A Historic Policing Problem

by Jack R. Johnson 09.2024

Last month, a North of James reader offered an additional item to our list of Presidential assassination and assassination attempts. Back in 2007, Presidential candidate, Barack Obama apparently was the target of an assassination conspiracy by the Ku Klux Klan. A sniper for the US military, Joe Moore spent nearly 10 years as an undercover informant with the KKK for the FBI.  In an interview with Tonya Mosley on NPR’s Fresh Air, Moore discussed how the Klan was getting inside information on Obama's visit from their police sources and the DMV. 

According to Moore, “These officers were in the vicinity of where candidate Barack Obama was going to appear sometime in the late October time frame. So there was a department near there that would have been involved with some of the logistics, and these officers had some access to the information. And the Klan decided that they would have a couple of vehicles that were provided by a fellow they knew that had a junkyard. And they would have the DMV - their contacts at the DMV assist with fulfilling the license plate registration information in order to sort of wash over who the real drivers were, who really owned the vehicles. And at the conclusion of this, those vehicles were to be destroyed at a junkyard. And the plan was to take those two vehicles with two shooters and two drivers to two different points where Obama was conducting his rally and deliver very powerful firepower in his direction.”

Moore then went on to relate how he stopped the conspiracy by saying, 

“What are y'all going to do about the drones?”

“Drones?” They asked, “What drones?”

Moore explained, “’Well, the Secret Service, you know, now that Obama is the candidate, he has an elevated level of Secret Service protection, and at this level, includes drones.’ I didn't know it did,” he told Fresh Air, “but they didn't either.”

That bit of deception may have saved Obama’s life. At any rate, the KKK decided not to go forward with the assassination plot thanks to Moore’s quick thinking. But one of the disturbing facts to emerge from the interview was the degree to which local law enforcement had been compromised by a radical white supremacist group.  As Moore notes later in the interview, “the KKK has always desired to take over law enforcement because that's a mechanism of power that if they can control it, they can grow their power. I don't think people realize how dangerous it is to have a single KKK member in the organization because then recruiting takes place, and it ultimately propagates and attracts other people that are perhaps persuadable.”

The FBI said last year that the top domestic violent extremist threat facing the U.S. is from "racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race."

Yet, few law enforcement agencies have policies that specifically prohibit joining white supremacist groups or extremist militias, and police departments usually respond to bias with a slap on the wrist, according to a 2020 report on explicit racism in police departments by the Brennan Center for Justice.

In fact, a 2022 Reuters study found that nationwide  “a significant number of U.S. police instructors have ties to a constellation of armed right-wing militias and white supremacist hate groups[…]The analysis found that some of the instructional information presented by police trainers was explicitly racist, and that some instructors endorsed and interacted with white supremacist criminal groups such as the Proud Boys.” [Sixteen Proud Boys are alleged to have taken part in the January 6th Capitol siege] Mounting evidence suggests the “white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement” that the FBI warned about back in 2006 is getting worse.”

Vida Johnson, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who studies police culture, documented the foundational relationship between American policing and white supremacy in a 2019 law review article going back to its origins in slave patrols, and drawing a clear line to the present. His article describes a continuing “epidemic of white supremacists in police departments,” citing examples of explicit police racism through the decades, including reporting that exposed police officers’ membership in the Ku Klux Klan in Texas in 2001, and in Florida, in 2014. “There have been scandals in over 100 different police departments, in over 40 different states” involving explicit police racism, Johnson wrote in 2019.

Johnson published additional research in the wake of the January 6 attack at the Capitol, documenting “high-profile instances of explicit racial bias” by cops that emerged in just the year or so following the 2019 article, including police officers in Wilmington, North Carolina, who inadvertently recorded themselves in 2020 fantasizing about murdering Black residents during a race war.

William Finnegan, writing in The New Yorker noted, “The number of hate groups in America spiked after Barack Obama’s election, and hate crimes have also gone up, but the appetite for prosecuting them, at any level—federal, state, local—has been feeble in recent years. In 2017, the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security identified white-supremacist violence as a persistent lethal threat to Americans—in fact, the single most lethal domestic terrorism threat—and yet there is no national strategy to combat it.” 

The research, however, did not go entirely unremarked. In May 2022, President Biden signed a historic Executive Order establishing a National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, that required the development and implementation of best practices for ongoing background checks to screen federal law enforcement officers for the promotion of white supremacy and other dangerous biases.  Local police organizations, however, still remain a problem.

Given President Trump’s recent attempted assassination where  faulty communications between the Secret Service and local law enforcement gave a would be assassin a window of opportunity, making sure our local police organizations aren’t unwittingly infiltrated with the KKK or similar organizations should be a no brainer. Let’s hope someone is thinking of it.