The Capitol riot is a reminder of the links between the police and white supremacy

As investigations into last week’s riot at the United States Capitol continue, one thing has become quite clear: the people involved were not just “marginal” elements, disconnected from mainstream society.

Prominent among the rioters was a group with a lot of institutional and social power – policemen and other policemen. In fact, almost 30 sworn officers have been identified so far participants in the demonstration that led to Wednesday’s riot, according to NPR.

This includes Virginia policeman Thomas “TJ” Robertson, who was arrested this week in connection with the insurrection. “CNN and the left are crazy because we really attacked the government, which is the problem, and not just any small company,” Robertson wrote on Facebook after breaking into Capitol.

The prisoners also include his colleague Jacob Fracker, a Virginia police officer and a corporal from the state National Guard. “Lol for anyone who’s possibly worried about my picture hanging around,” Fracker apparently wrote on Facebook. “It’s not like I did something illegal.”

Statements are blatant – the police’s disrespect for the exposed law, even if defending it should be their job. And yet it should come as no surprise that members of the police were present at the rebellion. After all, it was an insurrection in the name of a president who made racism and xenophobia the core of his administration and who repeatedly fanned the flames of white nationalism. Furthermore, the intention was to annul the election results, supporting a false narrative about electoral fraud that sought to annul the votes of thousands of black Americans.

Essentially, the attack on the Capitol was an uprising to defend white supremacy. And sustaining and supporting white supremacy has long been a part of police functions.

After the end of slavery, police departments played a key role in conducting mass incarceration and essentially as a weapon of the idea of ​​black crime, as historian Khalil Muhammad explained to Vox last summer. And in addition to reinforcing the principles of white supremacy as part of their work, police officers used to be personally members of white supremacy groups. As historian Linda Gordon notes, the police and other policemen made up a large proportion of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

So while it may be disturbing for many to see police officers as part of a riot that sought to overthrow American democracy – and that left a police officer dead – it should come as no shock that law enforcement officials can support the white supremacist ideology behind the rebellion . This ideology has been intertwined with policing since the beginning.

Police officers across the country face investigations and charges after the riot

In the past few days, reports of police officers present in the riot have continued to multiply. These are some of the officers who were present that day:

• Robertson, a police officer in Rocky Mount, Virginia, faces federal charges, including violent entry and disorderly conduct. He and Fracker posed for a photo in front of a statue on the Capitol, “making obscene gestures,” according to CNBC. He later said he was “proud” of the photo because he was “willing to put the skin on the game”. Robertson also said he was allowed to enter the building by the Capitol Police: “I entered through an open door guarded by two Capitol police officers, received a bottle of water from them and asked to stay inside a fenced area, which we did.”
• In addition to being a police officer, Fracker is the first known active employee charged in the Capitol riot, according to CNBC. Like Robertson, he is accused of violent entry and disorderly conduct. Both the Virginia National Guard and Rocky Mount police are investigating.
• Tam Pham, a Houston police officer for 18 years, resigned this week after being identified in the riot. He was seen in photos holding a Trump flag inside the Capitol, according to NPR, and is currently under federal investigation.
• Roxanne Mathai, the sheriff’s lieutenant in Bexar County, Texas, posted photos of herself on a Capitol balcony on Wednesday, calling it “the best day of her life,” according to NPR. She is on unpaid administrative leave.
• At least two Seattle police officers are on leave and under investigation following reports of their involvement in the rally, according to ABC. Meanwhile, there are resignations from Mike Solan, president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, after he said the “extreme left” was partly to blame for the riot.
• Seven traffic police officers, from the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority in Philadelphia, are under investigation after they attended the rally that ended in Wednesday’s riot, according to WHYY. “They are being investigated to see if they were involved in turbulent behavior or for violations of our social media policies,” said SEPTA traffic police chief Thomas Nestel this week.

Investigations are likely to continue in the coming weeks and months, and none of the above officers have been convicted of a riot-related crime.

However, as the nation processes last week’s events, it is crucial to recognize the role that the police played in defending white supremacy throughout American history.

In the South, after the Civil War, law enforcement became a tool to keep black Americans in de facto slavery, since they could be forced to work as punishment for a crime. “All expressions of black freedom, political rights, economic rights and social rights were then subject to criminal sanctions,” Muhammad told Vox. “Whites could accuse blacks who wanted to vote as criminals. People who wish to negotiate fair employment contracts can be defined as criminals. And the only thing that was not criminalized was submission to a white farmer to work on his land ”.

While black Americans were criminalized and forced to work in the South, the police also acted as the enforcer of white rule in northern cities, Muhammad told Vox. In the South, he explained, “a white man can really shoot a black man or woman in the middle of the street and get away with it. This was less likely to happen in the North – what was more likely to happen was a white resident simply calling the police. ”

And the police didn’t just arrest black Americans, leading to their arrest – they also participated in the mob violence against blacks. In 1919, for example, black Chicago residents protested the fatal stoning of Eugene Scott, a 17-year-old black boy. White residents attacked them and the police joined them, later discovering a commission that studied violence. “When the police had the option to protect blacks from the violence of the white mob, they chose to help and stimulate white mobs or to disarm blacks or to arrest them,” said Muhammad.

And in addition to perpetuating racist violence and mass incarceration at work, the police also had a presence in white nationalist groups. In the 1920s, “probably the largest individual occupational group on the Klan was the police, or other law and order officials, such as sheriff’s deputies,” Gordon told Vox. And while we didn’t know the specific affiliations of the officers under investigation for their role last Wednesday, it shouldn’t be surprising to see the police at a rally alongside white nationalists or to see pro-police flags “blue lives matter” at the same time. with confederate flags and other racist symbols.

“White supremacy has really infiltrated the police forces,” Sabrina Karim, a government professor at Cornell University who studies global policing, told Vox earlier this week. And in a significant way, it’s been there since the beginning.

This is something that became even more evident last summer, when Americans saw on video the brutal murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by the police in Minneapolis. It became even clearer when that murder led to protests for racial justice across the country, and police and other policemen in American cities responded with brutal force – a stark contrast to the treatment of right-wing anti-mask protesters in Michigan last spring, for example, who were allowed to enter the government palace with weapons. As Vox’s Fabiola Cineas noted, research shows that law enforcement was twice as likely to use force against liberal demonstrations than against demonstrations by far-right extremists between May and November.

This contrast became even more striking in the Capitol riot, when the Capitol police on duty appeared to move the barricades to allow protesters to approach the corridors of Congress – an officer even posed for a selfie with one of the rebels. There were probably many reasons for the catastrophic security breach that led to the invasion of the Capitol on Wednesday, but an affinity between some on-call police and the protesters was probably among them. “There was some degree of complicity, not among all police or law enforcement officials, but some,” said Karim.

And now, the fact that the off-duty policemen were actively participating in the rally that seeks to overturn the election – and rejecting the votes of thousands of black voters – is the latest reminder of how deep the connection between policing and white supremacy is.

Some expressed horror at the idea that police might be involved in the attack on the Capitol. “There is no excuse for criminal activity, especially for a police officer,” Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said in a statement about Pham’s resignation.

But for decades, the police in America have had the power to define what criminal activity is and have often exercised that power against black Americans, sometimes with fatal consequences. They have also been a central part of white supremacist groups that sought to demonize immigrants and people of color. And any response to the Capitol riot, and to the larger forces of white supremacy in America, will have to rely on that reality.