White Supremacists in the police departments 2016
By Lucy M. Warner
September 26, 2016


This compilation of information is in answer to a slightly more conservative family member:

You asked this afternoon whether it really is true that White Supremacists, and various other kinds of racist and just downright weird Rightwingers are actually members of police forces across the country. I looked to see if I had anything already on hand about it, which I didn’t, but it took no time at all to find the kind of information that is available. It comes mainly from concerned groups like SPLC, and is also, from time to time, mentioned in the police shooting news reports individually, also. All of these articles are interesting, disgusting and scary, like a black widow spider winding a poor bug up in her silk.

There are some very good web sources for information about what makes the modern policeman tick and the Rightist Movements as well. Copblock is one of my favorites because some of the commenters are policemen and women themselves, though it is a watchdog group tracking cops; the best and most universally respected, is probably the Southern Poverty Law Center; www.pfaw.org/right-wing-organizations (Profiles of Right Wing Organizations) is another one.

SPLC did one report during the last year or so on the extraordinary rise in the number of far right activist groups there are just recently, and the number of Americans who have joined their ranks. Some of it is related to the NRA propaganda machine, and unfortunately, the sweeping federal laws enacted immediately after 9/11. All of this has scared the American society to the point that we are now fully paranoid.

Altogether, it amounts to a shift in what “the American mind” really is now as compared to the time when I was young, and even in the last 20 years. It started in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as a "white backlash," and became harder and colder under the Reagan influence on politics and the economy.

the situation is now ripening into what could be the reality of our society coming apart at the seams, due at least partly to the fact that we have a Black President. I believe the Donald Trump phenomenon is a simple result of that far, far, FAR Right shift; and that our Democrats when we became more the right-leaning "New Democrats," have contributed toward that mind frame as well. We non-wealthy Whites quit fighting the water and drifted downstream with the rest. I haven't quite given up the ghost, however, and Bernie is still in the lead. It is the time for action, however, so as soon as I vote for Hillary in November I will seek out local citizens who are part of OurRevolution to become more active. We are all in “DEEP you know what,” folks! Wake up!



http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2016/07/police_shootings_brings_into_s.html

Shootings bring into spotlight 2006 FBI report about white supremacists in law enforcement
By Douglas Perry | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on July 07, 2016 at 10:03 AM, updated July 07, 2016 at 9:19 PM

photograph -- Diamond Reynolds, the girlfriend of Philando Castile of St. Paul, cries outside the governor's residence in St. Paul, Minn., on Thursday, July 7, 2016. Castile was shot and killed after a traffic stop by police in Falcon Heights, Wednesday night. A video shot by Reynolds of the shooting went viral. (AP Photo/Jim Mone), Douglas Perry | The Oregonian/OregonLive By Douglas Perry | The Oregonian/OregonLive


Philando Castile was shot to death by a St. Anthony, Minn., policeman on Wednesday, reportedly during a routine traffic stop for a "busted taillight." Castile, a 32-year-old school cafeteria worker who apparently had informed the officer he had a legal permit to carry a firearm, was in the car with his girlfriend and young daughter. Castile's girlfriend live-streamed the aftermath of the shooting.

"Police just shot my boyfriend for no apparent reason," the African-American woman said as the officer continued to point a gun into the car.

"I told him not to reach for it. I told him to get his hand out," the officer said.

"You shot four bullets into him, sir," she replied. "He was just getting his license and registration, sir."

The tragedy comes on the heels of the fatal police shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, of 37-year-old Alton Sterling while officers struggled with him on the ground. This shocking shooting also was videotaped by witnesses.

Outrage and horror over the shootings have spread rapidly across the country and the world as the videos have circulated.

Why have there been so many police killings of black men in recent years that an activist group focused on stopping police violence, Black Lives Matter, has come to prominence in American politics?

African-American comedian D.L. Hughley fears he knows the answer. Our children and parents and friends are "brutalized and nobody says anything," he said on CNN Thursday, his eyes welling with tears. "It's too much. It's too much."

Hughley later posted to Facebook an article published last year by law professor and former military police captain Samuel V. Jones. The article refers to a 2006 FBI report that warns of a concerted, decades-long attempt by white supremacists to infiltrate law enforcement.

