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  • 2016-09-27 (xsd:date)
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  • FBI Warned About White Supremacists Infiltrating Police Departments (en)
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  • In 2015, a nearly 10-year-old FBI warning about white supremacists clandestinely joining police departments started circulating online when Samuel V. Jones, a former military police captain and professor at John Marshall Law School penned an opinion piece about it for The Grio. Jones' article linked civil unrest over a spate of police shootings of unarmed black Americans with the subject of the report, suggesting a possible link between the two: Jones' piece was cited by African-American comedian D.L. Hughley in 2016 when he posted it to Facebook following an emotional appearance on CNN shortly after controversial police shootings of two African-American men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. The Oregonian noted of those shootings that: Jones' piece prompted other web sites to recall the FBI's 2006 warning and link it with recent police shootings. The report primarily discussed how white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement could impact security, giving hate group members access to information that could jeopardize investigations into such organizations. The report also noted that being employed by law enforcement could provide access to restricted areas vulnerable to sabotage and to elected officials and protected persons, whom they could see as potential targets for violence. While police violence was an issue in 2006 — just as it is in 2016 — the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been key in moving the issue front and center in the national eye, had not yet come into existence at the time the FBI warning was issued. Because the (heavily redacted) document is a decade old, it's difficult to judge how applicable it might be today in light of recent events. The FBI confirmed to us the document's authenticity and said it was retrieved via a Freedom of Information Act request in 2010. The report stated that white supremacist groups had for decades held an interest in infiltrating police departments but didn't provide any hard data on how many such efforts may have succeeded, or where and how exactly such an infiltration would impact a department's overall operation. The report cited specific cases in which a white supremacist's activities in a police department were scrutinized, but the details were redacted. It report did proclaim that such an infiltration could jeopardize investigations and afford white supremacists a means of endangering law enforcement personnel: While there hasn't been any indication that an infiltration of police departments by white supremacists is directly linked to specific recent police shooting incidents, nor that any organized efforts to infiltrate law enforcement have been successful in recent years, by 2006 the issue had at least risen to the level of meriting the FBI's attention. (en)
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