a reference to one specific person and the KKK it's just full of hypotheticals: "they could", "which can", "they can benefit." The fact that "ghost skins" exist does not suggest that they're any more numerous but it sure makes an attractive runaway conspiracy that of course can't be disproved. My quote is completely in context, he mentions nothing about openness of affiliation in the paragraph before or after. In fact he weakens his own argument by jumping from pointing out a handful of alleged white supremacist connections since 2000 to "hundreds of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist, and sexist social media activity" - posting memes seems like a bit of a step down from being a member of a white supremacist militia. And my ad hominem is completely relevant considering that he has burned professional bridges and has no incentive to be subtle or nuanced about a politically charged topic. As I said, fear, uncertainty and doubt. Glad to come back to this thread and see that it was flagged.
cgrealy 6y ago
Disturbing, but hardly surprising.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  Some of those among forces?...
  - hprotagonist 6y ago
    s/among/who work/
    - throw_m239339 6y ago
      ... are the same that burn crosses.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
BurningFrog 6y ago
Some of those that work forces...
- FriendlyNormie 6y ago
  Some of those that post this comment, are the same that need to go the fuck back to reddit.
- alexilliamson 6y ago
  Citation https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXazVhlyxQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXazVhlyxQ
- kgwxd 6y ago
  Another successful musician instantly becomes a political expert.
majormajor 6y ago
"Infiltrated" is a strange word, here. From the original report: > “white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement . . . by organized groups and by self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to white supremacist causes.” "self-initiated infiltration" sounds more like the racists were already there. My understanding from other reporting is that there's a law enforcement/military -> extremist militia pipeline as well, e.g. Oath Keepers and such.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  It’s infiltration because they’re doing it to further their aims by subverting those* of organisations they’re joining. The Internet means that planning and radicalisation can happen without ever being explicitly targeted by organised extremists. Hence self-infiltration much like the Islamist terror attacks carried out by self-radicalised people. * - Nominally at least.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Ancapistani 6y ago
  One of the issues I see is that half of the country seems to see Oath Keepers and Threepers as “extremist militias”, while the other half sees them as a reasonable reaction to an increasingly powerful government. I’m explicitly not taking a position on this topic -instead, I want to call out the significant disparity in perspective. HN seems to nearly unanimously accept the labels applied to these groups without question while other communities of which I’m part reject them (also without question). More worrying than the polarization to me is the fact that neither group seems aware that other sees things so differently, and that the opposite opinion is broadly held by the other side. The assumption seems to be that only “extremists” would hold that view, when the reality is that 30%+ of the population share it. The “moderate” position is vanishingly small these days.
  - chillwaves 6y ago
    What does a "moderate" position look like when it comes to white supremacy?
aokiji 6y ago
This seems as dangerous for society as the infiltration of communists in institutions...
chrisco255 6y ago
This is incindiary garbage propaganda. Cities are burning to the ground, murders are skyrocketing in NYC, Chicago, and others. People are fleeing Democrat run cities and states due to their insane idea of mob justice as if angry mobs have not been tried before in human civilization and always ended in millions of deaths. Stop this garbage insane delusionary descent. Stop upvoting it. Stop retweeting it. Stop. We have imperfect laws and systems because the alternative is chaos and hell.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  This is not propaganda. It's a real problem that threatens the very idea of a civilized country, and innocent people's lives (not their livelihoods, their actual lives) are at risk. People are scared.
  - dx87 6y ago
    The way the article is written is definitely trying to push a single side. For example, they mention the kid in Kenosha that killed two people, but leave out the part where he shot them because they were attacking him, which is clearly visible in the video.
    - nailer 6y ago
      > They mention the kid in Kenosha that killed two people, but leave out the part where he shot them because they were attacking him, which is clearly visible in the video. Video proof confirming above (content warning for violence): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdMTghlrFiw&bpctr=1598560684 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdMTghlrFiw&bpctr=1598560684 Edit: I know it's HN etiquette not to complain about downvotes, but what are people downvoting here? The post's text is 'video proof confirming above'. The link is video proof confirming above. I've added a content warning just in case that's it. Here's an account from a man described by a news agency as an eyewitness corroborating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0zSECoazDSE&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0zSECoazDSE&...
craftinator 6y ago
And here's a link to a video of David Beth, the Kenosha sheriff mentioned in the article, saying some things that you'd expect to hear from an anti-Semitic speech from 1930s Germany: https://twitter.com/People4Bernie/status/1299006089317347330?s=20 https://twitter.com/People4Bernie/status/1299006089317347330... It's quite relevant to the infiltration of white supremacists into the police force that the article points out.