"[T]he term 'ghost skins' has gained currency among white supremacists to describe those who avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes," the FBI report states.

Runaway.jpg
Saturday Evening Post

There is no evidence that the officers involved in the St. Paul and Baton Rogue shootings have any ties to white supremacist groups or hold racist views. Official investigations will determine whether the shootings were justified or not. The frequency of such incidents, however, suggests at the least that commonplace cultural attitudes about class and race make police stops very dangerous for young black men. And the 2006 FBI report argues that sometimes there are even worse motives at play.

"Several key events preceded the report," Jones wrote. "A federal court found that members of a Los Angeles sheriff's department formed a neo-Nazi gang and habitually terrorized the black community. Later, the Chicago police department fired Jon Burge, a detective with reputed ties to the Ku Klux Klan, after discovering he tortured over 100 black male suspects. Thereafter, the mayor of Cleveland discovered that many of the city police locker rooms were infested with 'White Power' graffiti. Years later, a Texas sheriff department discovered that two of its deputies were recruited for the Klan."

For many white Americans, the typical policeman of their imagination remains the one that the late illustrator Norman Rockwell made iconic: the kind, dedicated, soft-hearted man of the community. And that officer certainly exists in police departments across the country. But for black Americans, as expertly showcased in the recent ESPN documentary about the OJ Simpson murder case, the reality of policing in the U.S. is very different. Last year, another African-American comedian, Chris Rock, posted to social media several photos of him being stopped by police. In one post, he wrote: "Stopped by the cops again -- wish me luck."

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Reacting to Jones's piece about white supremacists in law enforcement, New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry last year reminded readers of Michael Elsbury, a white Baton Rogue police officer who resigned after "he was linked" to racist text messages.

"I wish someone would pull a Ferguson on them and take them out," Elsbury reportedly wrote in one message, referring to the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown. "I hate looking at those African monkeys at work ... I enjoy arresting those thugs with their saggy pants."

DeBerry worried that officers like Elsbury are not unusual. "Would a police officer with such white supremacist views even stick out?" he wrote. "Or are anti-black hatred and standard American policing so similar to one another that we wouldn't notice anything remarkable about a black-hating cop on patrol?"

Those are distressing, inflammatory and probably unfair questions to ask, but they are questions that are increasingly being asked by Americans of all colors.

-- Douglas Perry




https://timeline.com/white-supremacist-cops-fbi-b28b3b171d56#.yopuv0s60

Actual white supremacist cops are hiding in plain sight
The FBI investigation of far-right extremists on the force
Matt Reimann Contributing writer at Timeline
Jul 11, 2016

Photograph -- Louisiana police officer Raymond Mott (left) was fired after this photo of him surfaced doing a Nazi salute with a KKK member during an anti-immigration rally.


With recent protests focusing on the often racist results of law enforcement agencies around the country, it’s worth remembering that the FBI itself at one point looked into a more serious, deliberate version of that problem.

In 2006, the bureau compiled an intelligence report concerning a growing threat to the country’s police departments. The document, titled “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement,” warned of right-wing extremists’ efforts to join the ranks of local police forces. And yet for all the urgency conveyed by the report, it admitted the problem was far from newfangled. “White supremacist leaders and groups,” it states, “have historically shown an interest in infiltrating law enforcement or recruiting law enforcement personnel.”

To some, especially those in heavily-policed communities, this might hardly seem like news at all. And indeed, the tradition does go back decades. Larrissa Moore, a law student who has studied reams of Civil Rights-era murder records, explained to Fusion how the Klan encouraged its members to infiltrate the ranks of law enforcement. This effort began as early as the 1960s, a time when social progress was weakening the Klan’s ability to terrorize black lives. According to Moore, they believed that the laws wouldn’t “apply to them if they are the law.”

In recent years, the entanglement of law enforcement and white supremacy has gotten a fair amount of press. In September, police officer Raymond Mott was fired after a photo surfaced of him performing a Nazi salute at an anti-immigration rally. The year before, two Florida officers were fired when they were found having ties to the KKK. And in 2001, a similar story occurred when two deputies in Texas who had a strong allegiance to the Klan were dismissed.

These recent cases bring to mind an infiltration strategy outlined by the FBI report called “ghost skins,” a method in which members of white supremacist groups modulate their behavior and appearance in order to “to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes.”

