Inside detest groups on Facebook, police officers merchandise racist memes, conspiracy theories and Islamophobia

by Volition Carless and Michael Corey | June xiv, 2019

Part one in a series. Read parts 2 and 3.

Hundreds of active-duty and retired law enforcement officers from across the United States are members of Confederate, anti-Islam, misogynistic or anti-government militia groups on Facebook, a Reveal investigation has establish.

These cops have worked at every level of American law enforcement, from tiny, rural sheriff'due south departments to the largest agencies in the land, such as the Los Angeles and New York police force departments. They work in jails and schools and airports, on boats and trains and in patrol cars. And, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting discovered, they also read and contribute to groups such as "White Lives Matter" and "DEATH TO ISLAM Hush-hush."

The groups cover a range of extremist ideologies. Some nowadays themselves publicly as being defended to benign historical discussion of the Confederacy, but are replete with racism inside. Some trade in anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant memes. Some are openly Islamophobic. And almost 150 of the officers we found are involved with violent anti-regime groups such every bit the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters.

More than 50 departments launched internal investigations later on being presented with our findings, in some cases saying they would examine officers' by conduct to see if their online activity mirrored their policing in real life. And some departments have taken action, with at least one officer being fired for violating section policies.

U.S. law enforcement agencies, many of which take deeply troubled histories of bigotry, accept long been defendant of connections betwixt officers and extremist groups. At the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, marchers flew a "Blue Lives Matter" flag alongside anti-Semitic and white supremacist letters. In Portland, Oregon, police officers were institute to accept been texting with a far-right group that regularly hosts white supremacists and white nationalists at its rallies. A classified FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide from Apr 2015, obtained by The Intercept, warned that white supremacists and other far-right groups had infiltrated American law enforcement.

It tin can be hard to determine how deep or widespread these connections run. Researchers recently constitute numerous examples of police officers posting fierce and racist content on their public Facebook pages. Reveal'due south investigation shows for the get-go time that officers in agencies beyond the country take actively joined private detest groups, participating in the spread of extremism on Facebook.

Most of the hateful Facebook groups these cops frequent are closed, meaning only members are allowed to see content posted by other members. Reveal joined dozens of these groups and verified the identities of almost 400 electric current and retired law enforcement officials who are members.

One guard at the Angola prison in Louisiana, Geoffery Crosby, was a member of 56 extremist groups, including 45 Confederate groups and 1 called "BAN THE NAACP."

A detective at the Harris County Sheriff's Part in Houston, James "J.T." Thomas, was a fellow member of the airtight Facebook group "The White Privilege Club."

The grouping contains hundreds of mean, racist and anti-Semitic posts; links to interviews with white supremacists such equally Richard Spencer; and invites to events such as the mortiferous Unite the Correct rally in Charlottesville. Users regularly post memes featuring Pepe the Frog, the alt-correct mascot, with captions such as, "white people, practise something." And in that location are explicitly racist jokes, such equally 1 with a photo of fried chicken and grape soda with the explanation, "Mom packed me a niggable for schoolhouse."

Thomas once posted the logo for the Black College Football game Hall of Fame inside the group with a unproblematic caption: "Seriously. Why?" Shortly after, he posted a meme virtually an elderly African American woman confusedly responding to a reporter's question by naming a fried craven restaurant.

Afterwards being presented with Thomas' postings on Facebook, the Harris Canton Sheriff'southward Office fired him in Feb for violating a number of employee conduct policies.

"These policies state that 'an employee's actions must never bring the HCSO into disrepute, nor should conduct exist detrimental to the HCSO'due south efficient operation. … Personnel who, through their use of social media, cause undue embarrassment or damage the reputation of, or erode the public's confidence in, the HCSO shall be deemed to take violated this policy and shall be subject area to counseling and/or discipline," the department said in an email.

