[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
CONFRONTING VIOLENT WHITE SUPREMACY
(PART IV): WHITE SUPREMACY IN BLUE_
THE INFILTRATION OF LOCAL POLICE
DEPARTMENTS
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 29, 2020
__________
Serial No. 116-121
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Reform
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available on: govinfo.gov,
oversight.house.gov or
docs.house.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
41-981 PDF WASHINGTON : 2020
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND REFORM
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York, Chairwoman
Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of James Comer, Kentucky, Ranking
Columbia Minority Member
Wm. Lacy Clay, Missouri Jim Jordan, Ohio
Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts Paul A. Gosar, Arizona
Jim Cooper, Tennessee Virginia Foxx, North Carolina
Gerald E. Connolly, Virginia Thomas Massie, Kentucky
Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois Jody B. Hice, Georgia
Jamie Raskin, Maryland Gary Palmer, Alabama
Harley Rouda, California Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin
Ro Khanna, California Michael Cloud, Texas
Kweisi Mfume, Maryland Bob Gibbs, Ohio
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Clay Higgins, Louisiana
John P. Sarbanes, Maryland Ralph Norman, South Carolina
Peter Welch, Vermont Chip Roy, Texas
Jackie Speier, California Carol D. Miller, West Virginia
Robin L. Kelly, Illinois Mark E. Green, Tennessee
Mark DeSaulnier, California Kelly Armstrong, North Dakota
Brenda L. Lawrence, Michigan W. Gregory Steube, Florida
Stacey E. Plaskett, Virgin Islands Fred Keller, Pennsylvania
Jimmy Gomez, California
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York
Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts
Rashida Tlaib, Michigan
Katie Porter, California
David Rapallo, Staff Director
Candyce Phoenix, Chief Counsel
Amy Stratton, Clerk
Contact Number: 202-225-5051
Christopher Hixon, Minority Staff Director
------
Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Jamie Raskin, Maryland, Chairman
Wm. Lacy Clay, Missouri Chip Roy, Texas, Ranking Minority
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Member
Robin L. Kelly, Illinois Thomas Massie, Kentucky
Jimmy Gomez, California Jody B. Hice, Georgia
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Michael Cloud, Texas
Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts Carol D. Miller, West Virginia
Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of
Columbia
Rashida Tlaib, Michigan
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hearing held on September 29, 2020............................... 1
Witnesses
Michael German, Fellow, Brennan Center for Justice
Oral Statement................................................... 9
Vida B. Johnson, Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown
University
Oral Statement................................................... 11
Frank Meeink, Author and Activist
Oral Statement................................................... 13
Mark Napier (Minority Witness), Sheriff, Pima County, Arizona
Oral Statement................................................... 14
Heather Taylor, President, Ethical Society of Police, St. Louis
Oral Statement................................................... 16
Written opening statements and statements for the witnesses are
available on the U.S. House of Representatives Document
Repository at: docs.house.gov.
Index of Documents
----------
Documents entered into the record during this hearing and
Questions for the Record (QFR's) are listed below/available at:
docs.house.gov.
* Wall Street Journal , ``Who Watches the `Hate' Watchers?''
article; submitted by Rep. Roy.
* Department of Justice Report, ``Hate Crime Victimization'';
submitted by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
* CNN, ``DOJ Hate Crime Victimization Report Summary'';
submitted by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
CONFRONTING VIOLENT WHITE SUPREMACY
(PART IV): WHITE SUPREMACY IN BLUE--
THE INFILTRATION OF LOCAL POLICE
DEPARTMENTS
----------
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
House of Representatives
Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Committee on Oversight and Reform
Washington, D.C.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:13 a.m.,
via WebEx, Hon. Jamie Raskin (chairman of the subcommittee)
presiding.
Present: Representatives Raskin, Clay, Wasserman Schultz,
Kelly, Gomez, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Norton, Tlaib, Maloney
(ex officio), Roy, and Comer (ex officio).
Mr. Raskin. Good morning. The subcommittee will come to
order. And without objection, the Chair is authorized to
declare a recess at any time.
Welcome to the Oversight Subcommittee on Civil Rights and
Civil Liberties hearing entitled ``White Supremacists in Blue--
The Infiltration of Local Police Departments.''
Good morning to the Chair of the committee, Mrs. Maloney,
who has joined us. Good morning to our ranking member, Mr. Roy,
who is with us. And good morning to the vice chair of the
committee, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, and all of our other wonderful
members who have joined us.
I want to take a moment to extend a special welcome to
Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan to our subcommittee.
This is her first hearing with our subcommittee and we're
delighted to have her join us.
Welcome, Ms. Tlaib.
Before we begin today, I want to play a video that will set
the stage for the discussion that we're about to have.
Clerks, please go ahead and play the video.
[Video shown.]
Mr. Raskin. This is the fourth hearing our subcommittee has
had on the problem of White supremacist violence in America.
Since the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we have
also held a separate set of briefings on police brutality in
communities of color and rampant violations of the First
Amendment at civil rights protests by the Trump administration.
Today, we'll examine how these different threats to the
American people intersect--namely, how White supremacist
organizations, ideas, and attitudes have come to infiltrate and
target certain domains of law enforcement.
The bloody trail of violent White supremacy is now
splattered across America:
Charleston, South Carolina, where White supremacist Dylann
Roof slaughtered nine African American parishioners at worship
in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Charlottesville, Virginia, where hundreds of neo-Nazis and
Klansmen rioted and wounded dozens of people and killed Heather
Heyer in a terrible attack by automobile.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where a neo-Nazi killed 11 people
and wounded six at the Tree of Life Synagogue as they
worshipped.
Poway, California, another anti-Semitic rampage.
El Paso, Texas, where a White supremacist hyped up on anti-
immigrant hate killed 23 people and wounded 23 others in a
rampage at a Walmart.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, 75 percent of all
extremist-related murders between 2009 and 2018 were committed
by right-wing extremists. The Center for Strategic Studies,
which analyzed over 900 politically motivated attacks in the
U.S. since 1994, found that there have been nearly six times as
many victims of violence from right-wing groups as from others.
In 2020, they found that over 90 percent of political attacks
were conducted by right-wing groups. These are the facts.
Like COVID-19, this virus of violent White supremacy is
spreading. The Southern Poverty Law Center documented a record
30 percent increase in the number of hate groups nationwide
over the last several years and hate crimes are also trending
up.
But as with COVID-19, the Trump administration has decided
to mislead the public by downplaying the problem. A Department
of Homeland Security whistleblower has stated that Ken
Cuccinelli told him to specifically modify draft language on
White supremacy to make, quote, ``the threat appear less
severe,'' and to ``include information on the prominence of
violent 'left-wing' groups.''
The spread of violent White supremacy is a threat to
everyone, but disproportionately it is a threat to Black and
Brown communities. But it is also a threat, and purposefully
underestimating this problem is a threat, to first responders,
in this case, to police officers.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, White supremacists
and other far right extremist groups have killed 51 police
officers since 1990. Eighty-three percent of shootouts between
police and extremists involve right-wing extremists, with White
supremacists being responsible for more than half of those.
The unredacted memo we released today from the FBI states
that, quote, ``White supremacist presence among law enforcement
personnel is a concern due to the access they may have to
restricted areas vulnerable to sabotage and to elected
officials or protected persons that they could see as targets
for violence. White supremacy is a deadly threat to the safety
of law enforcement officers as well as to public safety
generally.
In May, far right extremists killed David Patrick
Underwood, a Federal law enforcement officer. One of the
Boogaloo boys charged in Underwood's death is a former Air
Force sergeant also suspected in the murder of a Santa Cruz
sheriff earlier this year. In February, a White supremacist
killed officer Nick O'Rear in Alabama.
In 2006 the FBI released an intelligence assessment warning
of, quote, ``White supremacist infiltration of law
enforcement.'' The FBI identified two distinct problems.
First, the FBI noted the problem of White supremacist
groups infiltrating law enforcement. We've seen a lot of
evidence of that in the 14 years since the FBI's assessment as
officers across the country have been dismissed for active
membership in the KKK and other similar groups. We will hear
testimony about this problem today.
But the FBI also identified a second problem: law
enforcement officers who have no formal affiliation with racist
groups, but who sympathize with their racist ideology. This too
has been in plain view in this period of resurgent racist
violence across America.
In 2019, a team of investigative journalists published the
Plain View Project, which collected over 5,000 postings
displaying White supremacist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and
violent Facebook material from police officers in eight
different cities.
We invited the FBI to come today. The Bureau refused to
come, claiming it has nothing to say because they have no
evidence that this is a widespread problem demanding the FBI's
attention.
What's more, they have attempted to disavow their own 2006
intelligence assessment, which has every sign of being an
authentic document. They did provide us an unredacted version
of that 2006 assessment, which I am releasing today so the
public can better understand how the FBI understood this threat
and judge its subsequent actions--or lack thereof--accordingly.
The redacted passages include prescient warnings for the
American people. The FBI warns that, quote, ``White supremacist
infiltration of law enforcement can result in abuses of
authority and passive tolerance of racism within communities
served.''
The FBI also cautioned that police officers who are hostile
to civil rights might, quote, ``volunteer their professional
resources to the White supremacist causes with which they
sympathize.''
These are chilling conclusions. But rather than clearly
spell out this threat for the American people, the FBI has
suppressed them from public view for 14 years.
For the first time, we can now see that the FBI believed
internally that White supremacist infiltration of law
enforcement departments was a serious problem, a source of
potential abuse of power and authority on the street, and a
source of potential violence against the civilian population.
This summer, as the country was shocked to watch videos
depicting the brutal and vindictive treatment of Black Lives
Matter protestors, other videos emerged of police officers
treating armed White militia as friends and as allies.
In Salem, Oregon, police gave a polite warning to a group
of armed White men asking them to ``discreetly stay inside the
buildings'' after curfew so it would not look like police were
playing favorites when they tear gassed protesters.
In Albuquerque, officers were caught on a police scanner
referring to White vigilantes as ``armed friendlies.''
In Kenosha, Wisconsin, officers pushed protestors toward a
group of armed White civilians. Police offered water to those
armed men, one of whom shot and killed two people that night.
The shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, got away, despite walking up to
police with his hands in the air, the murder weapon strapped to
his chest, while onlookers identified him as the killer of two
innocent Americans.
The social contract depends on fair and neutral enforcement
of the laws to protect the whole citizenry against criminal
violence and state violence. We must work to disentangle the
police power of the state from groups and individuals that
subscribe to violent White supremacist ideology and seek to
inflict harm on African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos,
Jewish Americans, LGBTQ Americans, and anyone who stands in the
way of a race war and the civil war that the extreme right is
calling for in America today.
If local or state law enforcement were being infiltrated by
ISIS or by al-Qaida or any other terrorist group we would
consider it an immediate public safety emergency. Infiltration
by violent White supremacy is no less of a threat and no less
urgent. To confront it effectively, we must understand it. That
is the purpose of today's hearing.
So, I now would like to recognize the distinguished ranking
member, Mr. Roy of Texas, for an opening statement.
I went a bit over my time there, Mr. Roy, so please feel
free to take the equal amount of time that you need.
Mr. Roy. Well, I appreciate it, Chairman. The Chairman is
always gracious to make sure that we have equal time and to
handle that in that respect. So, I appreciate that. And good to
see you from afar.