Yet, what’s most disturbing is the way such an infiltration could endanger the lives of civilians. One of the most eminent examples is the Lynwood Vikings, a white supremacist, neo-Nazi gang with firm roots in the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department. Their most infamous moment followed a campaign of racially-motivated violence and “wanton abuses of power” in the 90s, after which a judge awarded a massive $7.5 million dollar settlement to the group’s trail of victims. There is also John Burge, a Chicago police officer with reputed KKK ties who tortured over 100 black inmates, making gruesome use of items like plastic bags and car batteries.

Troublingly, the chief concern of the FBI report is that white supremacist infiltration may contribute to “investigative breaches and can jeopardize the safety of law enforcement sources and personnel.” In other words, the priorities are tactical, regarding how the agencies may be affected, rather than what the presence of white supremacist staff might mean for those being policed.




http://thegrio.com/2015/05/12/fbi-white-supremacists-law-enforcement/

FBI's warning of white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement nearly forgotten
Opinion
by Samuel V. Jones | May 12, 2015 at 9:18 AM Filed in: News, Opinion

Because of intensifying civil strife over the recent killings of unarmed black men and boys, many Americans are wondering, “What’s wrong with our police?” Remarkably, one of the most compelling but unexplored explanations may rest with a FBI warning of October 2006, which reported that “White supremacist infiltration of law enforcement” represented a significant national threat.

Several key events preceded the report. A federal court found that members of a Los Angeles sheriffs department formed a Neo Nazi gang and habitually terrorized the black community. Later, the Chicago police department fired Jon Burge, a detective with reputed ties to the Ku Klux Klan, after discovering he tortured over 100 black male suspects. Thereafter, the Mayor of Cleveland discovered that many of the city police locker rooms were infested with “White Power” graffiti. Years later, a Texas sheriff department discovered that two of its deputies were recruiters for the Klan.

In near prophetic fashion, after the FBI’s warning, white supremacy extremism in the U.S. increased, exponentially. From 2008 to 2014, the number of white supremacist groups, reportedly, grew from 149 to nearly a thousand, with no apparent abatement in their infiltration of law enforcement.

This year, alone, at least seven San Francisco law enforcement officers were suspended after an investigation revealed they exchanged numerous “White Power” communications laden with remarks about “lynching African-Americans and burning crosses.” Three reputed Klan members that served as correction officers were arrested for conspiring to murder a black inmate. At least four Fort Lauderdale police officers were fired after an investigation found that the officers fantasized about killing black suspects.

The United States doesn’t publicly track white supremacists, so the full range of their objectives remains murky. Although black and Jewish-Americans are believed to be the foremost targets of white supremacists, recent attacks in Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, Kansas and North Carolina, demonstrate that other non-whites, and religious and social minorities, are also vulnerable. Perhaps more alarmingly, in the last several years alone, white supremacists have reportedly murdered law enforcement officers in Arkansas, Nevada and Wisconsin.

In fact, the FBI reports that of the 511 law enforcement officers killed during felony incidents from 2004 to 2013, white citizens killed the majority of them. Of the citizens stopped by law enforcement officers in New York City and Chicago, white citizens were more likely to be found with guns and drugs. Given the white supremacist penchant for violence, guns and drug trafficking, the findings may be an indication that their network is just as destructive and far-reaching as that of foreign terrorist groups.

The unfortunate consequence of today’s threat is that a law enforcement officer may be good or bad, a villain or hero; one exceptionally prone to exhibit malicious forms of racial hatred, or distinctively suited to protect the racially oppressed. But the paradox doesn’t end there.

The white supremacist threat brings to light a dark feature of the American experience that some believed extinct. It rouses ingrained notions of distrusts between police and communities of color while bringing to bear the vital interest citizens of good will share in the complete abolishment of race as a judgmental factor.

As the nation struggles to resolve the perplexities of police brutality, the white supremacist threat should inform all Americans that today’s civil discord is not borne out of a robust animosity towards law enforcement, most of whom are professional. Rather, it’s more representative of a centuries-old ideological clash, which has ignited in citizens of good will a desire to affirm notions of racial equality so that the moral ethos of American culture is a reality for all.

Samuel V. Jones is a former military police captain and currently a professor of law focusing on criminal law at The John Marshall Law School.



