Police departs across the U.S. open probes into whether their own members took part in Capitol Riot

[riversedge]

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Supporters of President Trump take over balconies and inauguration scaffolding at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)



Police departments across the U.S. open probes into whether their own members took part in the Capitol riot


https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/01/09/investigating-police-rioters/





By Kim Bellware Jan. 9, 2021 at 9:00 p.m. CST

Police officers and at least one police chief from departments across the United States are facing termination, suspension or other discipline for their proximity to or alleged involvement in a chaotic gathering in Washington on Wednesday that ended in a riot at the U.S. Capitol and left five people dead.

Departments in California, Washington state, and Texas are among those that have announced investigations into their officers based on tips, social media posts and other evidence, though more officers could be identified as evidence emerges in the coming days.

The probes come after an especially fraught year for U.S. policing that saw massive civil rights protests against police violence. They are likely to raise questions about free speech, the expansion of surveillance and public trust in law enforcement, while legal experts warn the scrutiny could have unintended consequences.

How one of America’s ugliest days unraveled inside and outside the Capitol

In Seattle, Interim Police Chief Adrian Diaz confirmed at least two officers had been placed on administrative leave and referred to internal investigations after the department received social media posts showing the officers in Washington Wednesday...............................................





I have not read this article ---but will do so today:

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Report
Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law

Summary: The government’s response to known connections of law enforcement officers to violent racist and militant groups has been strikingly insufficient.

Mike German Michael German

Published: August 27, 2020



White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement FanaticStudio/Getty/BCJ

Viewing Introduction

Introduction

Racial disparities have long pervaded every step of the criminal justice process, from police stops, searches, arrests, shootings and other uses of force to charging decisions, wrongful convictions, and sentences.
footnote1_i175m82
1 As a result, many have concluded that a structural or institutional bias against people of color, shaped by long-standing racial, economic, and social inequities, infects the criminal justice system.
footnote2_e3ym9cc
2 These systemic inequities can also instill implicit biases — unconscious prejudices that favor in-groups and stigmatize out-groups — among individual law enforcement officials, influencing their day-to-day actions while interacting with the public.

Police reforms, often imposed after incidents of racist misconduct or brutality, have focused on addressing these unconscious manifestations of bias. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), for example, has required implicit bias training as part of consent decrees it imposes to root out discriminatory practices in law enforcement agencies. Such training measures are designed to help law enforcement officers recognize these unconscious biases in order to reduce their influence on police behavior.

These reforms, while well-intentioned, leave unaddressed an especially harmful form of bias, which remains entrenched within law enforcement: explicit racism. Explicit racism in law enforcement takes many forms, from membership or affiliation with violent white supremacist or far-right militant groups, to engaging in racially discriminatory behavior toward the public or law enforcement colleagues, to making racist remarks and sharing them on social media. While it is widely acknowledged that racist officers subsist within police departments around the country, federal, state, and local governments are doing far too little to proactively identify them, report their behavior to prosecutors who might unwittingly rely on their testimony in criminal cases, or protect the diverse communities they are sworn to serve.

Efforts to address systemic and implicit biases in law enforcement are unlikely to be effective in reducing the racial disparities in the criminal justice system as long as explicit racism in law enforcement continues to endure. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that it does.

In 2017, the FBI reported that white supremacists posed a “persistent threat of lethal violence” that has produced more fatalities than any other category of domestic terrorists since 2000.
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3 Alarmingly, internal FBI policy documents have also warned agents assigned to domestic terrorism cases that the white supremacist and anti-government militia groups they investigate often have “active links” to law enforcement officials.
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[soothsayer]

1. This surprises me

I think it’s great

[riversedge]

2. More Police Officers who attended the #CapitolRiot and took a nice selfie so @FBI knows what they l

What were they high on?? Trumpism????? breaking and entering. whow.





More Police Officers who attended the #CapitolRiot and took a nice selfie so @FBI
knows what they look like.
Rocky Mount Virginia must be so proud of these #BlueLivesAtTheSiege

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[Squinch]

3. I'm not really confident that all of them will make a good faith effort at this after, for example,

the head of the Chicago police union called the storming and the murder of one of their own "a trespassing."

[redstatebluegirl]

4. The Canadian County Oklahoma Sheriff

held a press conference saying he was there. He pretty much said "so what". Pompous asshole.

[LizBeth]

5. The very reason, and argument for BLM and on display now, reinforcing/supporting what ALL

of us were saying since Floyd. And before of course, but I am talking that point.