a snippet, a worthwhile read in full:
In November, a Georgia deputy was caught on an FBI wiretap boasting about targeting Black people for felony arrests so they couldn’t vote, and recruiting colleagues into a group called “Shadow Moses.” In 2017, an interim police chief in Oklahoma was found to have ties to an international neo-Nazi group. In 2014, two officers in Fruitland Park, Florida, were outed as klansmen and forced to quit.
Despite repeated examples, white supremacists who are fired from law enforcement jobs after being discovered can often find jobs with other agencies. There is no database officials can check to see if someone’s been identified as an extremist.
In 2020, an officer in Anniston, Alabama, was hired by a county sheriff’s department just a few years after the Southern Poverty Law Center posted a video of him speaking at a white nationalist League of the South meeting.
“There’s no trail that follows them even if they’re fired. It’s spreading the problem around,” said Greg Ehrie, former chief of the FBI’s New York domestic terrorism squad, who now works with the Anti-Defamation League.
Domestic terrorism experts have been calling for better screening to help identify extremists before they’re hired. Some states, such as California and Minnesota, have tried to pass new screening laws, only to be prevented by police unions, whose legal challenges argued successfully that such queries violate free speech rights.
Without screening, white supremacists who get inside can operate with impunity, targeting Black and other people of color, and recruiting others who share their views.
“Unless your name ends up in an FBI wiretap” an officer will go undetected, said Fred Burton, a former special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service. “There are loopholes in the background investigative process.”
http://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-business-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-only-on-ap-2b4106de3ebcbfae85948439a7056031?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningWire_July27&utm_term=Morning%20Wire%20Subscribers
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