THIS LOS GROUP IS NEW, I THINK:

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/06/17/anniston-police-department-has-two-hate-group-members-force

Southern Poverty Law Center
ANNISTON POLICE DEPARTMENT HAS TWO HATE GROUP MEMBERS ON THE FORCE
By Keegan Hankes
June 16, 2015

In 2013, Josh Doggrell took the stage at the national conference for the neo-Confederate League of the South (LOS). In a non-descript suit-and-tie, he spoke about gun rights, county supremacy, the state of law enforcement in Alabama and his loyalty to the League.


Josh Doggrell
"It’s wonderful to be around sanity," the founder and chairman of the League’s John C. Calhoun chapter in a video of the event posted to YouTube.

It was a common speech for a League conference. But Doggrell wasn’t quite a common southern nationalist. He was a police officer, a lieutenant in the Anniston Police Department, and he wasn’t the only one. A second officer from his department, Lieutenant Wayne Brown, joined Doggrell at the convention, and they had come with good news –– good news for any self-respecting southern nationalist at least.

“The vast majority of men in uniform are aware that they’re southerners,” Doggrell said, touching on gun rights and the perennial fear among extremist groups that the Second Amendment is under attack. “And kith and kin comes before illegal national mandates.”

Doggrell knows a little bit about kith and kin. He joined the LOS in 1995 after meeting its president Michael Hill at the University of Alabama while Doggrell was a student, serving as the secretary vice chairman and chairman of the school’s LOS chapter before founding his own chapter in 2009.


Kith and kin is part of an explicitly racist ideology called “kinism” that Hill has long promoted through the LOS. The Kinist Institute, an organization that promotes kinism, has called for laws against racial intermarriage, an end to non-white immigration, expelling all “aliens” (“to include all Jews and Arabs”), and restricting the right to vote to white, landholding men over the age of 21. In the past, LOS websites have referred to kinism as “a biblical solution for all races” that will save the South by preventing “white genocide.”

It was an odd thing for a police officer to say, especially one from Anniston. Fifty years earlier, Klansmen firebombed several buses carrying civil rights workers, known as Freedom Riders, coming to the South to test a U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordering that buses be desegregated. On May 14, 1961, in Anniston, a mob of Klansmen, some reportedly still wearing their Sunday church clothes, attacked and firebombed the riders. Police did nothing.

But Doggrell has never hidden his extremist ties, not from his family – in 2013, his two-year-old was already a League member – and definitely not from his employer. As Doggrell boasts elsewhere in the video, his superiors are well aware of his associations.

“It’s always wonderful to go back and show my bosses all the radicals that I cavort with on the weekends,” he boasts.

The video was posted on YouTube two years ago by the Southern Nationalist Network and has only recently came to the attention of Hatewatch, which immediately sought to bring Doggrell’s associations to the city’s attention.

After Hatewatch initially alerted the chief of the Anniston Police Department about Doggrell’s membership, further calls were referred to Brian Johnson, Anniston city manager, who told Hatewatch that even if the city was aware of police officers being a member of such “civic club,” there was only so much they could do.

When posed with the hypothetical of a police officer being a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Johnson elaborated by stating that, “We could not terminate an employee solely on his or her membership in a legal, lawfully formed, civic club or organization.” He added that it was “unfortunate” the city had to answer for Doggrell’s involvement in the LOS, especially at a time when policing practices are increasingly scrutinized amid a rash of stories of police violence and examples of biased, even racist officers. But, Johnson said, “I do not believe that someone could be terminated solely based on their private sector membership in a properly formed legal organization – as hateful as the KKK might be.”

Other cities have not been so laissez-faire about extremists and racists in their ranks.

In 2009 and again in 2014, officers were forced to resign after it was discovered they were high-ranking members of the KKK. Earlier this year, police officers in San Francisco were forced to resign because of racist text messages they were sending to each other. Also this year, in Ferguson, Mo., two officers were forced to resign after a racist emails were uncovered in the Justice Department inquiry surrounding the death of Michael Brown.

Given the deep racism that is central to the LOS, it seems odd of the city to ignore the possible conflicts of interest when acting as a police officer. The League has in recent years taken on increasingly racist and violent antigovernment rhetoric. Early last month, Hill penned an article for the LOS website entitled “A few notes on an American race war.”

