The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) closely watched Black-led organizations and anti-racist groups for years while ignoring the growing far-right threat, according to Hatewatch’s review of leaked documents. Experts say this is in line with broader law enforcement attitudes toward such groups. Hatewatch searched over 26,000 MPD email threads dated from May 2011 to December 2017. They contain surveillance logs of First Amendment demonstrations and monitoring social media, demonstrations and undercover surveillance of such groups as antifa and D.C. Black Lives Matter (DC BLM). Police even reviewed a tip about BLM based on reporting from The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing misinformation site that platforms far-right extremists. A search of “BLM” and “Black Lives Matter” yields 51 combined hits. “Antifa” returns 53 hits. The emails include attachments with further uses of the terms. MPD employees mention the “alt-right” – a name for a faction of the far right that arose online in the mid-2010s – one time in the emails. Daniel Hall, MPD’s top civilian analyst in the IB, thought SNPR, a brand name for watch straps, was “some alt right [sic] phrase.”
The overwhelming majority of the emails come from Hall’s account. Searching “far-right” yields no results that reference extremist groups, only phrases about locations of people and objects. “Nazi” yields eight hits – three from an email about an anti-fascist punching a neo-Nazi. MPD employees drafted the emails and documents as the U.S. saw rising violence from the far right, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) considers the “most persistent and lethal threat,” according to an October 2020 report. “White supremacy has been ignored by law enforcement,” Erroll Southers, professor of the practice in national and homeland security and former FBI agent, told Hatewatch.
via splcenter: D.C. Police Closely Watched Anti-Racist Groups for Years