Police agencies "blind in the right eye” to the violent far right

As the Trump Administration seems to be in full crash-and-burn mode, lots of insiders are trying to position themselves and/or their agencies in a better light. So that's always something to keep in mind as a background situation for stories like this: Betsy woodruff Swan, They tried to get Trump to care about right-wing terrorism. He ignored them. Politico 08/26/2020:

Just a few weeks into the new administration, DHS leaders noticed an alarming trend: a burst of vandalism at Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia; Rochester, N.Y.; and University City, Mo.

“We were all scratching our heads saying, ‘What is this?’” Neumann said. “You could sense that something about the threat was changing and morphing, but we couldn’t quite put our fingers on it until Charlottesville.”

On Aug. 11, 2017, scores of young white men carrying tiki torches marched through the campus of the University of Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “White lives matter,” in a public display of white supremacist mobilization that shocked and sickened the country. The next day, counterprotesters thronged the streets of Charlottesville to push back. And a white supremacist drove a car through that crowd, injuring 19 people and killing a woman named Heather Heyer.

Trump’s infamous response to the weekend: “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

It could have been a moment of action from the federal government, Neumann said — a chance for a systematic White House review of the threat’s scope and causes. But it wasn’t

The deference of local police agencies to violent far-right groups has been growing - even though some of them like the Sovereign Citizens groups have been known to be particularly dangerous for police themselves.

It's also not new that there would be actual overlaps and clsse connections between police departments and far-right groups. In the South during the segregation period of roughly 1876-1970, such connections between official law enforcement and KKK-type groups were familiar enough.

Andy Campbell reports in (Portland Police Are Giving Up On Policing The Far-Right Huffpost 08/25/2020):

Allowing local far-right groups to wreak havoc on the city isn’t a big departure for the PPB. As the Proud Boys cheered, officers launched tear gas and other munitions at anti-fascist counterprotesters during a rally in 2017, which left one antifa protester with a gas canister lodged in his head. Police gave the Proud Boys an escort out of the city following a rally in 2018 that saw the far-right demonstrators outnumbered by anti-fascists. A key officer had a friendly and ongoing relationship with the leader of Proud Boys affiliate group Patriot Prayer, judging from texts obtained by Willamette Week.

But relinquishing the act of policing to the brawlers themselves is both new and concerning, especially given the context: Local extremists have escalated their violent tactics in recent weeks, brazenly introducing guns and a lot more weaponry to the melee.

This is another major problem with American policing, that they are two often "blind in the right eye" when it comes to violent political groups.

It would be a disaster if a new Democratic Administration in Washington failed to address the chronic problems of policing in a serious way. And it certainly needs to be serious enough to bring down the obscene number of police murders of unarmed black people who are posing no physical threat to them or anyone else.