As you know, this hearing is the fourth in our series on
White supremacy. And we've had a number of good exchanges and
dived into some of the facts over the course of the previous
three hearings, and I certainly think it's important for us to
do so.
As you remember, I was particularly moved and wanted to
understand the situation in Charlottesville as a University of
Virginia graduate. Obviously, that hit close to home in talking
to a mother who lost her daughter sitting there on the downtown
mall in Charlottesville where I used to go as a student. Seeing
this horrid series of events unfold, it was important for us to
have that conversation. And I think it's important for us to
have this conversation.
I would note, and the Chairman knows, I mean, I've been
asking repeatedly for the last year for us to have a hearing,
for example, on human trafficking. There's 40 million people
around the world suffering from human trafficking, some 20,000
in the United States where we've had actual law enforcement
engagement with them, which is a fraction of what we know is
actually occurring in the United States. The estimates are
upwards of 300,000 or 400,000.
I think we should find time in our schedule for hearings on
matters such as that. As the Chairman knows, I think it's an
important issue. If you think about 300,000 or 400,000 people
that are estimated to be engaged in--or to be the victims of
human trafficking in the United States at any given moment, we
ought to look at that.
You know, look, I think we have to ask the question: Why is
this now fourth in a series of hearings? I don't question the
motives of the Chairman, but I would have to acknowledge that
it is fairly obvious over the last X number of months that my
Democratic colleagues really want to perpetrate a narrative
that American law enforcement is either systemically racist or
composed of White supremacists. And I just categorically reject
that characterization of the almost 800,000 law enforcement
personnel who are standing up on the Thin Blue Line for each
and every one of us every day.
As a former Federal prosecutor, I firmly believe we root
out crime wherever we find it. We root it out. And we root out
hate, we root out racism wherever we find it. That is our job,
to go pursue it. I wholly agree with that.
But it is a dangerous path, it is a dangerous path that my
Democratic colleagues are pursuing in defining our law
enforcement personnel as systemically racist. That's what's
happening. That's what these things are doing. That's what this
focus is doing.
And by the way, it wouldn't matter if this hearing was just
focused--that this hearing is just focused on law enforcement.
My Democratic colleagues have made it abundantly clear that the
United States of America is in and of itself systemically
racist. That is the position of the modern Democratic Party,
that our Nation is systemically racist. And that, to me, is
fundamentally at odds with what this Nation actually has stood
for and what this Nation actually has done.
I come from a family with a history in law enforcement. My
great-great-grandfather was a Texas Ranger in the county in
which I'm sitting in right now in the 1870's, in Travis County,
Hayes County, and Blanco County, and I'm proud of that.
My grandfather was the chief of police of a small west
Texas town, Sweetwater, Texas. He died of cancer when my dad
was seven. My dad barely knew him because he had just come back
from the war.
By all accounts from everybody I have talked to my
grandfather was a good, faithful public servant who was not
racist in way. Everything I understand from my family, from my
grandmother who was a single mom in west Texas, the first woman
county clerk elected in Nolan County, Texas, when my
grandfather died of cancer.
I stand by my grandfather, and I stand by all the law
enforcement officers that I worked with when I was the
Assistant United States Attorney, working in the U.S.
Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of Texas, and all of
the fine law enforcement officers who worked for me of varying
races when I was the first assistant attorney general.
You know, when I was First Assistant Attorney General for
Attorney General Ken Paxton here in Texas, we had 4,100
employees. I will wholly acknowledge that, irrespective of race
for a moment, if one percent of those 4,100 are doing anything
crazy, insane, mean, hateful, racist, illegal, at any given
moment, one percent of that 4,100, that's 41 people. And my job
as First Assistant Attorney General was to go track these
things down, have internal investigations, go look and figure
out what's happening. I wholeheartedly embrace and believe in
that.
But when we, the institution of Congress, make blanket
statements, using viral videos, to define a class of human
beings standing on that wall for us every day, I'm troubled by
that.
There is a significant amount of evidence out there that
suggests that there is not structural bias in the criminal
justice system regarding arrests, prosecutions, or sentencing.
Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police
actions.
There are 70 million interactions, roughly--obviously these
are estimates--70 million interactions between law enforcement
and civilians every year. Now, if a million of those are
troubling, problematic for varying different reasons, one of
which might be race, one of which almost certainly is race,
then we should root that out.
But when you then categorically define 70 million police
interactions, with 800,000 law enforcement personnel, as
systemically racist, then you're undermining our entire rule of
law, right? And we're seeing this unfold right now in front of
us.
You know, the past few months have brought police into the
limelight and sparked a resurgence of anti-law enforcement
rhetoric from the left and many in the media. And what has been
the result? More violence in our streets, more police officers
killed in the line of duty.
More Americans, many of them in low-income communities, are
suffering because their communities are crumbling at the hands
of lawless mobs. They can't use the bus stop to take them
across town to get to work because somebody smashed it to
pieces. They can't get a loaf of bread from their local corner
store because looters ransacked it, forcing the owner to close
shop for good. The owner of a shop that has been in their
family for years is now gone.
Forty-five percent of Black-owned businesses have been
decimated since the beginning of both the virus and all of the
unrest on our streets.
There are real consequences to what's going on on our
streets. In many cases they cannot call the police for help.
Just yesterday there was a thing that went on here in
Austin where somebody was running through the Whole Foods in
downtown Austin, where everybody's getting their little lattes
and buying some arugula for their salad, somebody is running
through. And they're worried about it, called the police. Well,
guess what? There were no police to get there. Why? Because the
Austin City Council, in its leftist infinite wisdom, had
slashed the police department by a third.
Look, data shows that when police backlash based on false
narratives follows the release of a viral video, law
enforcement tends to be less aggressive in pursuing
perpetrators, resulting in an increase in crime and homicide,
of which victims include all races.
In the two weeks following the death of Mr. Floyd, more
than 700 police officers were injured. Many lives have been
lost and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to private
businesses and public property has been made. Across 20 major
cities the murder rate at the end of June was an average 37
percent higher than at the end of May. The murder rate. These
are people, these are murders.
And what about the police officer shootings with the intent
to kill that we recently saw in Los Angeles and Louisville in
the name of defending social justice. There were two officers
killed in Louisville, at least one of whom was Black.
Defunding the police, creating broad, false narratives
about law enforcement and encouraging violence in our streets
in the name of politics is harming our communities. You can't
defund the police.
For example, for total homicides year over year for the 15
largest U.S. cities, Austin, in the district that I represent,
ranked first at 64 percent increase. And just a few months ago,
the city of Austin, as I said before, defunded one-third of the
police department.
More examples from Austin: 43 percent increase in murders,
17 percent increase in aggravated assaults, 30 percent increase
in statutory rape, 24 percent increase in arson, five percent
increase in vandalism.
Notably, due to their defunding, they canceled the 144th
Austin Police Department cadet class, the most diverse cadet
class for the department in its history. Half of the graduates
were minorities. They canceled it. It's gone. All those people
who wanted to serve in law enforcement, who wanted to serve in
the community, who wanted to help protect their communities--
again, over half minorities--that class is gone.
At least 46 police officers have been killed in the line of
duty this year. I read all of their names on the floor of the
House of Representatives last week. Where the hell was the NBA
wearing their names on the back of their jerseys? Where the
hell was the outrage for the law enforcement officers who lost
their lives in the line of duty, standing up on that Thin Blue
Line for us?
Twenty-four-year-old officer, Katherine Mary Thyne, who was
dragged by a car and pinned against a tree, dead. Police
Officer Brian Brown, who was also killed in a vehicular
assault, gone. Sergeant Damon Gutzwiller, who was ambushed,
shot and killed, gone. Twenty-four-year-old officer, Breann
Leath, who was shot in open fire responding to a domestic
disturbance, gone, just to name a few. We already have an over
50 percent increase in police officers killed in the line of
duty with three remaining months left this year, but cities
around the Nation are defunding their police departments.
This committee, in my opinion, is giving a platform to
harmful narratives, precluding the very idea of safe streets
while hurting our communities. Safety and security should be
nonnegotiable to this body. It is nonnegotiable to me as a
father, as a Texan, and especially as a Member of Congress.
I think, Mr. Chairman, I understand what we're doing here
and the conversation we're having. These are important
conversations. But we ought to be mindful of those 800,000 men
and women who are going to suit up today to stand on that line
for us.
And I'm always entertained by those who are out on the
streets and something happens, and there's violence because
they're out at some protest, and the next thing you know, they
go, ``Where are the police?'' That's happened to Members of
this body, where they're looking around, ``Where are the
police?''
Well, I guarantee you that the thing that we're going to be
asking is, ``Where are the police?'' if we continue to go after
and assault them and blanketly condemn them as racists, as an
institution of racism, as opposed to doing our lawful duty as
Members of Congress or as law enforcement officers to go root
out every single crime, every single action, one case at a
time.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. Raskin. Mr. Roy, thank you very much for your
thoughtful remarks. And I hope I'll get a chance to respond to
some of the things a bit later.
One thing I do want to say right now is there is nothing in
anything that I said--and there is nothing about this hearing--
which describes all of law enforcement as racist or a racist
threat. On the contrary, my whole opening was about how violent
White supremacy is a threat to the public interest, including
to law enforcement itself.
But I think we'll be able to discuss this more with the
witnesses as they come through. And I thank you for your
remarks.
With that, I'm going to recognize the Chair of the
oversight committee, Mrs. Maloney, for her opening statement.
Mrs. Maloney. First of all, I want to start by thanking my
good friend Chairman Raskin for convening this important and
timely hearing. The subcommittee has already held three
hearings focused on violent White supremacy, and Chairman
Raskin's leadership on this issue has been inspiring.
As Chairman Raskin said, racism is not new to America. It
is particularly not new to Black Americans. Since our Nation's
founding, racism has been used to treat Black Americans as
second-class citizens--or no class citizens.
We must never forget that policing in America started with
slave patrols. Many slave patrols evolved into police
departments that for decades have been used to ensure Black
Americans could not exercise their full rights as citizens.
We are dealing with that legacy today. Many police
departments face the continued infiltration of White
supremacists into their ranks. As the FBI found, and I quote,
``militia extremists, White supremacist extremists, and
sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links
to law enforcement officers,'' end quote.
This year we have seen millions of people march in the
streets. They are asking for the end of state-sanctioned
killings and calling for the dismantling of systemic injustice.
Their mission is straightforward. They are asking for the
bare minimum: that our Nation be a place where the lives and
deaths of Black Americans matter.
But those protests have been met with violence, and in many
instances police-sanctioned violence by White extremist groups.
This hearing is not about good officers versus bad
officers. This hearing is about making sure we as a Nation
acknowledge that White supremacy has no place in any police
department. The idiom does not end with, quote, ``a few bad
apples.'' The saying is, ``A few bad apples spoil the bunch.''
We cannot let White supremacy continue to spoil the bunch.
Instead, we should all condemn the behavior that Chairman
Raskin described.
I am honored to attend this hearing. It is shameful,
absolutely shameful that the FBI chose to ignore the
committee's request to attend and instead disavowed their own
terrifying findings about the pervasiveness of White supremacy
in police departments.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses about their
extremely important work. And I hope we remember the wise words
of Chairman Cummings, that, ``We are with better than this,''
end quote.
And I yield back. Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Madam Chair, thank you very much.
I now want to introduce our witnesses.
Our first witness today is going to be Michael German, who
is a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. Then Vida B.
