Since 2000, more than two dozen states have unmasked police officers with connections to white supremacist groups. What they have is government sanction.” A failure of imagination? They don’t just have the passion of their beliefs. “Their capabilities are actually on par with any foreign terrorist group, if not greater. He argues that the potential threat to public safety from the far right is much greater, given the cloak of authority under which these extremists can operate. “So often we tend to look at far-right militancy as something on the fringes of our society, tantamount to Al Qaeda and ISIS, without realizing that, no, these are members of state legislatures, police officers, military personnel,” says former FBI agent Michael German, who infiltrated and prosecuted neo-Nazi groups in the 1990s. New law could mark end of American Confederacy – in Brazil
Many Americans are struggling to understand the dynamics of right-wing terrorism, including the role of law enforcement officers and military personnel, and how rhetoric and mass psychology help to answer a fundamental question: Who do police protect and who do they protect them from? “If officers went up there and did that, that’s a criminal act, and you ought to be held accountable like everybody else.”Īs the FBI braces the country for more trouble ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, the attack on the Capitol revealed a troubling national blind spot: the political radicalization of police that predates the presidency of Donald Trump. More than two dozen officers are under investigation for their participation in Jan. Sworn officers were also on the other side, joining the rioters, a fact that has Mr. But Capitol Police has opened as many as a dozen investigations into reports that officers aided the mob, and at least two have been suspended. One officer died, 60 were injured, and the department lost another to suicide. The vast majority of officers fought valiantly to protect lawmakers from harm.
Now the Capitol attack has put a spotlight on sympathies within police ranks toward right-wing extremists. Police departments struggled last year to respond evenhandedly to racial-justice and pro-police protests. “So often we tend to look at far-right militancy as something on the fringes of our society, tantamount to Al Qaeda and ISIS, without realizing that, no, these are members of state legislatures, police officers, military personnel,” says former FBI agent Michael German. But in recent years, lethal threats to law enforcement have primarily come from right-wing extremists.
In its reporting to Congress it has lumped in antifa, an anti-fascist movement, with right-wing extremists like Boogaloos. Then there’s an apparent institutional discomfort to confront the problem publicly. Larger failures of imagination, added to biases of individual police officers, is part of what analysts say makes radicalization among officers possible. Critics say police departments are biased in how they handle protests by right-wing groups that claim to be pro-police.
6, in which more than two dozen police officers are under investigation for their alleged participation, has cast a shadow on the seemingly hands-off approach to the threat posed by a pro-Trump protest. Concerns about right-wing extremist groups recruiting police officers predate the presidency of Donald Trump.
0 kommentar(er)