sunseb 6y ago
Yeah these crazy hateful white supremacists are burning and looting US cities.
- mcphage 6y ago
  It's even worse than that—they're murdering people.
kanox 6y ago
The core problem seems to be that police abuses are not being properly punished. Whenever I tried to look into such incidence I see that prosecution gets stopped (or didn't even start) at a local level and the whole process stinks of conflict of interest. Asking local police and prosecutors to investigate misconduct just seems like a bad idea. My solution would be to automatically throw every violent police incident to a special-purpose federal body which is not otherwise involved in enforcing laws. This would be filled with prosecutors focused on civil rights and those people would hopefully be highly motivated to prove their case in court. The only problem I see is that this it ignores states rights but those are not particularly popular anyway.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  You don't get to ignore states rights just because they aren't particularly popular. Also, look into "regulatory capture". Independent bodies tend toward becoming very cosy with those they're supposed to be monitoring.
  - cgrealy 6y ago
    Non American here. The only time I ever hear about "states rights" is in relation to racism or misogyny. Are there actually valid useful reasons for the concept or is it time to ask what purpose they serve?
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      The last two times I heard about states rights were: - Trump wanted to run the Covid response. The states told him to get lost. (Was that good or bad? True, the Covid response has been disjointed, even incoherent. Would it have been more coherent if Trump ran it? Or less?) - Trump wanted to send federal law enforcement into cities to control rioting. The cities told him no. (There were some federal agents in Portland against the will of the city; the legal scope of their activity was protecting federal property.) The deal is that we have a limited federal government. They don't get all the power. They get the power the constitution says they get. The states (or the people) get the rest. And they're pretty touchy about protecting that power. Is it useful? It is if you want to keep having a limited federal government. Arguably, we need (and needed) far more than we have had.
alphabettsy 6y ago
White supremacists exist in some quantity in all parts of American society. This should not be a surprise. That they would choose a career where you can directly affect the lives and freedom of people you may hate without consequences would seem to make it more appealing.
nailer 6y ago
As other have noted, this article omits a number of relevant facts to spark a narrative: > Wisconsin, faced intense scrutiny over their response to armed white men and militia groups gathered in the city amid demonstrations by Black Lives Matter activists and others over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black father of three who was left paralyzed after being shot in the back. Video confirms Jacob Blake was ignoring the instructions of the police and moved to his vehicle (keep in mind that in the US firearm ownership is common). > On Wednesday, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old who appeared to consider himself a militia member and had posted “blue lives matter” content, was arrested on suspicion of murder after the fatal shooting of two protesters. Video and eyewitness testimony confirm this man was being chased by a group of people. dang: a better link would be to the actual report: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...
- chillwaves 6y ago
  It's not self defense when you initiate conflict. We have people traveling form out of state to start fights, then killing other people in 'self defense'. Do you see a problem here?
  - nailer 6y ago
    If someone pulls a gun on you and you're kneeling [1], or someone chases you [2], they are the aggressor. As this witness confirms [3] He travelled 20 miles from his home, a very short drive. It's possible the men who attacked him travelled from further away. You stating that this short journey 'crosses state lines' is a tactic similar to the article: omitting relevant facts to push a narrative. [1] https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1299119894169092098?s=20 https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1299119894169092098?s... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdMTghlrFiw&bpctr=1598560684 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdMTghlrFiw&bpctr=1598560684 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0zSECoazDSE&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0zSECoazDSE&...
  - TMWNN 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jadell 6y ago
We stop former felons from taking certain government jobs. There's no reason we can't do the same for current or former members of white supremacist organizations. You don't get to be in law enforcement while also being part of a white nationalist terrorist group, this shouldn't be controversial.
DlSGUSTING 6y ago
I'm not saying this isn't true (there's a lot of evidence to support this claim), however, if you read the actual report the Guardian is reporting on, all but one of their sources are Vox, NYT, WaPo. It wouldn't be controversial to say that these outlets lean left, and therefore would draw conclusions along those lines. Why didn't the Brennan Center report look at the studies directly? I think that taints the sources a bit.
mschuster91 6y ago
Meanwhile in Germany: the Interior Minister blocks a study on racism in politics because it is "not needed" and "racial profiling is no problem because it is forbidden" (https://www.dw.com/en/germany-study-halted-into-racial-profiling-by-police/a-54059367 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-study-halted-into-racial-profi...). At a time when literally every other week alt-right networks, weapons caches, abuses of police IT systems to snoop on women, antifascists and VIPs in the police and military crop up...