Johnson, who is an associate professor of law at Georgetown
University Law School, just a few blocks from the Capitol. We
will also hear from Frank Meeink, an author and activist. Then
we will hear from Mark Napier, who is the sheriff of Pima
County, Arizona. And finally, we'll hear from Heather Taylor,
who is the president of the Ethical Society of Police in St.
Louis.
The witnesses will now please unmute so I can swear you in.
Please all of you raise your right hands, if you would.
Do you swear or affirm that the testimony you are about to
give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
so help you God?
Thank you.
Let the record show the witnesses have all answered in the
affirmative.
Thank you. And without objection, your complete written
statements will be made part of the record. You are given five
minutes within which to give your oral presentation and then
all of the distinguished members of the committee who have
arrived, including Ms. Tlaib, who has just joined the
subcommittee, are going to ask you questions.
With that, Mr. German, you are now recognized for five
minutes.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL GERMAN, FELLOW, BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE
Mr. German. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the
subcommittee. Thank you for inviting me to testify today about
White supremacists and far right militant activity in law
enforcement.
In 1992, when I was with an FBI agent preparing to go
undercover against neo-Nazi skinhead groups in Los Angeles, my
colleagues warned that White supremacists often have relations
with law enforcement and that I would have to strengthen my
undercover identity to withstand law enforcement scrutiny.
I worked closely in that operation and in a later one
investigating far right militias in Washington state with
officers from several different Federal and local law
enforcement agencies who typically had more experience than I
did. None suggested this was an unreasonable concern.
So, I was not surprised when the FBI released its 2006
intelligence assessment entitled ``White Supremacist
Infiltration of Law Enforcement'' that alerted agents to this
infiltration by organized groups and, quote, ``by self-
initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic
to White supremacist causes,'' unquote, as it was the same
warning I received a decade earlier.
A leaked 2015 FBI counterterrorism policy guide makes the
case more directly. It warns agents that FBI domestic terrorism
investigations focused on militia extremists, White supremacist
extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have active
links with law enforcement officers.
But when Representative William Lacy Clay asked FBI
counterterrorism chief Michael McGarrity whether the Bureau
remained concerned about White supremacist infiltration of law
enforcement since the publication of the 2006 assessment at a
June 2019 hearing of this subcommittee, Mr. McGarrity indicated
he had not read it.
Asked more generally about this infiltration, McGarrity
said he would be suspect of White supremacist police officers,
but their ideology was a First Amendment protected right.
The 2006 assessment addresses this concern, however, by
summarizing Supreme Court precedent on the issue. Quote:
``Although the First Amendment freedom of association provision
protects an individual's right to join White supremacist groups
for the purpose of lawful activity, the government can limit
the employment opportunities of group members who hold
sensitive public sector jobs, including jobs within law
enforcement, when their membership would interfere with their
duties.''
More importantly, the FBI's 2015 counterterrorism policy,
which McGarrity was responsible for executing, indicates not
just that members of law enforcement might hold White
supremacist views, but that domestic terrorism investigations
have often identified, quote, ``active links,'' unquote,
between the subjects of these investigations and law
enforcement officials.
Its proposed remedy is stunningly inadequate, however. It
simply instructs agents to protect their investigations by
using the ``silent hit'' feature of the Terrorist Screening
Center watch list so that police officers could not ascertain
whether they were under FBI scrutiny.
Of course one doesn't need access to secret FBI terrorism
investigations to find evidence of explicit racism within law
enforcement. Since 2000, law enforcement officials with
connections to White supremacist groups or far right militant
activities have been exposed in more than a dozen states around
the country. Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of
Federal, state, and local law enforcement officials
participating in racist, nativist, and sexist social media
activity, which demonstrates that overt bias is too common.
Law enforcement officials actively affiliating with White
supremacists and far right militant groups pose a serious
threat to people of color, religious minorities, LGBTQ people,
and anti-racist activists. But the police response to protests
following the murder of George Floyd includes a number of law
enforcement officers across the country flaunting their
affiliation with far right militant groups.
Police officers casually fraternizing with armed far right
militia groups at protests is confounding because many states,
including California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, have laws
that bar unregulated paramilitary activities.
And far right militants have often killed police officers.
As the Chairman stated, the ADL has reported that far right
militants in fact have killed 51 police officers from 1990 to
2018. The ambush, shooting, bombing, and killing of Federal law
enforcement officers in Oakland and a local sheriff's deputy in
Santa Cruz County, California, by far right militants
highlights the threat that police engagement with these groups
poses to their law enforcement partners.
My written testimony includes detailed recommendations for
Congress, for prosecutors, and for Federal, state, and local
law enforcement. And I look forward to your questions. Thank
you.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you very much for your testimony, Mr.
German.
Professor Johnson, you are now recognized for your five
minutes of testimony.
STATEMENT OF VIDA B. JOHNSON, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF LAW,
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY
Ms. Johnson. Thank you to the subcommittee members and to
Chairman Raskin, Chairwoman Maloney, and Ranking Member Roy for
the honor of speaking with you today.
My name is Vida Johnson. I am an associate professor of law
at Georgetown Law and I write about criminal procedure and
policing.
Before I begin, I want to make clear that I believe that
the vast majority of people who become police officers do so
for all the right reasons, including members of my own family.
But nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that there's a long
history of explicit racism on police departments, and, sadly,
this legacy of racism continues today.
Our nation is one of the most diverse in the world and our
officers need to be able to protect and serve everyone in our
community.
In 2006, the FBI warned of White supremacists trying to
infiltrate police departments. The Department of Homeland
Security warned in 2009 that White supremacists were recruiting
former military personnel and called it one of the biggest
domestic terrorism threats in the United States. Warnings from
these agencies went unheeded.
In 2014, members of a police department in Florida were
outed as members of the KKK. In 2015, an Alabama officer was
identified as being a member of the League of the South. In
2017, an Oklahoma police chief was discovered to be one of the
most influential White supremacists in the country. In 2019, a
prospective homebuyer toured a Michigan officer's home and saw
a framed KKK application.
In addition to officers who identify with these types of
groups, some officers hold explicitly racist views without any
hate group affiliation.
The Department of Justice reports on Ferguson and Chicago
make plain that officers used the n-word, along with other
disparaging remarks about people of color, in the communities
they police. And of course this year, in Wilmington, North
Carolina, White officers were caught on tape looking forward to
a race war and dreaming of wiping Black people off the map.
Texting scandals involving officers in San Francisco and
Miami make clear that this is a problem nationwide.
In my 2019 Law Review article, ``KKK in the PD,'' I
compiled accounts of 178 instances of explicit racial bias
found in news stories. We know that this is just the tip of the
iceberg. Some officers aren't so careless as to end up on the
news, but still hold these views.
The confidentiality statutes in many states make the issue
of police discipline private, so they don't make the news. And
of course the blue wall of silence keeps many of these officers
on the force because others fail to report them for their
explicitly racist views.
We care about this problem because racist views can
translate into racist deeds. We know that officers
disproportionately stop people of color, and of course we worry
most about violence. We know that the biggest torture scandal
in policing involved John Burge, whose ``midnight crew'' in
Chicago extracted confessions from over 100 African American
men with the use of cattle prods and other torture.
An officer in Little Rock, Arkansas, was honest when he
reported to a police department that he had attended a Klan
rally. He was hired anyway. He later went on to shoot and kill
a 15-year-old unarmed Black boy.
So, what are some solutions to this terrible problem? A
more expansive view of Brady v. Maryland, if that were
codified, we might come to a way to ferret out some of these
officers.
Brady v. Maryland is a Supreme Court case that makes clear
that the government must turn over any information that is
favorable to the accused, and that includes information that
impeaches a witness' credibility; information in the police's
possession is imputed to prosecutors.
What would this look like? Prosecutors would have to
investigate their officers and turn that information over for
use at a public trial.
Other solutions include better background checks in hiring
of officers, zero-tolerance policies, searches of officer
emails and texts for keywords associated with racial animus,
social media policies in which officers agree as a condition of
hiring to allow social media searches, and Federal licensing of
officers, which would also allow for better screening and
preventing officers from going from one department to another.
We must weed out officers who hold racist beliefs rather
than sweep them under the rug.
I'm happy to take any questions.
Mr. Raskin. Professor Johnson, thank you very much.
I now recognize Mr. Meeink for his five minutes of
testimony.
STATEMENT OF FRANK MEEINK, AUTHOR AND ACTIVIST
Mr. Meeink. Good morning. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Frank
Meeink. I am a former White supremacist and neo-Nazi gang
member.
After I served my time in prison in 1994, I decided to
leave the skinhead movement, now with the antibodies to the
virus of hate.
I've spent the last 25 years speaking out against racism.
I've conducted hate crimes trainings for police officers, FBI
and Homeland Security agents. I volunteer with the Des Moines
Police Department as an announcer at their annual fundraising
hockey game. I am also an activist for Black Lives Matter.
Black lives matter.
I've spoken out about the fact that White supremacist
leaders encourage their followers to join the police force as a
means to cause harm to people of color. I was there when it was
said. I was in the room where it happened.
I'm here to bear witness to my own experience. I grew up in
a lower middle class, tough Irish Catholic neighborhood in
South Philadelphia. I had a mother who was a drug addict and an
abusive stepfather. I feared going home so much that some days
I tried to get hit by a car.
At the age of 13, I was kicked out of my mom's home and
moved in with mydaddy, who lived in a mixed, very rough
neighborhood in southwest Philadelphia. I was the new kid, a
skinny punk rock White boy at an all-Black middle school. This
is where my fear turned to hate.
That summer I went up to visit my cousin in Lancaster
County, Pennsylvania. This is Amish Country. And although my
family was not Amish, and I promise you there are no Amish neo-
Nazis, I thought my cousin and his friends were cool. They were
older. They were neo-Nazis. I would hear them make racist
comments even though they'd never spent any time around Black
people.
When they heard where I went to school, I became the urban
inner-city expert and I began to feel I mattered. The day that
I decided to join this movement was the day I saw other people
fear my group of friends. I saw them as powerful. Up until that
point I might be a teenager, but inside I was a seven-year-old
scared little boy who feared everything. I feared my parents,
my stepparents, my school. I feared if I was going to have
enough food to eat.
I wanted people to fear me, so I became a member of the
neo-Nazi movement. I got a swastika tattooed on my neck to
prove my undying loyalty. I joined the movement for survival,
which made me grasp onto every word that was said in the room.
And here is what I heard. In 1991, I attended a meeting run
by the White Student Union at Temple University. This was a
monthly meeting of about 15 to 20 members. They were mostly
college guys, so they were career-minded. They would use words,
they would say to us that we need to grow out our hair, stop
getting tattoos, and get ready to go into the military or
police. Two people that were at that meeting later on became
cops.
That same year, I attended a small meeting in Baltimore run
by the National Socialist Movement and a group called SS
Action. I heard the same rhetoric there. They told us to join
law enforcement so we can give Black people felonies so they
would not be able to legally arm themselves and they would not
be able to vote.
Later, in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, I attended a Hitler
birthday party. This was put on by the Christian Posse
Comitatus. And at that party Mark Thomas talked to us about how
he was happy with our numbers. We had a lot of members. But he
thought we were too rowdy. He said we needed to chill out and
get rid of our tattoos and be better soldiers for the movement.
Mark Thomas held Bible studies regularly. We would all
gather inside these military tents in his backyard and we would
read the Bible, shoot some guns, and prepare to destroy Sodom
and Gomorrah. This experience was meant to militarize us and
push us to gain more professional training in law enforcement.
