Adam Rogan/The Journal Times via AP
Kyle Rittenhouse, left, walks along Sheridan Road in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with another armed civilian, August 25, 2020. Rittenhouse is charged with the murder of two people.
In early June, as protests erupted across the nation following the killing of George Floyd, police in Philadelphia unleashed waves of tear gas on activists trapped on the banks of I-676. The chemical attack preceded the city’s 6 p.m. curfew. Hours later, the Fishtown neighborhood of the city was filled with as many as 100 mostly white vigilantes armed with bats and hammers. Police stood by as the vigilantes beat people they perceived to be Black Lives Matter supporters.
As the uprisings spread, versions of this dynamic played out in cities across the United States. Far-right groups adhering to varying degrees of white supremacist ideology would show up at protests and be either left alone by the cops or openly welcomed. By the end of August, researcher Alexander Reid Ross had documented at least 24 instances of police who had worked openly with white vigilante counterprotesters.
The most widely known instance of police working with a right-wing vigilante came in Kenosha, Wisconsin. There, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old who had long fantasized about becoming a police officer, shot three anti-racist protesters, killing two. He was then allowed to leave the scene, passing through a police barricade with his hands held high as activists clearly identified him as the shooter.
But white supremacist groups and many police forces don’t merely have a symbiotic relationship; in many instances, their memberships overlap. Studies have shown deep, extended working relationships between police and far-right groups. Mike German, a former FBI agent who infiltrated white supremacist groups, recently published a report documenting the extent to which white supremacist groups have infiltrated law enforcement. “Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and elsewhere,” German writes.
The threat is not that these groups or individuals will overthrow departments by acting as a revolutionary fifth column. Nor should we see these studies as a schematic pointing the way to racist-free policing, if only these far-right elements could somehow be cleaved off. Instead, we should look at this broad overlap, which has endured throughout much of our history, as a revelation of the true purpose of policing. The role of law enforcement has been mystified through decades of propaganda and euphemism. Examining the history of the police through the lens of their affiliations with overt racist and fascist groups helps to clarify what has been made obscure.
Following the Trump administration’s deployment of unidentified federal troops in unmarked vans in Portland, liberal commentators raised the issue of whether Trump is a force for fascism. It is a good question. Given the long history of overlap between law enforcement and overtly racist and fascist groups, however, the same question should be asked about police departments across the country.
Ideological and personnel overlap between police and white supremacist groups is as old as policing itself. After the Civil War, the first Ku Klux Klan took up where existing slave patrols—one of the earliest forms of policing in the United States—had left off. The first KKK would not only create a template for racist groups in the United States, but arguably was also the world’s first proto-fascist organization. “The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state,” writes Robert Paxton, in The Anatomy of Fascism. “By adopting a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as by their techniques of intimidation and their conviction that violence was justified … the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe.”
Through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, police were not only complicit in white terrorism, but were often instigators and participants in both lynchings and anti-Black pogroms. Sociologist Arthur Raper estimated cops were directly involved in half of all lynchings.
By the 1920s, the Klan was in its second generation, arrayed against not just Blacks but also Catholics and Jews. It was deeply embedded in political institutions: elected offices, the courts, and law enforcement. “Police chiefs and sheriffs were particularly likely to join, which encouraged their subordinates to follow,” writes Linda Gordon in The Second Coming of the KKK. “Often whole police forces were in or allied with the Klan.”
Other far-right groups from the time counted police among their ranks as well. Although the German American Bund was the most well-known fascist organization of the 1930s, the Father Coughlin–aligned Christian Front was also one of the vanguards of fascist action. Their platform was anti-Semitic, anti-communist, and pro-Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The Front, and their fellow travelers the Christian Mobilizers, were successful at recruiting police into their ranks, especially in New York City.
In 1940, NYPD Commissioner Lewis Valentine admitted that 407 officers had at one point been members of the Christian Front, following an investigation into the group’s efforts to infiltrate the department. In a preview of the role police unions would play in later decades, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association opposed Valentine’s investigation on grounds that it violated officers’ civil liberties.
White supremacist groups and many police forces don’t merely have a symbiotic relationship; in many instances, their memberships overlap.
Three years later, in Boston, Coughlinite gangs carried out what The Day, a New York Yiddish-language paper, called “a series of small pogroms” that local cops not only failed to prevent, but “would just as soon encourage.” In addition to beatings, the Christian Front handed out anti-Semitic recruiting literature “without the slightest interference from police.” Police in Cleveland were “friendly to the [Christian Front] movement.” In St. Paul, Minnesota, Sheriff Thomas J. Gibbon played MC for a Coughlin and Christian Front rally.