94 points by vanusa 6y ago

Link to the report: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...

verylittlemeat 6y ago
>Obviously, only a tiny percentage of law enforcement officials are likely to be active members of white supremacist groups. Quoted directly from the report itself. More fear, uncertainty and doubt to stir the pot. The author also resigned from the FBI as a whistleblower unrelated to this topic, so it seems he has a bit of an axe to grind.
- notacoward 6y ago
  Quoted out of context from the report. The point was that they're not likely to be out in the open about their affiliation with white supremacists, which is not the same as there being no affiliation at all. Of course infiltrators don't announce that they're infiltrators. Blending in is part of the game. Supremacists even have a name for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_skin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_skin Note the particular reference to law enforcement. That plus the ad hominem at the end of your comment adds up to a whole lot of Not Convincing. BTW here's another report on the same topic, from 2006. Can't wait to see what reason you come up with for dismissing it as well. http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/402521/doc-26-white-supremacist-infiltration.pdf http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/402521/doc-26-white-su...
  - verylittlemeat 6y ago
    Most of that document is redacted. The first key judgment even seems to be in the spirit of my quote, contradicting that there's any real infiltration. Aside from a reference to one specific person and the KKK it's just full of hypotheticals: "they could", "which can", "they can benefit." The fact that "ghost skins" exist does not suggest that they're any more numerous but it sure makes an attractive runaway conspiracy that of course can't be disproved. My quote is completely in context, he mentions nothing about openness of affiliation in the paragraph before or after. In fact he weakens his own argument by jumping from pointing out a handful of alleged white supremacist connections since 2000 to "hundreds of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist, and sexist social media activity" - posting memes seems like a bit of a step down from being a member of a white supremacist militia. And my ad hominem is completely relevant considering that he has burned professional bridges and has no incentive to be subtle or nuanced about a politically charged topic. As I said, fear, uncertainty and doubt. Glad to come back to this thread and see that it was flagged.

cgrealy 6y ago

Disturbing, but hardly surprising.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throw_m239339 6y ago
Some of those among forces?...
- hprotagonist 6y ago
  s/among/who work/
  - throw_m239339 6y ago
    ... are the same that burn crosses.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

BurningFrog 6y ago

Some of those that work forces...