In 1992, I attended a meeting of about 100 people in
Montgomery, Alabama. This meeting was run by the Aryan Youth
Front, where Bill Riccio urged us to join the military so we
could get real training.
In late 1992, I went to Aryan Fest in a desert town in
California. At that time, I still had a big swastika tattooed
on my neck. Many people made comments about me, that I need to
get rid of it and grow out my hair because we need all of our
people to join the military and/or police.
The fact that many of these neo-Nazis became cops means
there's something not right with the screening process in law
enforcement and I believe it is possible to fix.
I hope that by me speaking out today, and with God's help,
we can at least start stitching this wound in America and stop
just putting Band-Aids on it.
Breonna Taylor mattered. Black lives matter. Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Mr. Meeink, thank you very much for your
compelling testimony.
And, Sheriff Napier, you are now recognized for your five
minutes of testimony.
STATEMENT OF MARK NAPIER, SHERIFF, PIMA COUNTY, ARIZONA
Sheriff Napier. Good morning. I appreciate the opportunity
to appear before the subcommittee this morning, and I thank you
for that. My name is Mark Napier. I am the sheriff of Pima
County, Arizona.
The law enforcement profession shares the concern that any
bad actors may infiltrate its ranks. Moreover, we share
community outrage at the conduct of a very few members of our
profession when they act out with violence and racial animus.
However, these are the actions of a very, very few members of
law enforcement.
Every day, in communities large and small, thousands of law
enforcement officers make over a million contacts with the
public that result in no use of force or give rise to the
appearance of any racial bias. In point of fact, most public
contacts with law enforcement are the result of a call for
service.
The law enforcement profession makes every effort to weed
out bad actors. Our hiring and training process is rigorous.
Prior to employment, we conduct comprehensive background
investigations, oral interviews, polygraphs, and written
examinations. Today, we even scan social media looking for
troubling posts and questionable associations.
Successful candidates then go through extensive training.
This training includes cultural awareness training, racial bias
training, and use of force training.
Upon completion of academy training, new officers go
through field training, where he or she is evaluated and
observed by a tenured, high-performing officer.
At the conclusion of field training, the new officer is on
a probationary period for one year, during which time his or
her performance is reviewed and observed by a field supervisor.
The officer is then evaluated for the duration of his or her
career.
We take every step possible to weed out bad actors and bad
candidates and then to professionally train, observe, and
evaluate our officers throughout their career.
It would be dishonest to suggest that bad actors do not
slip through despite our best efforts. However, this is not
unique to law enforcement. Every profession risks the prospect
of a bad actor infiltrating its ranks and tarnishing its
standing.
These isolated occurrences, for any profession, should not
be used as an indictment of its entire membership or as a
catalyst to assert that the isolated bad acts are evidence of
systemic prevalence. As Americans, we do not believe the bad
acts of a few members of any group provide justification for
bias, stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination against all
members of that group. This is always wrong, even when it's
cast toward law enforcement officers.
I've been a law enforcement officer since 1981. I hold a
bachelor's degree in social psychology and a master's degree in
criminal justice. I do understand the manifestations of both
overt and implicit racial bias.
Moreover, I believe that racism, discrimination, and
socioeconomic inequality still exist in our country and
constitute a serious problem. Racism has been a scar on our
country since its founding, and I believe it is still alive
today.
During my three-decade career in law enforcement, I have
not found any evidence to make me believe that racism or White
supremacy is systemic--and systemic is a very important word--
in our profession.
Assertions to the contrary I believe to be false, not out
of naivete, ignorance, or a lack of personnel exposure to the
profession, rather because I have simply not been exposed to
any evidence that would lead me to reasonably believe that
systemic racism and infiltration of White supremacy into the
profession which I have dedicated nearly four decades of my
life to is present in modern day law enforcement.
Again, I appreciate the opportunity to testify before the
subcommittee this morning and I welcome any questions that any
members might have. Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Sheriff Napier, thank you very much for your
testimony today and for joining us.
Finally, we will hear from Heather Taylor, the president of
the Ethical Society of Police of St. Louis, Missouri.
And, Ms. Taylor, you are recognized for your five minutes
of an opening statement.
STATEMENT OF HEATHER TAYLOR, PRESIDENT, ETHICAL SOCIETY OF
POLICY, ST. LOUIS
Ms. Taylor. Thank you for having me this morning. I would
like to start off. Once again, my is Heather Taylor. I recently
retired, last Friday. I was a 20-year veteran of the St. Louis
Metropolitan Police Department. I was a detective sergeant in
the Homicide Section. However, I am speaking on behalf of the
Ethical Society of Police.
The Ethical Society of Police was founded in 1972 to fight
racial discrimination in our community and our police
department. We have approximately 325 members in the St. Louis
City, St. Louis County, and Ferguson area. We are roughly 97
percent African American.
I am here to give my perspective on White supremacist
ideologies and White supremacist sympathizers in law
enforcement.
The FBI report from 2006 about ``White Supremacist
Infiltration in Law Enforcement,'' the Plain View Project,
which affected our police department greatly, which exposed
racist content by police officers, and numerous other reports,
are clear examples we have a problem with White supremacy and
racism in law enforcement.
I want to provide my perspective by telling a true story.
For nearly seven years, I have repeatedly reported an officer
for his racism. I learned this officer had a penchant for
making racist statements about Black people on social media. He
once stated, ``Black people are pathetic.'' He also cheered a
Black man being shot in the head, posting, ``You can take him
out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of him.''
A Black woman accused him of saying ``Only prostitutes and drug
dealers own Bentleys.'' Another time, he made a racist
statement about Black people and welfare.
This officer was also reported for racial profiling by a
citizen. He's also a field training officer, training hundreds
of officers within our police department.
He's never been fired for these statements and these
complaints, despite people like myself, who is a sworn officer,
and citizens making these complaints.
These statements were not the worst of his actions. This
officer and other officers killed a Black man under
questionable circumstances in 2012. I was the scene
investigator on that case. That case haunts me to this day.
He used a banned chokehold. Another officer tased this man
six times--six times. The officer violated numerous policies. A
witness said that one of officers used the n-word during this
incident. Others stated the victim resisted arrest.
The use of the n-word, all witness statements relayed to
me, all questionable actions by the officers were placed in a
police report, an official document. The report was turned over
to the Internal Affairs Division for review for criminal
charges or discipline.
I was told the officers were returned to full duty. No
charges were filed. I just couldn't believe it, so I delivered
a copy of the police report to the Circuit Attorney's Office in
2013, months after the case was finally done. I just couldn't
believe that there were no charges, there was nothing.
To this day, I don't know if a grand jury ever reviewed the
case for any form of charges. I don't know the discipline of
that case.
In 2020, this same officer that used that banned chokehold
made an insensitive Facebook post about another Black man. This
time it was George Floyd. It was about chokeholds and his
belief that George Floyd's murder was justified.
I believe more extensive background checks are necessary
with hiring. I believe the immediate termination and removal of
police certifications of officers that support White supremacy,
that are corrupt in any way, that these officers should be
removed immediately.
And it is clear that anyone saying that you can train away
racism, they're wrong. You cannot train away racism. You just
can't. You need to weed it out. You need to fire them and
terminate them if they're officers.
I also believe that whistleblower protections need to
become a priority. I've risked my life by reporting officers.
I've received death threats from officers, officers liking the
idea of me bleeding out on a call by myself.
It's impossible to break the blue code of silence if there
are no protections in place that empower officers to come
forward.
I would like to also state that in 2017, a Black officer,
Milton Green, who grew up in the inner city, survived and
became an officer, he was shot in 2017 by a White officer.
There were racial undertones about that incident. That was in
2017.
Three months later, Detective Luther Hall was brutally
beaten, in his own words, like Rodney King, by four White St.
Louis City police officers. Those officers have been federally
indicted.
I would also like to state that COVID-19 is the leading
cause of death for police officers and suicide. The leading
cause of death. We are losing officers by COVID-19 and suicide.
We have had 45 officers this year, unfortunately, including
Officer Tamarris Bohannon, who was shot and killed, that have
been shot and killed or died by force, use of force.
I think it's important to address that sympathizing with
White supremacy is a problem within our law enforcement
communities. That is a reality. And what we see with the
officer that I am speaking about in my example is that he is a
field training officer. He's training other officers to become
officers. There's no way that he should have been allowed to
continue in this field.
I would also like to add in this that there was a recent
study by Citigroup that listed that $16 trillion is a result of
racism in our country--$16 trillion. That's what we have as a
result of racism in our country. And that includes law
enforcement and the settlements that have been made regarding
racist officers and sympathizers within our police department.
I welcome any questions. Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you very much, Sergeant Taylor.
And, with that, we have completed our witness testimony,
and we will enter upon questions.
I now will recognize myself as Chair for five minutes of
questioning.
I want to start with Professor Johnson to address the First
Amendment implications of this, because I know that there are
Supreme Court decisions that say that you can't discriminate
against people in public hiring based on what their political
ideology is, but I wonder if you would speak to the speech
conduct distinction in some of the things, for example, that
Sergeant Taylor just talked about in terms of officers letting
their beliefs influence their actions on the job, either toward
citizens, or toward fellow officers?
Ms. Johnson. Sure. I would be happy to answer that
question.
So, I think it is important to note that public servants
are limited in some of their speech in a lot of ways, and that
is true for Federal employees, judges. There are all sorts of
ways that we limit the speech of public servants. And there
have been court decisions, most notably by the Second Circuit,
that say that when an officer's speech is at odds with a police
department's interests in having the trust of the community,
that the interests of the police department outweigh the First
Amendment concerns of the police officers.
There was a famous case that took place in New York City
about officers who had been a little afloat in expressing very
racist stereotype, and, ultimately, the Second Circuit ruled
that those officers could be immediately terminated.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Professor Johnson.
Mr. German, dozens of officers have been killed by White
supremacists, as you point out. The unredacted FBI document
that we have released today mentions different threats of White
supremacists going out onto the police forces, as Mr. Meeink
talked about, being encouraged to do by neo-Nazi groups. They
talk about the risk of sabotage, the risk of having access to
elected officials, the risk of having access to weaponry, and
opportunities to use it.
What do you think are the biggest risks of White
supremacists actually infiltrating law enforcement?
Mr. German. I believe the biggest risk is that the risk to
communities policed by officers who are associated with White
supremacist groups are engaged in other racist behavior. And I
am disappointed that the FBI has disavowed, apparently behind
closed doors, its 2006 assessment, particularly because the
2015 assessment is much nearer in time, and much more direct
about what it is talking about. Not just that officers might
have White supremacist ideas, but that they have active links
to subjects of FBI domestic terrorism investigations.
And the reason I am concerned about that is because the FBI
already deprioritizes the investigation of White supremacist
violence. And this kind of disavowal disparages the work of
very good and effective FBI agents who work these cases,
despite the fact that they are not a priority.
And there are a number of cases. The FBI, in 2017, ran an
operation that identified two corrections officers who were
involved in a Ku Klux Klan plot to kill a Black inmate. You
know, these kinds of cases are critically important, and there
are many of them. I could go on. And we don't want to have the
FBI creating a chilling effect within its own agency that would
slow down the investigations like this when we already have in
civil rights color of law cases declination rates upwards of 96
percent.