In a hearing to appeal his firing, Thomas said he didn't realize he was a member of the closed grouping and defended his behavior. "If you remove the black female out of the picture, what's racist about it?" he said. The Harris County Sheriff's Civil Service Commission upheld his firing.

Lonnie Allen Chocolate-brown of the Kingsville Police Department in Texas, a member of three Islamophobic groups, posted a photo of a young black man with a pistol to his head with the header, "If Blackness lives actually mattered …. They'd cease shooting each other!" He as well posted an image that read: "Islam. A cult of oppression, rape, pedophilia and murder cannot be reasoned with!" Neither he nor his section returned calls for comment.

Peter Simi, an associate professor of sociology at Chapman University who has studied extremist groups for more than 20 years, said biased views like those expressed in these Facebook groups inevitably influence an individual's controlling process.

"The perceptions we have about the world at large bulldoze the decisions we make," Simi said. "To think that people could completely separate these extremist correct-wing views from their actions only isn't consistent with what we know most the decision-making process."

While Facebook vows that it prioritizes meaningful content, its algorithms likewise appear to play a office in strengthening biases. The more than extreme groups we joined, the more Facebook suggested new – and oftentimes even more troubling – groups to join or pages to like. It was easy to see how users, including law officers, could exist increasingly radicalized by what they saw on their news feed.

What's harder to come across is how these views affected their policing offline.

Disciplinary records and investigations into law misconduct are kept secret in a majority of states, meaning most American cops enjoy a coating of protection that can cover upward biases. Only in some cases, we found public documents that showed the officers we identified via Facebook likewise had been involved in real-life instances of alleged racism or other misconduct.

Will Weisenberger, a sheriff's deputy in Madison Canton, Mississippi, was a fellow member of a closed Facebook group called "White Lives Matter." He's also been caught up in a lawsuit filed by the American Ceremonious Liberties Wedlock confronting the department for allegedly engaging in decades of systemic racism and discriminatory policing.

Racism was so systematic at the Madison Canton Sheriff'south Section, the ACLU asserts, that the section's bare arrest forms came with ii words already filled in: "Black" and "Male."

Lawyers for the ACLU deposed Weisenberger and asked him about an incident in which a fellow deputy alleged that Weisenberger had punched an African American man in the face while the man's easily were cuffed. And so they asked him if he always uses any racial slurs while on duty.

"I may have used the N-word," Weisenberger said, according to the deposition.

"It's not something I'm proud of or do every day," he connected.

Neither the Sheriff's Department nor Weisenberger responded to calls for comment. The Sheriff's Department wouldn't release Weisenberger's disciplinary record or a re-create of the complaint made by his colleague. Police disciplinary records in Mississippi are confidential.

In Chicago, Lt. Richard Moravec was a member of a closed Facebook group called "Any islamist insults infidels, I will put him under my feet," which disappeared from Facebook before we could bring together it or search it for posts past officers.

While we don't know if he ever interacted with the Islamophobic group, Moravec has posted content that appears to exist openly anti-transgender and anti-Islam on his personal Facebook page.

One meme Moravec posted featured a photo of a young girl with the explanation, "Please! Don't misfile me. I'm a girl. Don't teach me to question if I'thousand a boy, transexual, transgendered, intersexed or two spirited."

And Chicago's open records on police comport revealed that he also has been the bailiwick of 70 allegations, including accusations of illegal use of force, verbal corruption and criminal misconduct, according to the Citizens Police Data Projection. That'due south more 99 percent of Chicago police officers. One of the allegations resulted in a five-24-hour interval suspension.

Moravec didn't reply to a call for comment.

To find cops with connections to extremist groups, we congenital lists of ii dissimilar types of Facebook users: members of extremist groups and members of police groups.

We wrote software to download these lists direct from Facebook, something the platform allowed at the fourth dimension. In mid-2018, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and afterward nosotros already had downloaded our data, Facebook shut down the ability to download membership lists from groups. Then we ran those ii datasets confronting each other to observe users who were members of at least one law enforcement group and i far-right group.