FriendlyNormie 6y ago
Some of those that post this comment, are the same that need to go the fuck back to reddit.
alexilliamson 6y ago
Citation https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXazVhlyxQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXazVhlyxQ
kgwxd 6y ago
Another successful musician instantly becomes a political expert.

majormajor 6y ago

"Infiltrated" is a strange word, here. From the original report: > “white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement . . . by organized groups and by self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to white supremacist causes.” "self-initiated infiltration" sounds more like the racists were already there. My understanding from other reporting is that there's a law enforcement/military -> extremist militia pipeline as well, e.g. Oath Keepers and such.

meheleventyone 6y ago
It’s infiltration because they’re doing it to further their aims by subverting those* of organisations they’re joining. The Internet means that planning and radicalisation can happen without ever being explicitly targeted by organised extremists. Hence self-infiltration much like the Islamist terror attacks carried out by self-radicalised people. * - Nominally at least.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Ancapistani 6y ago
One of the issues I see is that half of the country seems to see Oath Keepers and Threepers as “extremist militias”, while the other half sees them as a reasonable reaction to an increasingly powerful government. I’m explicitly not taking a position on this topic -instead, I want to call out the significant disparity in perspective. HN seems to nearly unanimously accept the labels applied to these groups without question while other communities of which I’m part reject them (also without question). More worrying than the polarization to me is the fact that neither group seems aware that other sees things so differently, and that the opposite opinion is broadly held by the other side. The assumption seems to be that only “extremists” would hold that view, when the reality is that 30%+ of the population share it. The “moderate” position is vanishingly small these days.
- chillwaves 6y ago
  What does a "moderate" position look like when it comes to white supremacy?

aokiji 6y ago

This seems as dangerous for society as the infiltration of communists in institutions...

chrisco255 6y ago

This is incindiary garbage propaganda. Cities are burning to the ground, murders are skyrocketing in NYC, Chicago, and others. People are fleeing Democrat run cities and states due to their insane idea of mob justice as if angry mobs have not been tried before in human civilization and always ended in millions of deaths. Stop this garbage insane delusionary descent. Stop upvoting it. Stop retweeting it. Stop. We have imperfect laws and systems because the alternative is chaos and hell.

happytoexplain 6y ago
This is not propaganda. It's a real problem that threatens the very idea of a civilized country, and innocent people's lives (not their livelihoods, their actual lives) are at risk. People are scared.
- dx87 6y ago
  The way the article is written is definitely trying to push a single side. For example, they mention the kid in Kenosha that killed two people, but leave out the part where he shot them because they were attacking him, which is clearly visible in the video.
  - nailer 6y ago
    > They mention the kid in Kenosha that killed two people, but leave out the part where he shot them because they were attacking him, which is clearly visible in the video. Video proof confirming above (content warning for violence): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdMTghlrFiw&bpctr=1598560684 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdMTghlrFiw&bpctr=1598560684 Edit: I know it's HN etiquette not to complain about downvotes, but what are people downvoting here? The post's text is 'video proof confirming above'. The link is video proof confirming above. I've added a content warning just in case that's it. Here's an account from a man described by a news agency as an eyewitness corroborating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0zSECoazDSE&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0zSECoazDSE&...

craftinator 6y ago

And here's a link to a video of David Beth, the Kenosha sheriff mentioned in the article, saying some things that you'd expect to hear from an anti-Semitic speech from 1930s Germany: https://twitter.com/People4Bernie/status/1299006089317347330?s=20 https://twitter.com/People4Bernie/status/1299006089317347330... It's quite relevant to the infiltration of white supremacists into the police force that the article points out.

sunseb 6y ago

Yeah these crazy hateful white supremacists are burning and looting US cities.

mcphage 6y ago
It's even worse than that—they're murdering people.