So, you can imagine how hard that is to continue working
when you have that kind of attitude from your superiors.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you.
Mr. Meeink, let me come to you. I think it may have been
Sergeant Taylor who voiced some skepticism about whether you
can train somebody out of their racism, and that that--
certainly that seems right in the abstract. On the other hand,
maybe your career or your own evolution is a counterexample to
that. We know Sheriff Napier spoke about the importance of
racial-cultural sensitivity training.
Do you think that is enough to make it work, and how did
you get out of the White supremacist ideology that you were so
steeped in? You have got to unmute.
Mr. Meeink. Thank you. And thank you for the question.
Everything can help. Anything that gets more people
involved with other human beings is something that will always
help. That is what changed my life, was having the consistent--
God put people in my life to prove me wrong consistently to
take the right spiritual path.
What I tell you--what I know about how I changed my racism
is that I learned that empathy plus humility equals humanity,
and I must be of service to people at all times, and that has
changed my life dramatically for the better.
The more important part about the policing is that we need
to take this very seriously, and the fact that I am talking
about events that were 30 years ago. Do you know how many
movements and groups have started and have done the same thing
since then? So, it is a real problem. It is really in there. We
are finding more and more stories.
Since my article came out in The Daily Beast a couple weeks
ago, more and more officers have been outed, and we will
continue to do that.
The training is a great option. We need more people to
really get involved with communities that they once hated or
are afraid of. A lot of the officers that we are getting are
officers that are coming from the suburbs, that come into the
cites, or suburban police forces that are getting a lot of men
that are full of fear, fear that I used to fear.
I looked in the face of that man with his knee on George
Floyd's neck. He had arrogant fear written all over him, and
that is what leads to racism, and that is racism, is that
arrogant fear----
Mr. Raskin. Thank you. My time is all up, Mr. Meeink. Thank
you very much.
I now yield to the distinguished ranking member for his
five minutes of questioning.
You have got to unmute, Chip, if you are----
Mr. Roy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I appreciate that, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate all the
witnesses. Thank you for your testimony, particularly those of
you who served in law enforcement. Not to, you know, belittle
those who didn't, but just appreciate your-all's service and
appreciate you, Ms. Johnson, who said that you have family
members in law enforcement, so I appreciate you all being here.
Mr. Chairman, I would like to put into the record an
article that The Wall Street Journal had--it is an editorial to
be clear--called ``Who Watches the Hate Watchers,'' about the
Southern Poverty Law Center's recent turmoil. Knowing the video
that was put out here at the beginning of the hearing was a
Southern Poverty Law Center video----
Mr. Raskin. Without objection.
Mr. Roy. Yes. The journal just points out some of the
issues that the Southern Poverty Law Center has had within its
own ranks, and they have been kind of making some internal
reviews about racism and sexism and other issues inside
Southern Poverty Law Center. Just putting that in the record as
indication that this is--we have societal questions, and so, I
am perfectly comfortable having these conversations here with
law enforcement as well, but that we should be looking across
all these organizations, particularly organizations who are
focusing so heavily on it.
A question for Sheriff Napier. Could you describe, sir, the
current difficulties you have in the hiring process and some of
the processes you all go through with respect to diversity and
training and your hiring processes?
Sheriff Napier. Well, clearly, hiring is a significant
challenge right now. The current national rhetoric around law
enforcement has not helped that, especially trying to recruit,
as we desperately do, people of color and people from
socioeconomically disadvantaged background is especially hard,
because when you have this supposition that there is systemic
racism in the profession, it seems unwelcoming to people of
color and people from socioeconomically disadvantaged
background.
So, it is an extreme challenge for all of us right now to
hire, but then, also to retain. Once people get into this
profession, it is now more difficult to retain them.
My son is a Tucson police officer. And, with some of the
recent events, he said something that I hope will touch all of
your hearts. He told me that when he became a police officer,
he said, ``Dad, I was willing to lay down my life for my
community. I realized that that was part of what I had signed
up to do.'' He said, ``but, Dad, I never signed up to be hunted
like an animal.''
And the execution and the ambush of law enforcement
officers has a very disquieting and chilling effect on law
enforcement officers and the ability to recruit these young
people. So, this is an ongoing challenge, and it is not getting
better anytime soon. There are certain economic drivers, of
course, but the current rhetoric around law enforcement is not
helping our recruiting efforts, especially into these
communities where we would ready like to recruit better.
Mr. Roy. Sheriff, would you find it troubling--you are not
the sheriff here in Travis County, Texas where the city of
Austin is, which I represent, but the city of Austin just cut
its department by a third, upwards of $150 million. They are
now having to reroute and take folks from one--for example, the
drug unit, they are having to move people off of that just for
regular patrol. They are having now--and sometimes--and they
canceled--as I noted in my opening statement, they canceled the
entire recruiting class, this existing class, which was the
most diverse in history.
Do you see that as a problem? Do you see that as something
that might be a nationwide problem beyond what I am just seeing
here firsthand in Austin, Texas?
Sheriff Napier. Of course. We are not asking law
enforcement to do less. When I became a police officer in 1981,
law enforcement was arguably pretty simple by comparison to
what it is in 2020. We are asking law enforcement officers to
be mental health professionals, substance abuse counselors. We
are asking more and more.
So, the idea that you would remove funding at the very time
when we are asking more of law enforcement than we ever have is
nonsensical. Should we have a great community dialog about the
redefinition, redefining of what law enforcement does and what
services it provides a community, and the manner in which those
services are provided. That is a sensible dialog. But I think
that results in greater funding to law enforcement, not less.
I just approached my board of supervisors to have
additional appropriations for the hiring of community
engagement specialists, which will be people that have specific
mental health and substance abuse training, that will respond
to calls that normally a deputy would respond to, because they
are a better tool. So, we are actually going in the opposite
direction.
Mr. Roy. Sheriff, I have got 30 seconds left, and I want to
be mindful of the clock as the Chairman just did, and I would
just close with this question:
You just touched on a very important issue that I would
love us to have a long conversation about. The additive nature
of having additional resources and mental health counselors and
folks to support and supplement law enforcement, versus a blunt
lack of law enforcement because of a reaction to issues that
has been undermining law enforcement. Can you just speak to
that, the additive nature versus the subtractive nature?
And then I will yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Sheriff Napier. Yes. I think the community is rightly
concerned about what role law enforcement fills, and we are
better able to fill that with more resources, not less. And the
indiscriminate arbitrarily cutting of a third of a law
enforcement agency is nonsensical, and does very little to
enhance public safety, or to enhance the ability of law
enforcement to respond to the evolving needs and desires of the
community for public service.
So, I would conclude there. Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Mr. Roy. Thank you. Thank you,
Sheriff.
I now recognize the Chair for her five minutes of
questioning. Please unmute if you would, Mrs. Maloney.
Mrs. Maloney. Hello? Can you hear me now? OK. Thank you.
Mr. German, I want to zero in on your August 2020 report.
In that report, you said that the FBI had previously identified
the main problem of White supremacy in law enforcement as,
quote, ``a risk to the integrity of the FBI investigations and
the security of its agents and informants,'' end quote.
What do you mean by that?
Mr. German. I certainly--thank you for the question,
Chairwoman Maloney.
I believe that my concern is, when you look at the 2006
assessment and the 2015 counterterrorism guide, the FBI
identifies the primary problem of White supremacist
infiltration of law enforcement is the risk it poses to FBI
investigations and law enforcement personnel, rather than
recognizing that the FBI also has a mandate to protect civil
rights. And I believe that the primary problem with White
supremacist infiltration of law enforcement is the threat it
poses to the communities these officers police, and
unfortunately, that is not--even with the full redactions
removed, that is not the primary concern reflected in those
documents.
Mrs. Maloney. Well, it seems that the FBI disagrees with
you. They have refused to provide testimony for this hearing,
and they have repeatedly told us that the 2006 threat
assessment is an irrelevant and outdated document.
So, in your report, you note that the FBI report does not
address the potential harm White supremacist police officers
pose, quote, ``to communities of color they police or to
society at large.''
What is the impact on communities of color--can you
elaborate, when police tolerate racism in their ranks?
Mr. German. The criminal justice system, there are racial
disparities at every step, from who the police stop, to who
gets searched, to who gets arrested, to how they are charged,
to use of force charges. And we have seen these disparities
persist over many decades now.
And, as long as there is a continuing persistence of White
supremacist involvement and racist behavior in law enforcement,
that is going to color the perception the public has about
police, particularly in the communities that are most heavily
policed. And that disruption between the law enforcement and
the communities they serve undermines the security of all of
us.
Mrs. Maloney. Also, in the 2006 assessment, the FBI stated,
and I quote, ``white supremacist infiltration of law
enforcement can result in other abuses of authority and passive
tolerance of racism within communities served,'' end quote.
Do you believe that observation has been borne out by
current events that we have been observing the past few months?
Mr. German. I do. And, again, this isn't a new problem, and
there are FBI agents and field officers across the country who
are doing good work on this topic, but, because that work is
deprioritized within the FBI, it becomes difficult for them to
be as successful as they need to be. And, you know, I would
particularly look at civil rights color of law violations and
the high rate of declination.
Mrs. Maloney. Given all this, do you think that it is
irresponsible of the FBI to continue to ignore this problem?
Mr. German. Absolutely. If the problem is large enough for
the FBI to warn its own agents, I think it is important that
the FBI and the Department of Justice put a national strategy
to protect the public from these officers as well.
And I totally agree that this is a small minority of police
officers who are engaged in this behavior, but as long as it
persists, it affects the whole system.
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you.
Mr. Meeink, earlier this month, you gave an interview to
The Daily Beast describing how multiple members of your gang
had infiltrated the police department.
What would you say to those who think that White
supremacist infiltration of law enforcement is not a real
threat?
Mr. Meeink. Thank you for the question.
To answer that question, I know the facts. I know that
there are people that I used to run with who are not very
spiritually good people, and they are racist from the core, and
I just would fear--if I was a Black person being pulled over on
the side of the road, knowing the people I know that became
cops, I would be fearful, too.
I yield my time.
Mrs. Maloney. This is my last question.
Given your experience, do you believe that there is a real
problem of White supremacist infiltration of the police
department?
And then I yield back.
Mr. Meeink. Thank you.
So, just to give you some experience real quick, I was a
hockey coach for a long time. When I got out of the neo-Nazis,
I had a great job of being a hockey coach. And the reason why I
bring that up is because every hockey team has an agitator,
right? He is the guy who goes out and starts trouble with the
other team during the game.
No matter what that man does, every person on that team has
to stand up for him. So, when you have one racist Nazi cop in a
precinct, the other cops might even not know his full beliefs,
but just have to back him up at all times no matter what.
And I think that is kind of the trouble that we are getting
ourselves into, is that people--with the blue line, we will
protect one another and not have to want to cause division
between ourselves, even to call out somebody who is wrong. So,
I worry about that, that they will protect each other because
of the blue line, like a hockey team.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Mr. Meeink.
And the gentlelady yields back. Thank you, Madam Chair.
I now recognize Mr. Clay for his five minutes of
questioning.
If Mr. Clay is not there, I am going to go to Debbie
Wasserman Schultz, or it looks like she may have had to step
away.
Let's see. I am coming to Mr. Gomez. I see you are present,
Mr. Gomez. You are recognized for five minutes.
Mr. Gomez. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman.
