Defund the Police? Purge Them, Instead

Calls to defund the police are less urgent - the bigger priority is to screen and flush out white terrorists infiltrating law enforcement.

Publisher’s Riff

Instead of defunding the police, the immediate priority is to purge the police. White supremacists have been infiltrating law enforcement agencies for quite some time, and we have yet to come up with concerted plans to stop that. Recent stories of this happening in Washington, D.C. during the recent attack on the U.S. Capitol are nothing new, unfortunately.

There are reports both anecdotal and confirmed that police officers - particularly U.S. Capitol Police - aided and abetted white insurrectionists attacking the seat of government last week. House Democrats are investigating further.

Maggie Haberman @maggieNYT

Cops gave rioters directions to Schumer’s office but aimed a gun at a photographer and didn’t believe she was a journalist. Astonishing this is the level of security in the halls of a co-equal branch of government in the post-9/11 era.

Emily Cochrane @ESCochrane

the fact that @erinschaff experienced THIS and still filed photos and wrote about makes me want to cry all over again because she is such a pro and was just doing her damn job in THE NATION’S CAPITOL. https://t.co/txT2jABPBq

There’s even video footage showing Capitol Police officers either welcoming in or opening up barricades to invading swarms of extremists and others taking selfies …

Tim Hogan @timjhogan

I’ve watched this clip 100 times and I still can’t believe it

Multiple reports confirm officers, for example, showing terrorists where Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) office is. And there are reports from current D.C. police officers who claim there were current police officers among insurrectionists clashing with local police last week, flashing their badges. So, we know police played a big role in the massive security failure in D.C. last week.

What's been needed for some time, but hasn’t happened, yet, is the larger national conversation and needed response on 1) the accelerated infiltration of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies by white supremacists, especially in recent years and 2) how those agencies screen for them and how we flush them out. It's gotten so bad that even the Secret Service recently acknowledged, publicly, that it is in the process of reconfiguring security details for President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris because of concerns that the originally planned details were saturated with MAGA-leaning Trump loyalists.

Hopefully, inevitable Congressional investigations will focus in on the extent to which white nationalists or fanatical MAGA followers have swelled Capitol Police ranks - and how that was a main driver in the collapse of security on Capitol Hill. This is not far-fetched or bizarre or unusual for Congress to do: the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing in September entitled "White Supremacy in Blue—The Infiltration of Local Police Departments" ….

The findings from that hearing should be revisited in the discussion on what happened last week. In addition, let’s also revisit the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s own warnings on this topic, plus recent and exhaustive research from sources such as the Brennan Center …

The harms that armed law enforcement officers affiliated with violent white supremacist and anti-government militia groups can inflict on American society could hardly be overstated. Yet despite the FBI’s acknowledgement of the links between law enforcement and these suspected terrorist groups, the Justice Department has no national strategy designed to identify white supremacist police officers or to protect the safety and civil rights of the communities they patrol.

Obviously, only a tiny percentage of law enforcement officials are likely to be active members of white supremacist groups. But one doesn’t need access to secretive intelligence gathered in FBI terrorism investigations to find evidence of overt and explicit racism within law enforcement. Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and elsewhere.

Defunding the police, in this respect, is not really the key priority. The core problem is white supremacists in the ranks of police departments, in addition to the white supremacist or white supremacist-allied leadership in police unions. We can defund the police all we want, but that will do nothing if active, collaborating white nationalist elements remain in the police departments. So, what if you successfully defund the police then what? Well, there's no progress since sleeper cell white extremists can still run amuck or control those departments in plain sight and find other creative ways to wreak havoc. What we need to do is quickly pivot the conversation to how we flush these terrorists out of these agencies.

How do we purge the police?