Shay Horse/NurPhoto via AP
A line of riot police near the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021
In 1992, retired Phoenix police officer Gerald “Jack” McLamb published “Operation Vampire Killer,” a 75-page conspiratorial tract whose aim was to recruit current and former cops to the burgeoning militia movement. The short book is largely incoherent, but McLamb’s paranoia about the threat posed by the New World Order, “internationalists,” and the tyrannical federal government is familiar to anyone who’s seen an Alex Jones clip on YouTube. The end of freedom was imminent, and the enemies of liberty were everywhere.
“The police officers, national guardsmen, and military officers who have contributed to this special publication are aware of a plan to overthrow the Constitutional Republic of these United States of America,” the book ominously opens. McLamb finds cause to celebrate later in the piece, stating: “All over this nation Officers, Guardsmen, and military personnel are awakening to this oncoming planned disaster.”
It’s difficult to gauge how successful McLamb was in his mission, given the clandestine nature of recruitment by the far right. In 1994, a sheriff’s deputy in Brevard County, Florida, was approached by a militia member handing out “Operation Vampire Killer.” “We know they recruit police officers,” a top police supervisor told Florida Today at the time. Another man in Helena, Montana, unsuccessfully attempted to distribute the book to every member of the state legislature. McLamb was described in reports from the time as one of the major “media stars of the far right,” and would regularly appear on talk radio, at conferences, and at various standoffs between militia members and law enforcement.
But if McLamb’s personal success is difficult to measure, the recent storming of the U.S. Capitol suggests his instincts about the power and potential of winning cops to his struggle were prescient.
IN THE DAYS SINCE a band of fascist insurrectionists briefly seized control of the U.S. Capitol, there has been no shortage of evidence suggesting at least some of the on-duty cops were sympathetic to the insurgents, and that some of the insurgents were off-duty police officers. At least two Capitol Police officers have been suspended, and several dozen more were under investigation as of Monday, for their “suspected involvement with or inappropriate support shown for” the rioters, according to The Washington Post. One of the suspended officers was seen in a viral clip taking a selfie with one of the seditionists. The other suspended officer was seen in a MAGA hat and appeared to be working with some of the rioters to extract police trapped in the building, in a scene that appeared less like actual participation and more like extremely unorthodox crowd control tactics. One Capitol Police officer apparently directed rioters to Sen. Charles Schumer’s office, as reported by The New York Times.
“The cops were very cool. They’re like, ‘Hey guys, have a good night,’” one insurgent told CNN. “You can tell that some of them are on our side.”
Police departments around the country are opening investigations into whether their members participated in the events of 1/6. Officers in Virginia and Washington state have been placed on administrative leave pending investigations into their roles in the siege while off-duty. A Philadelphia detective was reassigned after supervisors learned she had attended the event. A police chief in New Hampshire attended the rally, as did a Texas cop, according to The Washington Post. A retired Oakland cop marched on the Capitol, and his department is now investigating current officers who liked his post. The NYPD has opened an investigation into at least one officer who is believed to have participated in the riots. A current Metro D.C. cop wrote on Facebook that off-duty cops flashed their badges “as they attempted to overrun the building,” according to Politico.
Some cops who didn’t attend or participate in the siege offered support. The head of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police defended the rioters as “pissed-off people” who were “entitled to voice their frustration.” A fundraising arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association sent robocalls in the days leading up to the rally urging people to attend. The writer Jon Ben-Menachem has catalogued even more examples of participation and support by law enforcement.
The degree to which the security breaches were the result of poor planning or something more nefarious is now hotly debated, and some Democrats on Capitol Hill have questioned how many members of the on-duty police were supportive of the siege. Newly elected New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman introduced legislation to establish a “commission to investigate the attack, and ties between white supremacists and Capitol Police.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal said in an interview with New York magazine that she believed it “was not an accident” that security was lax. Others have suggested the siege was “an inside job.”