One of the--Mr. Meeink, you have already given us your
disturbing firsthand account of organized White supremacist
attempts to infiltrate law enforcement. The FBI's 2006
assessment added that White supremacist leaders and groups have
historically shown an interest in infiltrating law enforcement
communities or recruiting law enforcement personnel.
Can you tell us how this assessment squares with your own
personal experience?
Mr. Meeink. Thank you for the question.
Off of my personal experience, coming up in the neo-Nazi
world, we weren't so much worried about the cops on the
outside. We were more worried about FBI and other further
investigations. So, we never had a full-on hatred toward the
cops. They were just kind of a speed bump.
But we knew that, in learning how to become police
officers, we could affect our community better toward our
views. And, when I say ``better,'' that is the disturbing fact
and trend that I do see coming through the police department
right now.
Mr. Gomez. The FBI also noted in one of its redacted
passages, revealed today by the subcommittee, that it was
concerned about unreported instances and the infiltration that
has gone undetected. It further noted that the possibility that
infiltration has gone undetected is of great concern.
As someone who has been in the room when organized White
supremacists have had these conversations, do you think that
the FBI is being irresponsible when, today, it discounts a
likelihood that racism goes undetected or unreported?
Mr. Meeink. So, I know that, in the rooms, what we always
have talked about was how to try to get around their tests to
make sure that they don't see that we have either a neo-Nazi
past or neo-Nazi beliefs. So, it is talked about regularly
about how to try to get around their--it actually becomes a
goal of theirs, is to get around the screening process of
police departments. That is talked about in the rooms all the
time.
Mr. Gomez. When these groups of White supremacists--is
there often more than one or two, or how many would be in a
particular police department, and would they operate more as a
clique within that department or that station?
Mr. Meeink. That would be projecting on my end, and I
wouldn't have the facts to that, so I would really--I know that
there is neo-Nazis that get in the police. I don't know how
many do it at the time. I don't know--you know, I can't give
you any--I don't want to speak out of turn or say something I
am not--know as a fact. The other stuff I have talked about is
fact. So, this, I don't know the answer to.
Mr. Gomez. Well, the reason why I am asking that question,
in Los Angeles County--and this is a question for Mr. German.
In Los Angeles County, we have--the sheriff's department has a
long history of having--some people call it cliques, other
people call it gangs, that dominate station houses and often
have been terrorizing Black and Brown communities.
And I have actually appeared to the station. I went on
ride-alongs with actually the sheriff's department in
unincorporated east L.A., and it was something that I saw
firsthand. One the stations in unincorporated east L.A. was
called Fort Apache, right? So, last--so it is something that I
actually witnessed myself.
But, just last month, a lawsuit alleged that one of these
gangs inducts new members after they have been involved in
shootings, or acts of brutality, by giving them inking parties,
where they are tattooed with Nazi imagery. Chairman Raskin and
I have asked the DOJ to investigate.
Mr. German, how do these violent gangs, or these cliques,
fit into your view of White supremacist infiltration of law
enforcement?
Mr. German. It is certainly one manifestation of the
problem, and, you know, again, it--when you see these
instances, it is often through civil rights lawsuits, or
investigative journalists who are uncovering these cases. And
then law enforcement responds once it is a public scandal,
where, of course, people in law enforcement understood this was
an issue long before the investigative journalists or victims
of these abuses come forward.
And that is the problem with the FBI's reporting, is that
it acknowledges there is a problem, but it--its solution is to
advise its agents to protect their cases rather than having a
comprehensive national strategy to identify these officers that
are often known within their departments, and make sure that we
are nipping this in the bud proactively, as we would if it was
any other kind of terrorist group.
Mr. Gomez. One last thing is that I want to just
acknowledge that the sheriff's department in L.A. has different
cliques or gangs, and some are White supremacist-affiliated,
and some are multiethnic, and what happens is that, if you
don't join that clique, there is a lot of pressure, like--as
Mr. Meeink says, members who are joining, they're new to the
law enforcement, they are new deputies, so like they won't be
protected if their back is on the line while on the street. So,
they have this weird pressure to join.
And, in the end, law enforcement should be committed, not
to an ideology, but to the department and its ability to
protect and serve the people of their communities.
With that, I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Raskin. Mr. Comer, you are now recognized for your five
minutes.
Mr. Comer. Thank you.
My questions will be geared toward the sheriff. Sheriff, I
appreciate you being here. I appreciate all the witnesses being
here.
You mentioned the hiring process in your remarks, and I do
think it is important that we have a very heavy representation
of minority police officers, minority law enforcement,
especially in the minority districts. I think that would go a
long way toward solving a lot of the distrust that exists out
there.
What are the current challenges you face with respect to
hiring the right people and a diversity in hiring?
Sheriff Napier. Well, I would say, to some degree, this
very hearing does not help that. When you alleged that there is
systemic infiltration of White supremacists and people with
racially biased ideology within the profession, it is not
welcoming to people of color, and that is understandable.
I don't see that. What we are doing personally on my
department is going down to inner-city high schools and trying
to welcome these people very early on in their sophomore and
freshman year of high school, trying to recruit down there, to
say you have a home with our family, and to establish those
relationships very early on.
But this continual assertion that there is systemic
infiltration of White supremacists and people with racial
animus in this profession does not help that. And I don't speak
about this, you know, from anecdotal evidence or from an
academic perspective, but, rather, as a practitioner for 39
years.
Mr. Comer. Well, I couldn't agree more, and I was going to
ask you how you felt like the current national dialog among the
Democrats, because it is among the Democrats, implying the
systematic racism, their, you know, constant drumbeating to
defund the police in certain cities, cities which, by the way,
need law enforcement more than anyone, and even this committee,
the title of this hearing, ``White Supremacy in the Blue,'' I
mean, what is that doing to law enforcement, or now the morale,
to race relations? I mean, can you kind of give us an example
of what it is like?
Sheriff Napier. Well, I think it has strained our
relationship further with the communities that we struggle
historically to bond with. It has been an ongoing struggle
through the entirety of my career.
I would take you--I don't think this is purely a partisan
issue. I think there are some Republicans that are concerned,
myself being one of them, about having better relations with
people of color, to better reach out, to better understand
those communities. I think that is a responsibility that law
enforcement needs to embrace without respect to partisan
ideology.
But these things are not helping our relationship with
people of color and these disenfranchised communities that we
historically struggle with.
Mr. Comer. I completely agree and supported many parts of
criminal justice reform, especially sentencing and things like
that, sentencing injustices. I believe we need more minority
law enforcement officers. I have always said that.
But I do believe that the constant attacking of our law
enforcement is heavily overweighted in the Democrat rhetoric
right now, right before an election for obvious reasons, but,
Sheriff, every profession has bad apples, and law enforcement
is no exception.
What challenges do you face with respect to weeding out the
bad apples once they become employed as law enforcement
officers?
Sheriff Napier. Well, there are tremendous due process and
union agreements that make it very difficult for us sometimes
to weed out these bad apples, to--we have some people that have
frightening disciplinary histories on our department, and it is
hard to get rid of these people and to get them out the door.
So, it is an ongoing challenge, and we do want law
enforcement officers to have due process rights, and to be
protected, like any citizen would expect to be protected in the
employment environment. But, to some extent, maybe these
protections have gone a little too far and are a little too
constraining on executives like myself, who recognize a problem
and think that this person might be better equipped to be in a
different profession.
Mr. Comer. Well, I completely agree. Let me thank you for
your service, like all of our law enforcement women and men who
put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe.
I have 14 seconds left here. I do believe that, if we are
looking for bipartisan opportunities, bipartisan opportunities
for us to work together, Madam Chairwoman, would be to
eliminate the barriers that law enforcement have, like the
sheriff just mentioned, in making it easier to get rid of the
bad apples in law enforcement.
It is very difficult to fire someone once they get tenure
or once they get merit, they become a civil servant, and it
shouldn't be that way when you are dealing with bad--a few bad
cops.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Mr. Comer.
I now recognize Mr. Clay for his five minutes of
questioning.
Mr. Clay. Mr. Chair, did you say Mr. Clay?
Mr. Raskin. Mr. Clay, yes. You are recognized for five
minutes, and we have got you.
Mr. Clay. Thank you so much to you, and Ranking Member Roy,
for conducting this hearing.
And let me also congratulate Sergeant Taylor for your
retirement and your service to the St. Louis community over the
years. We appreciate that.
The types of posts and comments that the Plain View Project
identified reflect anti-Black racism, anti-Hispanic racism,
Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and violence against
civilians.
Sergeant Taylor, our city, St. Louis, was one of the cities
explored by the Project, and as the head of the St. Louis
Ethical Society of Police, can you talk about how these racist
attitudes translate offline?
Ms. Taylor. Thank you for your question, and thank you.
So, the attitudes, how they translate, is that, in the city
of Missouri, you are 91 percent more likely to be stopped and
pulled over if you are African American, compared to White
drivers.
Also how it translates is that African American officers in
St. Louis City are 60 percent more likely to leave SLMPD within
their first seven years.
We also know that African Americans in our community
overwhelmingly apply to become police officers, even in this
environment right now. African Americans want to be police
officers, then they apply. The catch is, that the hiring
process is sometimes not fair.
So, you have all those systemic factors that are in play,
and they limit the opportunities of African Americans in our
city to become police officers. And you think about the Plain
View Project and what it did, is that it exposed these biases
and these homophobia and racism, and what you see in a bigger
picture is the systemic problems.
Mr. Clay. And you mentioned in your testimony $16 trillion
as a result of systemic racism. Do you have any idea of how
much St. Louis has paid out for police misconduct and wrongful
death settlements? Do you have any idea about that?
Ms. Taylor. Oh, millions. Millions. We recently had an
officer, a captain, who settled a lawsuit for one--over $1
million for racism and discrimination.
We have Detective Luther Hall, who was brutally beaten by
four White police officers. His partner, who is White, who was
working with him undercover, wasn't touched. So, Luther was
beaten, but not his partner, who is White. So, that is likely
going to be a settlement.
Milton Green, who was shot by another White colleague, an
officer coming to the aid of those officers, so that--you know,
it is in the millions. They increased--doubled the budget for
lawsuits now.
Mr. Clay. Which burdens the taxpayer in a disproportionate
way.
Let me ask you about a certain attorney, Kim Gardner's
exclusion--exclusionary list, where she does not take certain
cases from officers who have--who are on this list. I noticed
that some of them match up with these posts that are from this
article.
What does that do to the morale of police officers as--
well, as other--as German has said, for the good officers? What
does that do when they see these cases not being taken, and the
whole thing about not being disciplined for these racist posts
that are put up?
Ms. Taylor. It is very difficult. It is--in one sense, you
are happy. You are absolutely--you are clapping that she is
refusing to take their cases. But on the back end of it, we
still have to work with these people. We have to work with
people who are homophobic, who are racist, who are making these
violent threats, and the belief--my belief is that a good
majority of us are coming to work to do our job, and we do it
fairly.
However, we have to stand up. We have to stand up as
officers, Black and White. When we see these posts by other
officers, and we see corruption, we have to stand up, and it is
our moral--as far as, you know, your spirits are down a lot of
times within the police department when you see these things.
Mr. Clay. Again, thank you for your service.
And, Mr. Chairman, my time has expired. I yield back.
Ms. Taylor. Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you very much, Mr. Clay. I now recognize
Ms. Wasserman Schultz for her five minutes of questioning.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The threat of White supremacy has become really more
dangerous than ever, and meanwhile, the presence of White
supremacists embedded within law enforcement makes it more
difficult to detect and counteract threats from violent hate
groups.
