A US House of Representatives subcommittee held a hearing this week to examine the infiltration of law enforcement by white supremacist groups, reports Jurist. Representatives from law enforcement, academics and activists gave testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties subcommittee in a recorded two-hour remote hearing.
Prior to the hearing, subcommittee chairman Jamie
Raskin released a 2006 FBI threat assessment report that highlighted the
extent of white supremacist officers within police departments across the
country and the effect of their presence in fostering an environment of
pervasive racism. The FBI had only released a highly redacted version of the
report. Raskin explained his decision to release the unredacted report as
remedying “a serious dereliction of duty” from the FBI.
Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for
Justice and a former FBI agent, testified at the hearing. In his written statement, he drew attention to examples in just the last
few months of “law enforcement officers across the country flaunting their
affiliation with far-right militant groups” such as the Three Percenters, the
Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.
Vida Johnson, a professor at Georgetown University
Law Center, gave testimony about her 2019 law review article, “KKK in the PD: White Supremacist
Police and What To Do About It,” in which she compiled “178 instances of
explicit racial bias by the members of the police in 48 states,” which she
called “just the tip of the iceberg.”
Johnson and German’s testimony, like the 2006 FBI
report, described a spectrum of white supremacist affiliation within law
enforcement agencies.
In some cases, officers were avowed members of hate
groups, acting with a deliberate intention of infiltrating the federal
government to increase their organizations’ ability to commit violence without
repercussion. The FBI report included examples of a police officer who made
threats against Black school children and a Black city council member and a
correctional officer who assisted a white supremacist prison gang with drug
distribution and assaults.
Other officers did not have direct ties to white
supremacist hate groups but expressed sympathy with white supremacist ideology.
As German wrote, “Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of federal
state and local law enforcement officials participating in racist nativist and
sexist social media activity, which demonstrates the overt bias in the ranks as
far too common.”
German pointed out that the Supreme Court rulings
in Brady v. Maryland and Giglio v. United States established
that prosecutors are under a requirement to provide exculpatory evidence to
criminal defendants, including evidence that might impeach a government
witness. German recommended that officers who have condoned racist behavior
should be added to Brady lists since their racism could reasonably be
expected to impeach their testimony.
Both German and Johnson called for police
departments to perform better background checks, follow zero-tolerance policies
for hate group membership, and institute better whistleblower procedures and
protections. They also called for the Department of Justice to gather more data
on white supremacists within local law enforcement and to strategically bring
prosecutions to weed out officers with white supremacist affiliations.
Subcommittee Chairman Raskin and Chairwoman Maloney
called for the passage of the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, “to rid law
enforcement communities of officers who have white supremacist affiliations or
subscribe to white supremacists beliefs.”
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