“Negroes are more impulsive than whites,” Hill wrote. “Tenacity and organization are not the negroes [sic] strong suits. If [a race war] could be won by ferocity alone, he might have a chance. But like the adrenaline rush that sparks it, ferocity is short lived. And it can be countered by cool discipline, an historic white trait, and all that stems from it.”

These pronouncements are doubly serious given news first announced on this blog that the LOS was forming a uniformed, paramilitary unit called “the Indomitables” tasked with advancing a second southern secession by any means necessary. The group has also become increasingly anti-Semitic. This past May, Hill suggested that one of the South’s main problems is “Jewry” and what he depicts as the Jewish-controlled media. “ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and other largely Jewish-Progressive owned media would doubtless fan the flames, justifying black behavior while conversely condemning white reaction,” Hill wrote at the time as he contemplated the difficulties that will face the white man.

As for Doggrell, he has some racial views of his own.

In a Facebook post from March of this year, Doggrell asked his followers, “When ‘minorities’ become the majority, why do we still call them minorities?” Hill responded to that post by stating, “So they can still be demonized and destroyed … if they are white (and especially white Christians).”

Later that month, following the Supreme Court’s decision that Alabama’s legislative districts are racially gerrymandered, Doggrell authored a post stating, “So, the robed oligarchs say that gerrymandering is not an issue of right or wrong, legal or illegal—at least on its face. It is a matter of whether or not it benefits blacks (which makes it okay), or if it does not benefit blacks (which means it is not okay).”

Such suspicions regarding the government’s treatment of race relations are only the beginning of Doggrell’s disdain for the federal government.

“What a despondent situation we find ourselves in, as southern men and women, when the very institutions that we grant extraordinary powers in an effort to serve us are abused and misused by a manipulating national government that seeks to make a tool out of local police that can be used to destroy us when the time comes,” Doggrell lamented in his 2013 presentation. But countering Johnson, Doggrell insists the city and the police department know all of what he does in his off time.

In a closing question-and-answer session to his 2013 presentation, Doggrell, who was investigated by the police department and cleared in 2009 for his LOS ties, recounted an interaction with his then chief a year prior. In anticipation of questions about his LOS affiliations, Doggrell told the chief, “I’m not going to sell out my position with the League, as something I believe in strongly. If it came down to it, I’d choose the League.”

According to Doggrell, the chief responded, “We pretty much think like you do.”

If that’s the case, the Anniston police department may have even bigger problems than Doggrell.

Editors’ Note –– Ryan Lenz contributed to the reporting of this article.



THIS JSTOR ARTICLE IS VERY INTERESTING, BUT IT’S A PDF AND CAN’T BE COPIED. GO TO THE WEBSITE AND READ IT. –

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27895011?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

The County Supremacy Movement
Elizabeth M. Osenbaugh and Nancy K. Stoner
The Urban Lawyer
Vol. 28, No. 3 (Summer 1996), pp. 497-516
Published by: American Bar Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27895011
Page Count: 20




THE NEXT ARTICLE IS VERY ODD. I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING. THIS "AUXILLIARY COP" SITUATION IS BOTH SCARY AND STRANGE. IT NEEDS TO BE OUTLAWED. ONE OF THE THINGS THAT I THINK WE REALLY NEED IS A NEW SET OF FEDERAL LAWS THAT SPECIFICALLY DEFINE WHAT IS NOT LEGAL AND WHAT IS REQUIRED ON THESE LOCAL LEVEL SITUATIONS. IT ISN’T ENOUGH THAT THE DOJ, WHEN THEY COME INTO A CASE, CAN PRODUCE SOME JUSTICE THAT TIME, BUT THEY DON’T MAKE LAWS THAT APPLY IN OTHER SITUATIONS. IF THE ACLU WERE TO BRING A LAWSUIT URGING THE SUPREME COURT TO ACT, THAT WOULD REALLY HELP, HOPEFULLY.

http://thegrio.com/2015/04/16/policing-black-men-donors/

Is the policing of black men a new sport for wealthy donors?
Opinion
by David Love | April 16, 2015 at 8:25 AM Filed in: News, Opin

Robert Bates (Photo/Tulsa County Sheriff's Office) | Eric Harris (Family Photo)

the policing of black men the new sport for white officers and wannabe cops?