We got 14,000 hits.

We did non presume that everyone in a police Facebook group was an actual officer, because many could exist relatives of police officers or just really into police enforcement. So, nosotros spent months poring over private Facebook pages, looking for clues, such equally photos of the officer in uniform, or posts about police force events, or notes mourning lost cops. So nosotros corroborated what we found on Facebook with additional research, often calling the departments to confirm the private either even so or had once worked there.

Ultimately, we confirmed that virtually 400 users were indeed either currently employed as police force officers, sheriffs or prison guards or had once worked in constabulary enforcement.

Nosotros and then asked to bring together the closed extremist groups. Many groups ask users questions in order to join, and these frequently offer insight into the nature of the group. The grouping "Terminate Radical Islam in America," for example, asks, "Why practise yous personally recall Islam should be banned in America?" At least 12 current and one-time police officers were members of that group.

The group "Amalgamated Brothers & Sisters," which counts at least 25 current and former cops every bit members, explicitly asks, "This grouping is sometimes racist does this carp you?" Inside that group, we found several cops and ex-cops posting racist comments.

Nosotros used our real names and photos and answered the questions honestly to join these groups. Nosotros used general language, often maxim we were "interested in learning more." Every bit a event, many of the most extreme groups rejected our application to join, ignored u.s. or blocked us from viewing the grouping.

Merely dozens let us in.

We didn't seek to find every single hate group or law group on Facebook, and we couldn't confirm the professions of hundreds of the users in our database.

Several officers claimed that they didn't even know they were members of the closed groups we identified them in. And that's probably the example for at least some of these officers, due to Facebook's policies for joining groups.

Until tardily 2018, Facebook allowed users to invite friends to join groups they thought would interest them. The invitees would receive a notification telling them they were a member of a new group, and depending on each user'due south algorithm, the user's news feed might include content and postings from the group. Simply it's certainly possible that cops could accept been added to groups without realizing it, especially if they're not active on Facebook.

Facebook has since changed its policies. Users now get a request to join a group that they have to confirm.

But that doesn't utilize to dozens of current and retired officers who take commented on and liked posts in closed extremist groups or who proactively joined groups themselves, without being invited by somebody else.

We examined a tiny sample of what exists on Facebook — what Megan Squire, a informatics professor from Elon Academy in North Carolina, chosen "a tiny, postage-stamp-sized window into Facebook's skyscraper of data."

Hate is all around yous

In the 2nd part of Reveal's series about hate, nosotros look at how racism and white supremacy are institutionalized in America.

Listen Now

Squire, who has studied hate groups on Facebook for years and maintains her ain database, said the social media platform, and especially airtight groups, are used by hate groups such as white supremacists to programme events and build camaraderie.

"Charlottesville was planned on Facebook," Squire said. "Extremists are definitely using Facebook groups to plan physical, real-earth events or just to make their lives a little smaller, to find friends."

A spokeswoman for Facebook said the company doesn't tolerate hate speech on the platform and works extremely hard to identify and close downwards hate groups. In the last twelvemonth, as part of a button to reform the company, Facebook has said it won't tolerate white nationalist or white supremacist content, and information technology has moved to shut down the accounts of some of the most pop hate-spoken language provocateurs.

But while groups with overt neo-Nazi, white supremacist or Ku Klux Klan names get close downwards relatively rapidly by Facebook, hate groups take wised up in response.

As has happened elsewhere on the internet, extremist groups on Facebook often use in-jokes and subtle references in their names to avoid takedown policies. Moderators of airtight groups command who can join, and on Facebook, cops tin hibernate who they really are — using false names and list pretend jobs.

Inside the closed Facebook groups to which we gained access, transparently racist, misogynistic and homophobic content is on full display. Nosotros catalogued more than than 120 active and retired officers posting in these groups or commenting in support of others.