It will likely be weeks or longer before the public knows the true extent of the Capitol Police department’s or members’ complicity in the siege. However damning that verdict may be, nobody disputes that the Capitol Police were unprepared to secure the Capitol, or to respond quickly once it had been breached. It seems clear that the racist bias endemic to law enforcement—which consistently downplays the risks of white supremacist violence—played a significant role in the multiple security failures of January 6, though a full accounting of what went wrong at the top is still emerging.
“The real paradox of 1/6 is that this was a command failure, even as many rank-and-file police agree with the Trumpist insurrection goals,” says Stuart Schrader, a sociologist whose research focuses on policing and counterinsurgency.
Is the long, symbiotic relationship between the far right and law enforcement breaking down as Trump’s administration collapses?
Outgoing Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund has blamed congressional security officials for denying his requests to deploy D.C. National Guard units as backup prior to the rally. Reporting from The New York Times offers a contradictory story: that both the Capitol Police and the D.C. Metro police had “rebuffed” offers for help from the National Guard in the days before the attack. The Metropolitan Police issued a statement claiming they had no intelligence that the January 6 rally would attempt to breach the Capitol, despite the fact that the insurgency was planned in the open, and that the FBI and NYPD had warned Capitol Police about the threat. Two Black officers told BuzzFeed that management left them completely unprepared for the heavily militarized storming of the building. One of those officers also said off-duty cops from around the country were present, and that some “flashed their badges, telling him to let them through,” echoing Politico’s reporting.
Yet for all the overt or implicit affinity between the far right and law enforcement, which dates back to the beginning of policing, an accounting of the events of January 6 would be incomplete without acknowledging the open conflict between many of the insurgents and the officers on duty. A plainclothes officer shot and killed Ashli Babbitt as she attempted to breach the Speaker’s Lobby, immediately outside the House Chamber. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died as a result of injuries sustained during the siege, although details are scant. (Another Capitol Police officer died by suicide shortly after the siege.) Sund, the chief of the Capitol Police, said in a statement that rioters attacked his force with metal pipes, and news reports said at least 60 cops were injured. (Sund resigned within 24 hours of the siege.) One video shows a mob of insurgents beating back cops attempting to hold an entrance to the building. A rioter pulls an officer down a flight of stairs, while other members of the mob bludgeon him, including with a flagpole. Other cops were sprayed with bear mace, attacked with stun guns, and crushed against or between doors.
Video recorded the evening of January 6 appeared to show riot cops treating the remaining right-wing protesters with the kind of physical brutality that is common during left-wing demonstrations. And in the days immediately prior to the siege, police arrested Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, leading some of his street gang to denounce police as “treasonous pig bastards.” At least 90 people have been arrested so far, by both federal and local law enforcement, a number that is expected to increase in the coming days and weeks.
So is the long, symbiotic relationship between the far right and law enforcement breaking down as Trump’s administration collapses? In the short term, maybe, but in the long term, almost certainly not. The events of 1/6 illustrate that the relationship between the far right and law enforcement is complicated, and often seemingly contradictory. The hypocrisy of a mob that would have considered itself the vanguard of the Back the Blue movement over the summer violently assaulting officers was lost on no one.
But this seeming contradiction is not new, nor does it suggest an irreparable breach between rank-and-file cops and post-Trump fascist movements. At certain points, like the height of the second KKK in the 1920s and during the Jim Crow decades in the South, there was virtually no daylight between uniformed cops and terrorist Night Riders. This was also the basic dynamic, albeit to a lesser extent, during the summer of 2020, which saw police and far-right gangs cooperate in anti–Black Lives Matter crackdowns across the country.
At other points in U.S. history, law enforcement has been more antagonistic to the far right, especially at the federal level, and the far right has returned the enmity. The 1990s were one such period of open, ongoing violence, culminating in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, in coordination with the broader white-power movement. McVeigh chose that building because it housed members of the DEA and ATF.
But a close examination of the militia movement shows that for all the anti-statist rhetoric, its groups have never struggled to find willing recruits among current and former law enforcement. For all their talk of tyranny, the broad white supremacist movement’s primary targets over the last four years have been racial-justice activists, not the federal government as led by Donald Trump. And there was plenty for them to love about local police departments when they were busting the heads of Black Lives Matter activists.