In June 2016, for example, California police officers were
found to be collaborating and protecting members of the
Traditionalist Workers Party, a neo-Nazi group, in order to
target, quote, ``antiracist activists'' after a clash in
Sacramento.
In February 2019, a police lieutenant in Portland was
discovered to have a long-running friendly correspondence with
a leader of Patriot Prayer, a far-right extremist group.
My own South Florida community has not been immune to hate
within its own law enforcement ranks. In 2015, four Fort
Lauderdale police officers were found to have exchanged
violently racist text messages, leading to the dismissal of at
least three-dozen cases against Black defendants.
Now, I don't want to give the impression that this is
representative of all law enforcement, but these examples,
alone, are too many, and they undermine our Nation's promise of
equal justice.
So, Mr. German, my question is: Can law enforcement's
responses to White supremacists be blunted by sympathetic
officers who don't foresee right-wing terrorism as a threat?
Mr. German. Absolutely can be. And I think the solution is
to--as Professor Johnson has advocated, that
[inaudible] prosecutors have to find them, and as Sergeant
Taylor has suggested, protecting the good officers who report
their colleagues when they engage in racist behavior, so that
we can have a system that the good officers are able to report
the misconduct of their colleagues without themselves being
targeted, and then the prosecutors can make sure that those
officers' testimony is not being used in a way that would
undermine the rights of defendants who are charged with crimes.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Sergeant Taylor, have you noticed a
difference between how your colleagues assess threats posed by
violent White extremists as opposed to those of other groups,
like individuals, for example, protesting George Floyd's
murder?
Ms. Taylor. Yes. We have had colleagues that have been
White and Black that believe that George Floyd was murdered.
However, we do have employees that stated that, you know, it
was justified, that seeing the knee in George Floyd's neck was
justifiable. And that goes with my opening statement that that
officer was one of them, but he is not the only one.
And what that does is that it divides--it brings in that
divide once again that just we are on opposite ends a lot of
times when it comes to things like that along racial lines, and
it doesn't help bring us together in--to do our job
effectively.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Thank you. Last month, we saw a
video of police in Kenosha providing water, for example, to
right-wing militia members and telling them that they, quote,
``appreciated their presence'' even though they were heavily
armed and out after a county curfew.
Later that night, one of those militia members, 17-year-old
Kyle Rittenhouse, allegedly opened fire and killed two
protesters.
Mr. German, in your experience going undercover with White
supremacist groups, do you think that these extremists believe
law enforcement, whether implicitly or explicitly, is more
aligned with their world view?
Mr. German.
[Inaudible] there has more
[inaudible] believe so, and my frustration is those in law
enforcement don't seem to recognize the danger that is their
colleagues. You know, we have been a
[inaudible] department of 30 officers--Santa Cruz County
sheriff deputies attacked by far right militants. We haven't
seen a change in police behavior toward these militants, and I
think that poses a threat not just to the communities these
police officers serve, but to law enforcement officers
themselves.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. As I close, it is time that we
acknowledge the dangers of a police culture that compromises
its ability to address violent right-wing extremists by
tolerating it within its own ranks, even if by a small
minority. And I was glad to hear Mr. Comer say that we need to
go after bad apples, but, by failing to fully tackle what
internal law enforcement studies have flagged as a problem, the
public confidence in our police is further eroded at a time
when we can least afford it.
So, I appreciate the opportunity to have this hearing
today, and I yield back.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Ms. Wasserman Schultz.
I now recognize Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the vice chair of the
subcommittee, for her five minutes of questioning.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you so much, Chairman Raskin, and
thank you to all of our panelists, to our witnesses here today
for your testimony and offering your insight.
Before I begin, I would like to ask unanimous consent to
submit to the record a Department of Justice--a report on hate
crime victimization, and a CNN article which summarizes the
report.
Mr. Raskin. Without objection.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Now, far too much of the discussion
around the issue of White supremacist infiltration in policing
focuses on whether this problem exists at all, and we have
known for generations that it is not a question about whether
this problem is an issue, it is a matter of how we have allowed
it to sustain for so long.
Congress, as well, has been complicit, and our silence has
allowed for more violence and continued generational trauma in
our communities, and the question was raised by the ranking
member earlier: why do we keep talking about this?
We keep talking about this because we have not solved this
problem. And I want to make very clear that, when we talk about
systemic racism, we aren't litigating the individual attitudes
of any one officer. We can all exist in racist systems, and you
do not have to be racist or consciously racist in order to
participate in these systems.
And I think it is quite evident when you look at the
outcome of the war on drugs. A systemic racism is about the
laws that are on the books. It is about the types of
enforcement that happens. It is about how many officers get
designated to some communities more than others that yields
racial disparities in their outcomes. It doesn't have to do
with litigating each and every one individual officer. And that
is really the issue that is at play.
One of the things that I wanted to discuss is we have to
stop asking about how--if White supremacy in policing exists,
and I think we need to start figuring out how we can better
determine the scale of this problem. How big is this issue?
Mr. German, in your report, you write about the unbroken
chain of law enforcement involvement in violent organized
racist activity right up to the present day, but you also note
that only rarely do these cases lead to criminal charges.
So, why is that?
Mr. German. Thank you for the question.
I believe it is difficult to prosecute police officers,
partly because of the way the civil rights laws are written and
have been interpreted by the Supreme Court. So, there is
certainly room for Congress to work on that, but, also, for how
the FBI investigates these crimes, where--when there is an
incident of alleged police brutality, that the law
enforcement--the FBI will often investigate that very narrowly,
much the way they do hate crimes. Are we able to prove that
there is some kind of bias or intention to violate civil rights
in this case, rather than looking comprehensively at that
police officer's past to know whether that bias could be proven
by other means?
And then those cases are sent to Justice Department
prosecutors, and the vast majority of them are declined for
prosecution, so it becomes a matter of rote. FBI agents know
that they just churn these cases out for declination.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you.
And, Sergeant Taylor, in your decades-long career in law
enforcement, how often would you see officers who harbored and
acted on White supremacist views actually held responsible for
their actions?
Ms. Taylor. Very rarely. Very rarely. We have an officer
that, with COVID-19, who made a statement about Chinese
Americans and COVID being spread in San Francisco, reported
him, had a citizen report him decades before he had been
disciplined for 30 days for using the N word, and he is still
on the street patrolling. So, very rarely.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. So, we have testimony that this is a
problem, and it is not being--it is systemically not being
addressed, but Professor Johnson, I have one last question.
I think it is important that we talk about the legal
mechanisms by which--kind of that perpetuate this issue. So,
let's talk about qualified immunity. How does the legal system,
in general, including qualified immunity, protect racist law
enforcement officers from accountability, and how can we hope
to evaluate the true spread of this problem given those
barriers?
Ms. Johnson. That is an excellent question. I think
qualified immunity is certainly a barrier to holding police
officers civilly liable. And then, we also have the fact that
interests align between police and prosecutors, because the
prosecutors depend so much on police officers to help make
their cases, to see a situation where, you know, officers
aren't being held responsible within their own ranks; they are
not being held responsible by prosecutors, and they are not
being held responsible through our civil courts.
So, it is just a significant problem.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Professor Johnson, Ms. Ocasio-
Cortez.
I now recognize Ms. Pressley for her five minutes of
questioning.
Ms. Pressley. Thank you, Chairman Raskin, for convening
this hearing. I think it is worth repeating history, and the
roots of policing are inextricably linked to the Antebellum
slave patrols of the South that led to the establishment of
all-White police departments. And, since the Fugitive Slave
Act, criminal law enforcement has meant the subjugation and
dehumanization of Black lives.
After the Civil War, police departments and local
governments throughout the country were saturated with Ku Klux
Klan members and sympathizers who refused to intervene in their
campaign of terror. And, by the early 20th century, the KKK had
over 1 million members.
Mr. Meeink, given your experience with White supremacist
groups, do you think that contemporary organizations have tried
to continue this campaign of influence on law enforcement?
Mr. Meeink. Thank you for the question.
Yes, ma'am. I believe that, you know, the--a lot of the old
neo-Nazi groups have now become more groups, like the Proud
Boys, and a lot of those Proud Boys are filling and wanting to
be police officers. They are now flying the cop flag at all
their rallies and in their homes.
I mean, they are--so the Proud Boys, who used to be the--
what I would consider and are the neo-Nazis of the early 1990's
and 1980's, are planning to gear up to become law enforcement.
That is their now new goal, because they see the damage they
can do and get away with it. That is why they want to join.
They know that they can--the war on drugs--as AOC said, the war
on drugs and the treading on our Fourth Amendment allows bully
cops to pull us in cars and bring dogs around us to search us
when we have not committed a crime, and we are the citizens,
and our civil servants should not be able to do that.
I will yield my time.
Ms. Pressley. Thank you. And it is clear from historical
record that we cannot simply rely on training to address this
problem. Across our country, racism is often ingrained in
official and unofficial police training.
So, take the case of Travis Yates. After the Minneapolis
mayor banned so-called warrior training for the city's cops to
reduce police violence, Yates offered to train Minneapolis
police for free. And, this summer, in the wake of George
Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, Mr. Yates, a police officer in
Tulsa, Oklahoma, was recorded saying that Tulsa police shoot
African Americans, quote, ``less than we probably ought to,''
end quote.
Then there is John Guandolo, an ex-FBI agent, whom the
Southern Poverty Law Center describes as, quote, ``notorious
Muslim basher and conspiracy theorist,'' end quote. He has
provided law enforcement trainings in at least seven states
since leaving the FBI in 2008.
So, Sergeant Taylor, have you heard of or had any
experiences with these kind of racist violent trainings?
Ms. Taylor. They do exist, and the example that I used in
my opening statement, that officer's defensive tactics, a
training officer, and he trains another jurisdiction, and
after, you know, we complained on him, thank goodness they no
longer use him to train other officers.
So, yes, you know, he is steeped in violent ideologies,
racism toward African Americans, Muslims, you name it, and he
trains other officers.
So, that is present. It is very much present in law
enforcement with these officers, and they are allowed to fester
and fester and fester. And the policies allow that.
Ms. Pressley. And might I also just, you know, add to--for
a moment, I appreciate the enthusiastic affirmation in support
of the need to end qualified immunity. I have introduced a bill
with Justin Amash to do that, to address the callous impunity
and disregard for Black and Brown lives. I mean, there can be
no justice without accountability, and there is no
accountability for as long as we have that doctrine.
Mr. German, have you seen other instances where police
training has emerged as a pressure point for spreading White
supremacist views?
Mr. German. I identify--you know, even in implicit bias
training, which we expect to be the most comprehensive in anti-
racism, I quote three separate trainers who say they
specifically avoid mentioning explicit racism in law
enforcement, because they don't want to offend their audience.
And that, I think, is a bigger part of the problem, is
that, by willingly turning a blind eye to this problem, we
allow it to fester rather than taking it head-on and making
sure we understand that we can't stop or correct implicit bias
and unconscious bias if we don't address overt and explicit
bias.
Ms. Pressley. And Professor Johnson, given the sequence of
events that took place in Kenosha, Wisconsin, when Kyle
Rittenhouse murdered and injured Black Lives Matter activists,
can you give us your view, because I think history is so
important, on the evolution of American law enforcement as a
protector and ally of White supremacist groups?
