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White Vigilantes Have Always Had A

Friend In Police

New data shows that far-right vigilantes, often with support from

cops, have threatened protesters nearly 500 times since police

killed George Floyd.

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the streets of Kenosha carrying an assault rifle alongside other armed white men, a

local self-styled militia formed for the purported purpose of protecting property from

protesters.

“We appreciate you guys, we really do,” a cop can be heard telling the group over a

loudspeaker before tossing Rittenhouse a bottle of water.

It was a scene familiar in American history: agents of the state conscripting armed

white vigilantes to help violently suppress movements for racial justice and liberation.

(“Cops and the Klan go hand in hand,” the common protest chant goes.) So it wasn’t

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support of law enforcement, these vigilantes have shot protesters, attacked them with

cars, and beaten them.

And as political tensions intensify heading into the presidential election this fall — with

a president who routinely demonizes anti-racist protesters as “thugs” and terrorists,

and with reactionary police forces desperate to beat back calls for their own

by Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical

Right. He started gathering data on May 27, two days after police in Minneapolis killed

The dataset, which Ross shared with HuffPost, documents a staggering amount of

violence directed at protesters by the far-right, including 64 cases of simple assault, 38

incidents of vigilantes driving cars into demonstrators, and nine times shots were fired

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Ross’ dataset also includes 387 incidents of intimidation, such as people using racist

slurs, making threats and brandishing firearms. “There just isn’t really anything to

compare it to,” Ross told HuffPost. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”

The data — which Ross gathered from social media posts, news reports and the ACLED

US Crisis Monitor with help from Political Research Associates and the Institute for

Research and Education on Human Rights — includes some harrowing tales of

man opened fire on them at night, striking one protester in the face.

A man in Iowa City, Iowa, allegedly drove his car into a crowd of protesters and,

according to a criminal complaint, later justified the attack by telling police the

protesters needed “an attitude adjustment.” The steady drumbeat of such stories this

summer has coincided with story after story of cops and national guardsmen openly

supporting or collaborating with fascists and white vigilantes.

Ross said his dataset includes about two dozen incidents of vigilantes receiving

approval or support from law enforcement. A sheriff in Arizona, for

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Philadelphia posed for a friendly photo with vigilantes who roamed the city’s streets

with baseball bats. Still more stories emerged this summer of cops themselves

relishing violence against protesters.

said.

or five generations.”

A report published this week by former FBI agent Mike German, now a fellow at New

York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, documented how police ties to “white

dozen states since 2000. “In a time when the effort to defund police is getting some

salience, the police are behaving in such a way as to justify that argument,” German

told The Guardian.

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cops could be heard on the scanner referring to this group of vigilantes — founded by

a neo-Nazi — as “heavily armed friendlies.”

A short time later, one of those “friendlies” shot and badly injured an anti-racist

protester. Estes argues it’s important to remember the history of white vigilantism in

the U.S. in order to understand how these fascist groups operate in our society today,

and how they’ve often proven an eager partner with law enforcement.

“The Second Amendment was created specifically to arm white settlers against

runaway slaves, enslaved African people, as well as to kill native people on the

from law enforcement.

And look at the violence in “border towns” — white majority settlements ringing Native

American reservations — where white vigilantes have maimed and murdered

Indigenous peoples for generations. Law enforcement has often looked the other way.

“These white vigilantes today don’t misinterpret history,” Estes said. “They’re actually

upholding the kind of the original intent of the Second Amendment.” What’s

happening now, he added, is “an intensification of that kind of citizen policing” in

response to a growing tide of Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist organizing.

stem the spread of the coronavirus. Armed militias circled — and sometimes even

entered — state Capitol buildings, showing the often hands-off approach with which

governments often treat white vigilantes.

At Black Lives Matter protests following the police killing of Floyd, disparate

paramilitary and vigilante groups — Boogaloo Bois, III Percenters, Oath Keepers,

Proud Boys and white nationalists — became a regular fixture of right-wing

counterprotests.

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“If you get counterprotesters showing up who are armed, cops are almost always facing

towards the Black Lives Matter and racial justice protesters, not towards the armed

counterprotesters,” Gardiner said. This, he argued, has created an atmosphere in

which paramilitary groups feel emboldened.

“Going forward, we need to seriously reconsider the permissiveness with which we are

allowing armed paramilitaries to roam the streets of our nation’s towns and cities, as

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