The German American Bund, too, at least occasionally enjoyed tacit support from police. In 1933, a Los Angeles lawyer approached the LAPD chief with information he’d secretly gathered on Nazis working in the city. The chief defended the Nazis with arguments that “came straight from Nazi literature.” St. Louis police were reportedly the Bund’s “best friends,” due to their shared hatred of communism. Police in New York City, Cleveland, and elsewhere regularly protected Bund meetings from anti-fascist protesters, a consideration rarely extended to communist or socialist gatherings.
The Silver Legion, or Silver Shirts, was another overtly fascist group that counted police among its ranks. In Portland, the department’s anti-communist “red squad” was run by Walter Odale, who was a member of a Silver Shirt splinter group. The Silver Legion’s presence in Minneapolis was modest—200 people attended an early meeting—but included two local cops, while a third scouted for new talent. As with the Bund, Los Angeles police and the county sheriff were supportive of the group.
Another of the colored-shirt movements, the Black Legion, which was most powerful in Michigan, included police as well. The Black Legion was a pro-Nazi group with heavy KKK overlap that targeted union workers and labor leaders, likely with the implicit support of Ford and other anti-union carmakers. Their campaign of terror culminated with the kidnapping and killing of Works Progress Administration worker Charles A. Poole. Although that killing would be the Legion’s undoing, members were suspected in as many as 50 other assassinations. According to reports from the time, as much as “one third of the [police] force” in Pontiac, Michigan, belonged to the Legion. Detroit’s chief of police may have been a member as well.
Throughout much of the country, the laws that police enforced were overtly racist. In Hitler’s American Model, James Q. Whitman describes how Nazi lawyers in the early 1930s looked to U.S. laws—primarily statutes throughout the country that prevented interracial marriage, as well as laws that created a citizenship hierarchy (or outright bans) for immigrants—as inspiration for the Nuremberg Laws. Elements of U.S. westward expansion also shared characteristics with fascism, as personified by the Texas Rangers, an irregular organization that worked with vigilantes to engage in widespread ethnic cleansing—only to be integrated into the state government in 1935, with no significant change in its mission.
AP Photo
A group of Texas Rangers in 1936
With the defeat of European fascism in World War II, the tenor of racist and fascist groups began to change in the United States. Anti-communism had always been present in U.S. politics, but now it became the primary concern of law enforcement and their reactionary allies. The most notable was the John Birch Society, a conspiratorial organization that has long been accused of trafficking in anti-Semitism, a claim they strongly deny. The Birchers were also committed to opposing the civil rights movement and the perceived threat of communism.
Like its intellectual forebears, the John Birch Society was successful in infiltrating and recruiting police around the country. Birch cells in the Philadelphia and Santa Ana, California, police departments had dozens of members, at least. Under public pressure, NYPD Commissioner Howard Leary in 1966 said he would fire Birchers from the department if he could, but that he lacked the authority. In Los Angeles, according to Mike Davis and Jon Wiener in their new book on L.A. in the ’60s, an adjunct of the police and firefighters union “was a front for the Birch Society … under the benign eye of Chief [William] Parker.”
The Society also established “Support Your Local Police” committees, which worked in tandem with the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in New York City to undermine Black Liberation activists and prevent civilian oversight of police. “PBA President John Cassese led this campaign to victory, drawing heavily from the race-baiting, anti-Communist line of JBS,” writes criminologist Jarrod Shanahan. In language strikingly familiar to current right-wing reactionaries, Shanahan quotes Cassese as saying he was “sick and tired of giving into minority groups … with their whims and gripes and shouting.”
By the 1950s, police reformers were pushing for professionalization within departments that were seen as either bumbling yokels or too closely aligned with racist groups. This period coincided with the institutionalization of police unions, many of which from their outset were home to the most reactionary elements in departments. These associations protected rank-and-file officers accused of abuse, gave top brass plausible deniability when criticized by elected officials, and helped to solidify the police as an institution for politicians to court. As Kristian Williams argues, police unions in the 1960s marked the evolution of police from tools of political and financial elites into their own political force acting in their own interests, with a large degree of autonomy. And no interest was more important than defeating the civil rights movement and preserving the racial caste system under the guise of restoring “law and order.”
Police unions in the 1960s marked the evolution of police from tools of political and financial elites into their own political force acting in their own interests.
This racist reaction to civil rights advances also included the creation of White Citizens’ Councils in the South, ostensibly nonviolent civic groups dedicated to preserving segregation. In addition to stacking juries, the Councils would publicize the names of Black organizers, thereby putting a target on their back for vigilantes. When Black activists were inevitably assassinated, as George Lee was in Belzoni, Mississippi, police and sheriffs often ruled the deaths accidental. “Sheriff Ike Shelton suggested that Lee had somehow lost control of his car and that the lead pellets found in what was left of his jaw might be teeth fillings,” Charles Cobb Jr. writes in This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed.
