A recent hack revealed the extent of active-duty police officers who are members of the right-wing Oath Keepers paramilitary group, and new reports show their involvement in additional anti-government extremist groups.
Police officers from some of the nation's largest departments are involved with the Oath Keepers, according to a hacked membership list, and MSNBC legal analyst Frank Figliuzzi sees three factors that allowed radical extremism to infiltrate law enforcement agencies.
"First, President Donald Trump strategically cultivated cops in his bid to win and maintain power by recruiting those who already wielded it," Figliuzzi writes. "'Cops for Trump' rallies, often led by then-Vice President Mike Pence, played out in packed venues across the country, including one where Pence warned officers that they 'won't be safe' if Joe Biden were elected president. Trump also promoted the false notion that only his supporters were defenders of police, which caused most police unions, including the country's largest, to endorse Trump for president."
Figliuzzi argues police were radicalized by the nationwide wave of Black Lives Matter protests, which he says caused more than 2,000 injuries to officers and created a backlash.
"To police, the violence against them became a self-fulfilling MAGA prophecy — caused not by their own colleagues' misconduct but, as they were led to believe, by far-left liberals and minorities intent on destroying the country," Figliuzzi writes.
The former FBI assistant director of counterintelligence also believes the "defund the police" slogan further isolated police into an "us versus them" mindset.
"Counter-radicalization of police officers won't be easy, but it can be done," Figliuzzi writes. "The answer isn't to defund the police, because, in reality, corrective measures are likely to require increased budgets. Those measures must include changing the way police candidates are recruited. Targeted recruitment of college-educated, proven problem solvers, from a wide variety of academic, cultural, ethnic and racial backgrounds, will take more money, not less. Enhanced screening and vetting, including polygraphs and social media analysis, to identify and weed out those applicants more likely to default to physicality over verbal de-escalation or to act upon biases and violent ideologies, can be accomplished — but again, it will cost more, not less. Such vetting and background investigation can't end with the application process but rather must be systematically incorporated throughout officers' careers."