Ms. Johnson. I mean, your question illustrates how
significant this history is, I mean, between the first police
departments being organized to catch enslaved people, to the
lynchings that took place for decades without any White people
being held responsible by law enforcement; to, you know, a lot
of unrest that we saw in Los Angeles in the 1990's and
elsewhere, that this is something that is consolidated power
within the state, and it is used against people of color and
poor people in this country.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you. The gentlelady's time has expired.
Ms. Pressley. Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Ms. Pressley.
And thank you, Professor Johnson.
I turn now to the representative from the District of
Columbia, Ms. Norton. You are recognized now for your five
minutes.
Ms. Norton. Can you hear me, Mr. Chairman?
Mr. Raskin. Yes, we have gotcha.
Ms. Norton. Thank you.
This is a very important hearing that we are--and not the
first one we have had on this subject. I am concerned that,
despite identifying this problem, going back to 2006--we are in
2020 now. The FBI has done nothing to address what has become a
growing threat, and now they appear to be arguing that it
doesn't exist at all.
I note that two FBI witnesses did come before us last year.
They gave us 2,000--more than 2,000 words of testimony. They
didn't even use the words White supremacy once, and that is
after the Charlottesville killing of Heather Heyer.
Even more concerning for me is that there has been a recent
whistleblower report that alleges that senior Trump
administration appointees have attempted to suppress a segment
of a DHS threat assessment that predicted an elevated threat
environment from White supremacist groups this year. That is
what I mean about a growing threat that is still being denied
by the FBI.
But, Mr. Chairman, I would like to flip to the other side
of this issue, because I am concerned that, in recent years,
the FBI has released a report on what apparently our experts
agree is a fictitious movement they call Black identity
extremism. I have found no expert that says any such thing.
So, I would like to ask Mr. German: Do you know of any such
movement of Black identity extremism, and what does it mean to
you that the FBI would rather focus on what experts seem to
agree is an imagined threat of Black identity extremists, but
not on the threat of White supremacists and police?
Mr. German. I think it is an example of the systemic bias
that exists in law enforcement. The FBI remains an
overwhelmingly White and overwhelmingly male organization, so,
when their guidelines are altered to allow them to investigate
groups without evidence of criminality, evidence of wrongdoing,
they can target people that they are afraid of because of bias,
rather than focusing on evidence that shows some individual or
group that is engaged in violent conduct.
Ms. Norton. Thank you.
Professor Johnson, can you talk about barriers inside of
Federal law enforcement that make it difficult to give the
issue of White supremacy the attention it requires now?
Ms. Johnson. Well, I think we just--Federal law enforcement
lacks the political will to address it. There was an ABC poll
in 2017 that found that 10 percent of Americans found it was
acceptable to hold White supremacist or neo-Nazi views. So, you
have to imagine that there may be a similar number of law
enforcement officers that feel that way.
And so, when you have got these problems inside of law
enforcement and no real pressure from the outside to address
this issue, it is going to continue to fester.
Ms. Norton. Thank you.
Finally, I would like to ask Sergeant Taylor: As a local
law enforcement officer, what are you looking for from the
Federal Government? That is what we have to focus on here as
Members of Congress. What are you looking for from the Federal
Government to help you combat this threat? What could we do?
Ms. Taylor. I think that it is fair to--you can't
[inaudible] the problem
[inaudible] and speaking to the very people that are in the
field that have experienced these atrocities that are Black,
White, you know, homophobia, racism, all these different
extreme views that officers have, we have to have those people
at the table to discuss these things. And, if you don't have
them there with these views that have experienced these things
and fought these systems--and that goes for our community as
well. If we don't have them present, everything can't be White
and male. You have to have diversity there to bring these views
into play to actually address them. It has to come from a well-
rounded perspective.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Ms. Norton, for your questioning.
And, finally, we come to Ms. Tlaib for her five minutes of
questioning.
Ms. Tlaib. Thank you so much, Chairman Raskin, for allowing
this courageous hearing to happen.
I do want to take a moment and recognize Sergeant Taylor's
incredible courage as well. I know it hasn't been easy for you
to speak the truth about what was going on while you were
serving there. I am sure it is continuing even after
retirement. So, we really do appreciate, especially in my
community, that is 85 percent Black, I so appreciate you
speaking up.
The issue we are discussing is not speculation, and I
really, you know, worry that we continue to say that it is some
sort of theory out there. It has been proven that it is our
reality today, and White supremacy, as you all know, has not
been confined to Facebook posts. It is just evident that what
is actually bleeding into our communities, and that is making
us all unsafe right now.
Recent horrific events have occurred in my district that
have raised concerns for me. And, so, Professor Johnson, I want
to start with you. Yes or no: Should we be concerned that some
right-wing, White extremist groups see police departments as
allies?
Ms. Johnson. Yes, absolutely.
Ms. Tlaib. So, this is something that I actually have seen
firsthand in my district. Last year, the Detroit Police
Department escorted a heavily armed neo-Nazi group waving Nazi
flags and wearing swastika armbands as they disrupted a Pride
festival.
In the aftermath, the Detroit police chief defended the
protection of his department that he gave to armed White
supremacists, saying with regard to anti-racist counterprotests
that, quote, ``Both sides were wrong,'' which drew outrage of
course in our community.
However, the treatment of Black Lives Matter peaceful
protesters by Detroit police recently, they were met with
beatings, chokeholds, tear gas, and the rest. They had to go as
far, these protesters had to go as far as to get a Federal
judge, which agreed, that they have to stop using batons,
chemical agents like tear gas, and chokeholds on protestors.
So, Professor Johnson, how does this kind of protection for
neo-Nazis versus the violence toward those protesting right now
for Black lives in Detroit, a city again that is 85 percent
Black, make us safer?
Ms. Johnson. Again, I think its evidence of exactly what
this subcommittee is investigating.
Ms. Tlaib. Thank you so much.
You know, one of the things that is of concern to me is the
FBI does not believe this topic was worthy of testimony today,
even though their own report and assessments state that White
supremacists have infiltrated police departments and could lead
to tolerance of racism against Black communities.
And so when I hear your testimony, Sergeant Napier, you
know, Captain--or is it Sergeant, I believe, Napier--are you
there?
Sheriff Napier. I am, ma'am. Sheriff.
Ms. Tlaib. Yes, Sheriff. I'm sorry.
One of the things that concerns me, you know, you talk
about your son, and I am of course concerned about a lot of
things when it comes to policing in my community. But I want to
take a close look at something that happened within your
district.
Last November, one of your officers was caught on camera
tackling a Black teen in foster care who lives without arms or
legs, Sheriff. OK? He was tackled by an officer under your
leadership. He was also seen abusing another Black teen who was
merely filming the incident. That officer was not charged.
So, I'm wondering if that is the case of why you haven't
been able to diversify your work force, your team, or some of
the concerns I saw. I truly believe, you know, curious on your
end what kind of treatment did that officer get? Was he held
accountable?
Sheriff Napier. Well, first, we presented that, as we
should. We put the officer on immediate leave and presented
that matter to the County Attorney's Office, who made the
decision to decline criminal charges. I was not----
Ms. Tlaib. So, he was never charged, correct?
Sheriff Napier. That was a basis on----
Ms. Tlaib. Do you think that is also leading to people not
wanting to work for a police force that is constantly involved
in criminal activity and assault of innocent civilians?
Sheriff Napier. Well, it was deemed not to be criminal
activity, ma'am----
Ms. Tlaib. I understand.
Sheriff Napier.--because the County Attorney's Office made
that decision. I did not make that decision.
Ms. Tlaib. I know. Sheriff, the system is broken, and I
know you don't want to face the fact that you and your son are
in a system right now that is broken. And I know you're
deterring away from talking about it in that way.
But, you know, going back to Sergeant Taylor, one of the
things that I know the Black Lives Matter protestors in my
district have been crying out is please invest more into our
schools, invest more into our communities and neighborhoods.
One of the things that I hear from my police officers is
they weren't trained to be nurses or social workers or mental
healthcare workers. They want to see more investment in that
because that keeps them safe and that keeps the community they
are supposed to be keeping safe of course safer.
Can you talk a little bit about that, Sergeant Taylor?
Because I feel like much of what many of these protestors are
out there demanding was just a shift in recognizing their lives
matter and recognizing that they have to have investment in
their quality of life, which again makes the job of law
enforcement obviously much more at ease versus right now where
they're criminalizing communities of color?
Mr. Taylor. Thank you for that question.
I think that most law enforcement officers would prefer
having social workers in our jobs, because we don't want to
respond to a lot of these calls because we are ill prepared for
it. I studied psychology and I'm still ill prepared for it even
with empathy.
And these ideologies about law enforcement are accurate in
the sense that we have a problem with addressing our internal
problems, first off. And then we have a problem with how we
respond to these calls, because we want to put force in places
that force is not necessary. This is what we're taught. We're
taught to be these warriors where we should be guardians. And
then even with being a guardian, we're ill prepared for that.
So, when people talk about defunding the police, when they
talk about reallocating these resources, it's necessary because
we need more conflict resolution. We have a lack of that. We
have a lack of that in law enforcement. We have a lack of de-
escalation.
And so when you bring in people that have these four-year
degrees, which most of us do not have, and you bring those
people in who have these specialties and skills, it can offset
us responding and shooting a 13-year-old in the back who has
autism.
So, it's important that we have these people in these jobs.
And most of the time most law enforcement officers will agree
that they don't necessarily want to respond on these calls
anyway because we're ill prepared for it.
Ms. Tlaib. That's exactly what I'm hearing. Thank you so
much.
And again, Chairman, I will pray for Sergeant Taylor. I
know how extremely difficult it is for her to come up and speak
the truth about this.
And really so much respect for you today. Thank you so
much.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Congresswoman Tlaib.
Thank you, Sergeant Taylor.
In closing, I want to thank not just Sergeant Taylor, but
all of our panelists today for their extraordinary
participation, Michael German, Sergeant Taylor, Professor Vida
Johnson, Frank Meeink, Sheriff Mark Napier from Arizona. Thank
you all for coming and participating so intelligently in this
important conversation.
The question of the neutrality and the fairness of law
enforcement all across America goes right to the question of
our social contract. If you read any of the social contract
theorists, John Locke or Thomas Hobbes or Rousseau, all of them
said that we enter into society because we'll be safer inside
the social contract than outside of it, which Hobbes said was a
state of nature, a state of war and violence, nasty, brutish,
in short.
And so we enter the social contract, but we expect that the
police who we pay to protect us will act with neutrality and
fairness and respect for everyone in the community. And we know
that the vast majority of officers enter with that idea.
So, the infiltration of White supremacist members,
activists, ideas, and attitudes is a threat to public security
and public safety and is a threat to the reputation of the law
enforcement function, which I think all of us agree on. It is,
whether you consider it a few bad apples or a lot of bad
apples, but those bad apples can spoil the reputation of the
whole barrel.
So, we hope that the FBI will stand up and take credit for
the things that it is saying and doing to identify the problem
and come up with a national strategy for making sure that we
don't have that kind of infiltration and suffusion of White
supremacist attitudes and ideas and actions in law enforcement.
With that, without objection, all members will have five
legislative days within which to submit additional written
questions for the witnesses to the Chair, and we will forward
them to the witnesses for their prompt response. I ask all of
our witnesses to please get it back as soon as you can.
And with that, I thank you all for your participation. The
hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:20 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]