Law Enforcement, White Supremacy, and the Far-Right

Jimmy Miotto examines how currently proposed police reforms would be in vain without a reckoning of law enforcement’s past and present status as a haven for white supremacists.

It goes without saying that when the history of America in 2020 is written, COVID-19 and the 220,000 lives it has claimed to date will be the headline story. Yet no retelling of 2020 will be complete without spilling a lot of ink on the continued police killings of African Americans and the protests that sprang up in response. In any other year, this would be the biggest story of the year, and it may still prove to be the most influential event in 21st-century America.

One reason this story will resonate far into the future is the massive scope of the protest response throughout America. In June, pollsters estimated that between 15 and 26 million Americans participated in Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. That translates to about 10% of America participating in a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. For comparison, protests to unseat government leadership or assert political independence find success when 3.5% of a country’s population participates on average.

Given the size of the Black Lives Matter protests, it’s unsurprising that lawmakers and normal citizens alike have pushed for policy changes that could increase accountability for police officers nationwide. Twenty nine states had already introduced “police oversight” bills as of October 16. These bills focused on chokehold bans, establishing independent police misconduct agencies, and creating public databases containing all relevant information on police stops.

These are necessary steps toward creating police forces that are accountable for their actions and the lives they protect. Even so, they are insufficient. No set of police reforms will be enough until policymakers embrace an uncomfortable fact: racist misconduct and brutality by police are not unconscious decisions, but intentional ones. The degradation of Black Americans by police isn’t a bug in the system, but a deliberate act by governmental organizations shackled to white supremacist groups.

For some, becoming a police officer may be a way to sanitize white supremacist violence as state-sanctioned “law enforcement.” And connections between law enforcement and white supremacists aren’t a mirage created by hyperventilating liberals. An FBI Counterterrorism publication from 2015 noted that the Bureau regularly identifies “active links” between police and white supremacists during domestic terrorism investigations. As far back as 2006, white supremacist groups were encouraging their members to become “ghost skins,” or members who “avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes.”

Considering that right-wing extremists and white supremacists perpetrated two-thirds of all terror incidents and plots in the United States this past year, the repeated contemporary links between law enforcement, right-wing extremists, and white supremacists must be recognized for what they are. In recent years, law enforcement officials resigned their positions after membership in groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, The League of the South, and Neo-Nazis came to light. In 2019, The Center for Investigative Reporting identified more than 400 current and former police officers who were active on Facebook groups with names like “White Lives Matter,” “Confederate Brothers & Sisters,” and “DEATH TO ISLAM UNDERCOVER.”

Moderate critics of police violence may be depressed by police connections to white supremacy. However, they worry that police abolition is an unrealistic goal in the short term. Yet there are concrete steps we can make now to root out the explicitly extremist and white supremacist elements of police forces nationwide.

In essence, cities, states, and the federal government must transform incentives for law enforcement officials and their unions. Departments could be required to perform bias testing, and governments could be given more ability to conduct investigations, fire, and sue police officers in the event that they are found to have connections to hate groups. Forcing police to pay out of their own departmental budget when their officers fail the community will also make it clear that it is in their best interest to avoid hiring anyone who seems to hold strong bias towards African Americans. The less removed a police department is allowed to be from its misdeeds, intentional or otherwise, the better.

This current iteration of white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement is the culmination of a decades-long project. Look back even further, and it’s easy to see that the stories of white supremacy and law enforcement in America are joined at the hip. The policy changes suggested by legislators nationwide will only be a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound until local, state and federal governments recognize the obvious. If a trustworthy, caring and unbiased police force can exist in America, it can only exist after purging departments nationwide of extremists.