In 1 48-hour flow, civilian members of one airtight group posted a steady stream of hateful content:

  • One user posted a link to a piece almost how the skins of African slaves were once turned into jackets. It garnered 34 comments and 103 emoticon responses in 24 hours. Almost all of the people reacting to the post gave it the "haha" response. "ten/10 would wear, " a commenter said.
  • Some other post mocked the removal of a citizenship question from the 2020 demography, playing off the common white supremacist conspiracy theory that an international group of Jews is masterminding the clearing of Latinos into the The states. "When are nosotros going to show everyone what the Jewish conduce is doing?" commented one member.
  • A video showing an African American human being arrested by an African American police officeholder resulted in an immediate comment: "Just reading that made me require some fried chicken and watermelon."

At least six law enforcement officers were members of the group, which was called "Anti-SJW Pinochet's Helicopter Pilot University." The name showcases the wordplay central to the white supremacists' rebranding every bit the "alt-right." Information technology refers to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who had his political opponents thrown out of helicopters into the Pacific Ocean. "SJW" stands for "social justice warrior," a term used to mock individuals who support equal rights for people of color, women and the LGBTQ customs.

While the terminology is new and sometimes cryptic, the core messages of the alt-right repeat longstanding neo-Nazi and white supremacist bounds. Perry Tolliver, a retired corrections officer from Baltimore, and Michael Pinegar, a one-time Arizona Department of Corrections officeholder — who were both members of the Pinochet grouping until it disappeared from Facebook earlier this month — seemed well-versed in the alt-right's terminology. In separate posts in the group, both Tolliver and Pinegar referred to African Americans as "dindus" — a racist slur common on Facebook and elsewhere.

In a like vein, Detective Steve Fumuso from Westchester County in New York oft inserted comments into posts in the Pinochet grouping that denigrated African Americans, Latinos and the LGBTQ community.

Fumuso posted a meme with a white man making the "OK" symbol — a favored gesture of the alt-right — and the words "fuckin mint" under a racist joke about Mexicans in Dec 2017. Earlier, he had commented, "Ha ha ha haaaa. Fuck em," nether a "Tucker Carlson This night" clip about Mexicans being worried about crime committed past Central American migrants.

Westchester County Public Condom Commissioner Thomas Gleason said the department'south Special Investigations Unit would launch an investigation.

In an interview months later on, Fumuso said he had retired shortly after the internal affairs investigation. He said the two things had zilch to do with each other.

"I similar memes, they make me express joy. I didn't bring together to express whatsoever racist views," he said. "I don't care what y'all think. That's my opinion. You know what'southward a racist annotate? 'Brits are all full of shit.' "

(The reporter conducting the interview, Will Carless, has a British accent.)

Several officers contacted for this story countered that they have a Outset Subpoena right to opine on social media, even if those opinions are unpopular or offensive to some people.

Even so, while civilians savor Offset Amendment protection from government censorship or harassment, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that public agencies such every bit constabulary departments may penalize their employees for speech and behavior in certain cases.

Valerie Van Brocklin, a sometime federal prosecutor who trains constabulary departments and other public employees on social media use, said law officers across the country have been fired or suspended for making off-colour jokes or leaving problematic comments under paper articles.

"I enquire them, 'Would yous, every bit a cop, in your uniform, put that on a sandwich board and walk up and down the streets of your boondocks? ' " Van Brocklin said. "And they'll say, 'No, considering I could be fired for that.' Well, instead of putting it on a sandwich board, you put it up for the whole globe to run into, and then why would you think it's protected?"

No single code of behave or ethics policy governs the thousands of jurisdictions in the U.Southward. that utilise police force officers. Different law enforcement agencies have widely differing standards for the behavior they have from their personnel, and this was reflected in the responses we received from departments.