kanox 6y ago

The core problem seems to be that police abuses are not being properly punished. Whenever I tried to look into such incidence I see that prosecution gets stopped (or didn't even start) at a local level and the whole process stinks of conflict of interest. Asking local police and prosecutors to investigate misconduct just seems like a bad idea. My solution would be to automatically throw every violent police incident to a special-purpose federal body which is not otherwise involved in enforcing laws. This would be filled with prosecutors focused on civil rights and those people would hopefully be highly motivated to prove their case in court. The only problem I see is that this it ignores states rights but those are not particularly popular anyway.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
You don't get to ignore states rights just because they aren't particularly popular. Also, look into "regulatory capture". Independent bodies tend toward becoming very cosy with those they're supposed to be monitoring.
- cgrealy 6y ago
  Non American here. The only time I ever hear about "states rights" is in relation to racism or misogyny. Are there actually valid useful reasons for the concept or is it time to ask what purpose they serve?
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    The last two times I heard about states rights were: - Trump wanted to run the Covid response. The states told him to get lost. (Was that good or bad? True, the Covid response has been disjointed, even incoherent. Would it have been more coherent if Trump ran it? Or less?) - Trump wanted to send federal law enforcement into cities to control rioting. The cities told him no. (There were some federal agents in Portland against the will of the city; the legal scope of their activity was protecting federal property.) The deal is that we have a limited federal government. They don't get all the power. They get the power the constitution says they get. The states (or the people) get the rest. And they're pretty touchy about protecting that power. Is it useful? It is if you want to keep having a limited federal government. Arguably, we need (and needed) far more than we have had.

alphabettsy 6y ago

White supremacists exist in some quantity in all parts of American society. This should not be a surprise. That they would choose a career where you can directly affect the lives and freedom of people you may hate without consequences would seem to make it more appealing.

nailer 6y ago

As other have noted, this article omits a number of relevant facts to spark a narrative: > Wisconsin, faced intense scrutiny over their response to armed white men and militia groups gathered in the city amid demonstrations by Black Lives Matter activists and others over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black father of three who was left paralyzed after being shot in the back. Video confirms Jacob Blake was ignoring the instructions of the police and moved to his vehicle (keep in mind that in the US firearm ownership is common). > On Wednesday, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old who appeared to consider himself a militia member and had posted “blue lives matter” content, was arrested on suspicion of murder after the fatal shooting of two protesters. Video and eyewitness testimony confirm this man was being chased by a group of people. dang: a better link would be to the actual report: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...

chillwaves 6y ago
It's not self defense when you initiate conflict. We have people traveling form out of state to start fights, then killing other people in 'self defense'. Do you see a problem here?
- nailer 6y ago
  If someone pulls a gun on you and you're kneeling [1], or someone chases you [2], they are the aggressor. As this witness confirms [3] He travelled 20 miles from his home, a very short drive. It's possible the men who attacked him travelled from further away. You stating that this short journey 'crosses state lines' is a tactic similar to the article: omitting relevant facts to push a narrative. [1] https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1299119894169092098?s=20 https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1299119894169092098?s... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdMTghlrFiw&bpctr=1598560684 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdMTghlrFiw&bpctr=1598560684 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0zSECoazDSE&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0zSECoazDSE&...
- TMWNN 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jadell 6y ago

We stop former felons from taking certain government jobs. There's no reason we can't do the same for current or former members of white supremacist organizations. You don't get to be in law enforcement while also being part of a white nationalist terrorist group, this shouldn't be controversial.

DlSGUSTING 6y ago

I'm not saying this isn't true (there's a lot of evidence to support this claim), however, if you read the actual report the Guardian is reporting on, all but one of their sources are Vox, NYT, WaPo. It wouldn't be controversial to say that these outlets lean left, and therefore would draw conclusions along those lines. Why didn't the Brennan Center report look at the studies directly? I think that taints the sources a bit.

mschuster91 6y ago

Meanwhile in Germany: the Interior Minister blocks a study on racism in politics because it is "not needed" and "racial profiling is no problem because it is forbidden" (https://www.dw.com/en/germany-study-halted-into-racial-profiling-by-police/a-54059367 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-study-halted-into-racial-profi...). At a time when literally every other week alt-right networks, weapons caches, abuses of police IT systems to snoop on women, antifascists and VIPs in the police and military crop up...