For all the anti-statist rhetoric, militia groups have never struggled to find willing recruits among current and former law enforcement.
UPON MCLAMB’S DEATH in 2014, the Southern Poverty Law Center described him as one of the Patriot movement’s “most ardent conspiracy theorists.” The SPLC noted that it was unlikely he had recruited the 6,300 police officers he had claimed to, and although McLamb’s influence had waned, Alex Jones was still selling an updated edition of “Operation Vampire Killer” on his website in 2014.
There are other examples of former law enforcement officials who rose to prominence in the militia movement during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Retired Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack rose to fame in the movement as a plaintiff in a lawsuit opposing the Brady Bill, the most significant gun control law of the 1990s. Mack had close ties to Randy Weaver, whose standoff with federal law enforcement at Ruby Ridge was a defining event for the white-power movement. Mack would later go on to found the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, whose philosophy says that county sheriffs are the supreme law of the land. Mack also sits on the board of the far-right Oath Keepers, whose members include law enforcement and current and ex-military.
Others, like Wayne Gonyaw, were less prominent but more extreme. Gonyaw was a retired Tennessee sheriff who became a sergeant in Aryan Nations and ran the Tennessee state militia. Reports from the time said Gonyaw claimed “to have several active duty law enforcement officers in his militia.”
Cops, both retired and active-duty, cycled in and out of the movement in the ’90s, providing various levels of support, training, intelligence, and in some cases direct participation. A “man who identified himself as a retired police chief” led a workshop on radio communications organized by the racist Florida militia, according to research from the Anti-Defamation League. John Parsons, a leader of the South Dakota militia, told a reporter in 1996 that it was “natural” for public-safety officers, including cops and sheriffs, to join paramilitaries. “When they call, we send them information packets,” he said, including “Operation Vampire Killer.” Retired cops were vendors at early “prepper” expos that catered to militia members, offering tactical gear, night vision equipment, and far-right recruitment literature. Sometimes, law enforcement would simply look the other way. In Ozark County, Missouri, a report said Sheriff Max Vaughn was aware of racist and anti-Semitic militias in his area, but “doesn’t believe they are dangerous,” and “doesn’t have much of a problem with them.”
Even as the movement was courting cops, some militias continued to actively threaten members of local law enforcement. In 1995, a sheriff in Idaho began receiving death threats after militias began operating in his county, including a letter saying he’d be “hung at high noon” if he enforced federal laws. That same year, a member of the Arizona militia told a reporter that sheriff’s deputies and other officers would be “indicted by a citizens’ grand jury” and tried by a “township Supreme Court.”
Given this history of conflict, some mainstream observers were shocked by the overt politicization of policing under Trump, and the rise of the Blue Lives Matter movement. Now, as arrest numbers go up and participants in the siege wind their way through the courts, it’s possible that the rift between the far right and police will be exacerbated. A sense of betrayal from the insurgents was already apparent in the heat of the battle in the Capitol. Immediately prior to the shooting of Ashli Babbitt, a rioter yelled at an officer, “When the whole country hated you, we had your back.” Others called cops “traitors,” and yelled “fuck the blue” when police began to force them out of the building. One woman was heard saying, “They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”
It would be shortsighted, however, to believe the affinity between cops and the far right has been permanently severed. And the response from lawmakers, both conservative and liberal, will likely be a doubling-down on policing as the primary tool to oppose post-Trump fascist movements. “I think that this operational disaster is most likely to result in increased funding/technology/manpower for the Capitol police, which is insane,” says Schrader.
Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, argues that the instinct from many liberal politicians, including President-elect Joe Biden, to grant police more authority is a mistake. “At all levels of government, these politicians have come to rely on police to paper over the social problems they have created by decades of neoliberal austerity politics,” he says.
“It is up to these politicians to use their power to rein in this institution by redirecting [police] budgets to community needs, [altering police unions’ use of] the collective-bargaining process to reduce their legal impunity, and by firing police leaders who publicly espouse right-wing views,” he adds. “Until that happens, we can expect to see a hardening alliance between police and the right-wing extremism responsible for the attack on the Capitol.”