In Watkins Glen, New York, Sgt. in Accuse Steven Decker refused to talk well-nigh the fact that one of his officers, Robert Brill, was a member of 2 groups connected to the Proud Boys, a violent alt-right gang, and the group "Kekistani Freestate," named for Kek, a sort of deity employed past the alt-correct for memes and other jokes.

"Nosotros don't discuss personnel matters," Decker said, earlier hanging upwardly. Brill didn't respond to calls for comment.

The Abbeville Police force Department in Georgia hasn't responded to multiple phone calls and emails near one of its officers, Joel Quinn, oftentimes featuring conspiracy theories and anti-Islam posts on his personal Facebook wall. He too has posted inside a Confederate group.

Reached via Facebook Messenger, Quinn dedicated his posts. "Its also my responsibility to detect possible threats to my community all the mode up to and including my country," he wrote. "Remember about this, majority of crimes are committed by minorities (black, hispanic, etc) per FBI statistics however I don't 'casualty' on any particular one." (According to the latest FBI Uniform Crime Reporting statistics, 68.nine percent of arrestees in 2017 were white.)

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections hasn't commented on corrections officeholder Sheldon Best, a member of "Crusades Against Degeneracy," a grouping that trades in racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant and homophobic content. In 2017, All-time commented on an NPR story reporting that babies of color are now the majority in the United States. Beneath it, he wrote: "Possibly, simply minority on minority homocide (sic) will make sure adults of color remain a minority."

Best said in an interview that he was apologetic nearly this and other posts in the group. "Some people" could view his membership in the grouping as problematic, he acknowledged. However, he said that while some members of the group concur discriminatory views, he does non.

We provided the New York Police Department with posts from Officer Randy Paulsaint, a member of thirteen groups committed to the anti-feminist Men Going Their Ain Fashion movement.

The groups contain memes depicting women as evil, greedy and jealous. In one, someone posted a meme about a woman asking for a Christmas nowadays. In the comments, Paulsaint inserted a gif of a human being kicking a woman in the caput.

The NYPD said its investigation was closed equally unsubstantiated. "The investigation was unable to clearly prove or disprove that the subject officer made the offending posts," the department said.

Peter Simi, the sociologist, said white supremacists and other extremists have been working hard to integrate their hateful views into lodge in as many ways as possible.

"Leaders have long been advocating for infiltration of society — graduate from high schoolhouse, become to college, bring together the military, become a police officer, become a school teacher — get within the organization," he said. "That's why information technology's so difficult to get a handle on the scope of this, considering the purpose for those who are infiltrating these systems is to be careful non to tip their hands. So we're always dealing with the tip of the iceberg."

Researchers Daneel Knoetze and Michael Dailey contributed to this story. It was edited by Andrew Donohue and Matt Thompson.

Will Carless can be reached at wcarless@revealnews.org, and Michael Corey tin exist reached at mcorey@revealnews.org. Follow Carless on Twitter: @willcarless.

Will Carless was a correspondent for Reveal roofing extremism. He has worked as a strange correspondent in Asia and South America. Prior to joining Reveal, he was a senior correspondent for Public Radio International'south Global Mail squad based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Before that, Will spent 8 years at the Voice of San Diego, where he worked as an investigative reporter and caput of investigations. During his tenure in San Diego, Will was awarded several prizes, including a national award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has been a finalist for the Livingston Awards for young journalists twice in the last five years. He surfs, spends time with his family, travels to silly places and pretends he'south writing a novel.

Michael Corey is Reveal's senior information editor. He leads a team of information journalists who seek to distill large datasets into compelling and easily understandable stories using the tools of journalism, statistics and programming. His specialties include mapping, the U.S.-United mexican states border, scientific data and working with remote sensing. Corey's piece of work has been honored with an Online Journalism Honor, an Emmy Honour, a Polk Award, an IRE Medal and other national awards. He previously worked for the Des Moines Register and graduated from Drake University. He is based in Reveal's Emeryville, California, office.

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