This is a question worth asking, in light of this season of police killings, particularly the April 2nd fatal shooting of a black man named Eric Harris, 44, by Reserve Deputy Robert Bates. After officers brought Harris to the ground, an officer yelled “Taser” twice, after which Bates shot Harris with his gun and said, “Oh! I shot him. I’m sorry.” Apparently, Bates meant to shoot the man with his Taser rather than his gun.

As Harris yelled that he was shot, he said, “I’m losing my breath,” to which the officer responded, “f*** your breath.” Harris died an hour later.

But oh well, what difference does it make, right? Whether it’s a Taser or gun, it’s just another dead black man we’re talking about. Plus, the man said he was sorry.

Robert Bates, 73, who has been charged with second-degree manslaughter in Harris’ death, is a prime example of someone who went out of his way looking for trouble. To put it another way, he volunteered to be in that situation, or rather, he paid a lot of money to volunteer. Now a man is dead from a situation that did not warrant using a Taser, much less a gun.

But who gave Bates this authority?

One has to ask why the 73-year old CEO of an insurance company — with one year of full-time experience as a cop back in the 1960s — would be allowed to be in the thick of it, in a major, high-stakes operation where he had the power of life or death over Eric Harris.

On the surface, it would appear Bates was a “pay-to-play” wannabe cop. It turns out Bates had donated video equipment, weapons and cars to the Sheriff’s Office, not to mention $2,500 to Sheriff Stanley Glanz’s reelection campaign in 2012. And he even served as the sheriff’s campaign chair. As Vox reported, as many as 130 reserve deputies in Tulsa are “wealthy people,” and it is not unusual for them to make donations. And as Salon had reported last year, some police departments openly ask for donations for a badge and gun permit.

Auxiliary police are nothing new. There are around 400,000 volunteer officers across the nation who, in a time of cash-strapped police departments, help fill in the gaps. But apparently, there is a wide discrepancy when it comes to what reserve cops can do. For example, in Los Angeles, they are allowed to do community relations and desk duty, while in the NYPD they are unarmed.

This state of affairs would give us the impression that anyone, at least in a department such as the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office, can play cop—at least if the price is right. It is also painfully evident that some individuals are all-too-eager to become police officers. Just to take it a step further, it is exceedingly difficult to fathom that these folks would be allowed to carry on in white communities and “accidentally” fatally shoot white citizens the way this reserve deputy killed Mr. Harris. It would not be allowed.

It is a little harder to wrap one’s head around this Tulsa incident unless we understand this country’s history concerning the policing of black people. Some would suggest the concept of police volunteers goes back to the Wild West, when common folk were deputized to fight crime and catch the bad guy. Although this is a valid assertion, there is also another troubling legacy of policing in America that is implicated in the shooting of Eric Harris.

As for black people, our first experience with police were the slave patrols. As Brittney Cooper reminds us in Salon, American policing traces its origins to these patrols.

During slavery times, all whites were encouraged and sanctioned to exert control over blacks. White men were deputized as members of the slave patrols — both slave masters and non-slaveholders alike — which were a crucial part of the slavery police state and economic order maintained by wealthy whites to maintain control over blacks. According to Professor Carl T. Bogus of Roger Williams University School of Law, these patrols were militias under the Second Amendment, designed to protect whites against slave rebellion.

“Virtually all able-bodied white men were part of the militia,” Bogus notes of Southern men, “which primarily meant that they had slave control duties under the direction and discipline of local militia officers.”

Old habits die hard, and the larger issue is that places such as Oklahoma have unresolved issues when it comes to race relations and the treatment of black people, as we saw with the recent racist fraternity chant at the University of Oklahoma. We should also remember that Tulsa is the site of a 1921 race riot in which the entire African-American community of Greenwood, also known as Black Wall Street, was destroyed by a white lynch mob, and hundreds were killed. And the Southern Poverty Law Center gave Oklahoma schools a grade of F for their lack of requirements about teaching the civil rights movement.

And in the Tulsa Sheriff’s Office, wealthy white men such as Robert Bates can pay to play slave patrol, play with black lives such as Eric Harris, and even take them.

