Michael German cited several examples of cops getting fired because of their links with hatred groups like Ku Klux Klan and accused the authorities of doing little. In what is perceived to be an alert, a former special agent with the FBI has claimed that White supremacist groups have infiltrated the ranks of law-enforcement agencies across the country over the last two decades. Michael German came up with a report for the Brennan Center for Justice which addressed the relations between the serving police officers and far-right groups. “Racial disparities have long pervaded every step of the criminal justice process, from police stops, searches, arrests, shootings and other uses of force to charging decisions, wrongful convictions, and sentences. As a result, many have concluded that a structural or institutional bias against people of color, shaped by long-standing racial, economic, and social inequities, infects the criminal justice system,” he said. According to German’s report, the law-enforcement officials have been tied to racist militant activities in more than a dozen states since 2000 with several officers found to have posted social media posts that promote racism and bigotry. “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,” he said.
siehe auch: Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement. The government’s response to known connections of law enforcement officers to violent racist and militant groups has been strikingly insufficient. Racial disparities have long pervaded every step of the criminal justice process, from police stops, searches, arrests, shootings and other uses of force to charging decisions, wrongful convictions, and sentences. Police reforms, often imposed after incidents of racist misconduct or brutality, have focused on addressing these unconscious manifestations of bias. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), for example, has required implicit bias training as part of consent decrees it imposes to root out discriminatory practices in law enforcement agencies. Such training measures are designed to help law enforcement officers recognize these unconscious biases in order to reduce their influence on police behavior. These reforms, while well-intentioned, leave unaddressed an especially harmful form of bias, which remains entrenched within law enforcement: explicit racism. Explicit racism in law enforcement takes many forms, from membership or affiliation with violent white supremacist or far-right militant groups, to engaging in racially discriminatory behavior toward the public or law enforcement colleagues, to making racist remarks and sharing them on social media. While it is widely acknowledged that racist officers subsist within police departments around the country, federal, state, and local governments are doing far too little to proactively identify them, report their behavior to prosecutors who might unwittingly rely on their testimony in criminal cases, or protect the diverse communities they are sworn to serve. Efforts to address systemic and implicit biases in law enforcement are unlikely to be effective in reducing the racial disparities in the criminal justice system as long as explicit racism in law enforcement continues to endure. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that it does.