The next iteration of the KKK continued their recruitment of officers as well, though by now the Klan was telling its members to keep their affiliation quiet. David Cunningham writes in Klansville, U.S.A. that the civil rights–era Klan had police officers and sheriffs as members throughout North Carolina. In 1968, six officers in Chicago were also outed as belonging to the KKK, and the Klan claimed to have Milwaukee police in their ranks as well. The Klan had penetrated “local police to some degree in every county” in Mississippi and the surrounding region.
But perhaps the strangest example of law enforcement working with the Klan, and arguably the most damning, is the case of FBI informant Gary Rowe. For years, Rowe embedded in the KKK as an FBI asset, where he instigated and participated in several high-profile attacks on civil rights organizers. He trafficked information both ways—from the Klan to the Bureau and vice versa. In 1961, he gave the FBI advance notice that Klansmen were planning a mob attack on Freedom Riders in Alabama, which federal agents did nothing to prevent. The Klan carried out their attack with assistance from Birmingham Detective Sergeant Tom Cook, who “provided the Klan with a list of civil rights groups, the locations of their meetings, and the names of their members.” While still on the FBI payroll, Rowe was involved in the murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo.
Rowe wasn’t the only informant whose information went ignored by law enforcement. In 1979, a group of Nazis and Klansmen murdered five communist organizers in Greensboro, North Carolina. Police failed to intervene, despite having ample warning of an impending armed ambush from a longtime informant inside the Klan.
It’s important to acknowledge that many of the groups listed here were investigated by law enforcement, and occasionally prosecuted. (Within many right-wing groups, there is deep paranoia about infiltration and mistrust of law enforcement.) Police reformers, always cognizant of the importance of public relations, typically tried to purge identified extremists from their ranks—not necessarily out of a commitment to anti-racism, but at least to restore the perceived legitimacy of the police and their monopoly on the use of force.
Fascist movements have always developed institutions with power parallel to the state, but only accountable to their political movement.
Yet throughout the history of the police reform and professionalization movements, there are more subtle examples of racist ideology and practice. The most important reformer of the early 20th century was August Vollmer, who founded and led the Berkeley School of Criminology and has long been celebrated as an anti-corruption crusader and progressive. Vollmer also belonged to the American Eugenics Society, and his curriculum included readings on the dangers of interracial relationships. Richard Herrnstein co-wrote an influential criminology textbook in 1985 with James Q. Wilson, who had popularized the “broken windows” theory of policing. Herrnstein would later go on to co-write The Bell Curve, which argued that Black people in the aggregate have lower IQs than whites. In Los Angeles in the ’50s, Chief Parker cleaned up what had been a notoriously corrupt department but remade it into a more efficient and brutal occupying army in the city’s Black and Latino communities.
Later reforms would create a model of policing based on counterinsurgency. As Stuart Schrader writes in Badges Without Borders, that model simultaneously exported and imported anti-subversive, anti-communist lessons learned in cities through the United States and in dozens of countries around the world that received U.S. police training and assistance. Counterinsurgency theory sees the entire population as a looming threat to control—a threat that must be dealt with before the subversive elements take hold.
As Ryan Devereaux has written, “The blue line is a reminder that much of the policing community sees itself as separate from the rest of society.”
That community comprises not just active-duty officers, but their unions, their official benefactors, and their vigilante supporters, who act as the ligaments connecting official state-sanctioned violence with the nominally unsanctioned violence that has often been a co-traveler with police. As Paxton, the scholar on fascism, argues, fascist movements have always developed institutions with power parallel to the state, but only accountable to their political movement. The increasing autonomy of police departments and inability of elected officials to enact effective reforms suggest that police departments are fundamentally anti-democratic institutions whose primary commitments are to both their own preservation and the perpetuation of a racist, exploitative status quo. “In America, Negroes do not have to be told what fascism is in action,” the poet Langston Hughes said. “We know.”
Over the last four years, historians have begun looking at the conservative movement with fresh eyes, with increased attention to the overtly white supremacist elements of right-wing ideology. This is a positive development, but any accounting of the history and persistence of fascistic thought and practice in the United States must include law enforcement as a central player and shaper of racial hierarchy. Too many see the police simply as unwitting tools in the reproduction of white supremacy. They should instead be seen as their own political movement, as active agents in the maintenance of white supremacism. They are not bystanders; they are political actors pursuing their own interests. And they have chosen their allies.
This piece has been updated to reflect that the John Birch Society denies trafficking in anti-Semitism.