Follow David A. Love on Twitter at @davidalove



ON THIS LISTING OF ALL POLICE KILLINGS THAT EACH POLICE DEPARTMENT IS SUPPOSED TO FILL OUT AND SEND TO THE FBI ON AN ANNUAL BASIS, THE “REQUIREMENT” TO SEND THAT DATA IN IS NOT MANDATORY, SO MANY DEPARTMENTS JUST DON’T DO IT. THAT NEEDS TO BE CHANGED IN FEDERAL LAW, TOO. THE FBI CAN’T KEEP HONEST STATISTICS ON THE MATTER, WHICH MAKES IT HARDER FOR LAWS COVERING IT TO BE WRITTEN, AND THE NEED FOR IT TO BE PROVEN. THAT PIECE OF INFORMATION CAME OUT IN THE NEWS AS A PART OF THE FERGUSON INVESTIGATION BY DOJ. SEE THE WORK BELOW OF THESE FOUR YOUNG BLACK LAW STUDENTS.


http://fusion.net/story/245527/police-history-kkk-connections/

It’s time to admit police have a history of connections with the KKK
INFILTRATED 12/16/15 7 AM

Larrissa Moore skipped the typical law school summer vacation at a beach. Instead, she spent her summer break holed up inside a Presbyterian church in Georgia, reviewing unsolved murder cases from the civil-rights era. The Mississippi College School of Law student says she wants to be a federal judge, but until that day comes she’s figuring out how to serve justice any way she can.

Moore, 24, spent 10 weeks reviewing old police records looking for clues to help her close unresolved civil-rights era killings, including suspicious cases that may have involved officers pulling the trigger. But the enthusiasm Moore had when she arrived to her internship quickly turned to anger. Moore said she quickly realized many of the officer shootings she was looking at from the 1950s and 1960s sounded a lot like the cases she was seeing in the news in 2015.

“The Michael Browns and Walter Scotts, they’re all repeated,” said Moore, who grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and got her undergraduate degree from Spelman College, a historically black liberal arts college for women.

(Read more about the unprecedented effort to solve civil-rights era murders.)

Moore is still hopeful about what she can achieve in the criminal justice system but says it’s frustrating “to go back and read these newspaper headlines and see that the exact same thing is happening today, that we really haven’t progressed in over 60 years.”

The other scary phenomenon that Moore sees repeating itself over and over: police officers with ties to white supremacist groups.

Moore and four other law school students interned with the Cold Case Justice Initiative (CCJI), a Syracuse University program that investigates unsolved civil rights murders. This year the students were hosted by the Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia.

Larrissa Moore standing in front of the Lewis R. Slaton Courthouse in Atlanta.Jorge Rivas/Fusion

The students looked at cases from as early as 1946 all the way to 1969, the period allowed by the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. Congress passed the act in 2008 and provided $10 million annually for the FBI and the Department of Justice to investigate unresolved racially motivated killings.

And although CCJI was founded to review civil rights cases the small group still gets calls from people looking for help in more recent suspicious murders. In July, Moore started assisting with the case of Rexdale Henry, 53-year-old Native American man who was found dead in a Mississippi jail cell.

Henry was found dead just a day after Sandra Bland was found dead in her Texas jail cell. Henry’s cellmate has been charged with murder. Texas officials said Bland’s autopsy found injuries consistent with suicide. But questions still remain in both cases.

Ties with the KKK

Larrissa Moore focused her research on police officers with ties to the KKK and found one of the group’s first orders was to infiltrate the police department—“because the laws don’t apply to them if they are the law,” she said.

“If you think about the history with the police department, they were pretty much set up to continue white supremacy,” said Moore, who noted the first black law enforcement officials in Georgia were hired in the mid 1940s.

“We had black officers but they could not arrest white people,” said Moore, who said this illustrated that blacks were still inferior in the eyes of the law.

Law enforcement connections with white supremacist groups have continued into present day.

Last year a Florida deputy police chief resigned after the FBI reported that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. No criminal wrongdoing was found for the former police chief of Fruitland Park, a town about 40 miles northwest of Orlando.

RELATED
151211-atlanta5
Cold case justice: Inside the hunt for civil rights era killers

“It’s not a crime to hate people. It may be despicable, it may be immoral, but it’s not a crime,” Chief Deputy State Attorney Ric Ridgway told the Orlando Sentinel in July 2014.

A year after he resigned the former deputy police chief was hired in a food service position at a local elementary school. He only lasted in the new job for three days before parents who recognized him pushed him out.

In September a Louisiana police detective was fired after pictures surfaced of him at a KKK rally giving a Nazi salute. A few months earlier the civil-rights group The Southern Poverty Law Center exposed an Anniston, Alabama, police officer for speaking at a rally of the known hate group League of the South.

Law enforcement ties to white supremacist groups have been uncovered outside of the South as well.

A federal judge in 1991 described a clique of deputies at the Lynwood Sheriff’s station in Los Angeles as a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang.” The judge’s finding came after more than 70 Lynwood residents filed a lawsuit alleging deputies engaged “in systematic acts of shooting, killing, brutality, terrorism, house-trashing and other acts of lawlessness and wanton abuse of power,” especially against Latinos and blacks, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“There is a direct link between departmental policy makers, who tacitly authorize deputies’ unconstitutional behavior, and the injuries suffered by the plaintiffs,” wrote U. S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. The county of Los Angeles agreed to a settlement in 1996, promising to retrain deputies and pay $7.5 million to compensate victims of alleged abuses.

Years later in 2012 the L.A. Times reported the L.A. county undersheriff, the department’s second in command, had a Lynwood Vikings tattoo, the name of the group the judge referred to as a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang.” Former undersheriff Paul Tanaka admitted to having a Vikings tattoo on an ankle and told a local radio station that “it was no big thing. [The viking] was a mascot.”

Tanaka left the department in 2013 and is now the mayor of Gardena, a Los Angeles suburb with a population of 60,000 residents. His office did not respond to Fusion’s request for comment.

In an October 2006 report the FBI reported that “white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement” is a “concern” because it can lead to “investigative breaches and can jeopardize the safety of law enforcement sources and personnel.”

An excerpt from the FBI's 2006 report 'White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement --

The FBI report noted the First Amendment’s freedom of association provision can protect law enforcement officials’ rights to join white supremacist groups for the purposes of lawful activity. However, the government can limit employment opportunities of hate group members if their “memberships would interfere with their duties.”

While noting that the threat still exists, the FBI acknowledged the same findings that Larrissa Moore found in her research: white supremacists groups and leaders “have historically engaged in strategic efforts to infiltrate and recruit from law enforcement communities.”

Still cold and running out of time

In many of the cases the law students reviewed, they say if police investigations had “done more there could have been justice for some of these families,” explained Mandisa Styles, a Mercer School of Law student.

The FBI so far has not reviewed any of the 37 cases sent to them by The Cold Case Justice Initiative, according to the group’s founders. The FBI did not respond to several requests for comment. And the extension that allows the interns to review these unsolved cases is running out of time—the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act expires in 2017.

“We have discovered hundreds of killings that aren’t on the FBI’s list that no one’s ever done a full accounting of all the people who have been killed either by Klan or by suspicious police shootings,” said Janis McDonald, a law professor at Syracuse University who co-founded CCJI with law professor Paula Johnson.

Mandisa Styles, right, prepares to present her research at a CCJI event.Jorge Rivas/Fusion
Mandisa Styles, right, prepares to present her research at a CCJI event.

Earlier this year the co-directors formed a working group within the United Nation’s Human Rights Council Network called Accountability of U.S. for Inaction on Racist Killings, which will examine civil-rights era killings and lynchings and suspicious police killings from the era of slavery until today. McDonald and Johnson went to the U.N. with hopes of requiring the U.S. to respond to these killings.

“Young people today need to put this in context of what happened in the recent past that really has helped contribute to what is going on today,” said Janis McDonald, a law professor at Syracuse University, who co-founded CCJI with law professor Paula Johnson.

This year at least 909 people have been killed by law enforcement officials, according to KilledByPolice.net, a website that tracks police killings by collecting corporate news reports.

A white police officer killed a black person nearly two times a week during a seven-year period ending in 2012, according to a USA Today analysis of the most recent accounts of justifiable homicide reported to the FBI.

“This work is so important, because history is repeating itself,” said Larrissa Moore.

“If we don’t go back and address these old cases and get accountability for them, it’s going to keep happening.”