CA Sheriff Warned Officers Not to Join Far-Right Extremists

According to internal documents, the sheriff’s department in Orange County, California, advised its officers earlier this year not to affiliate with far-right extremist groups and warned them against engaging with white supremacist websites, reports The Guardian. The Orange County sheriff’s department’s “extremism awareness” training document from February instructed officers not to share disinformation and to avoid associating with militias, QAnon, rightwing platforms like Gab and 4chan, as well as second-amendment groups or law enforcement “clubs” that could be “avenues for exploitation”. The training is notable, experts said, because it suggests that sheriff’s officials were acknowledging that their own officers could be drawn to far-right groups and were concerned about the risks of them posting racist or extremist content.

Experts criticized the training for falsely presenting the far right and the “extreme left” as equivalent threats, when data shows that white supremacists perpetuated the large majority of recent domestic terror attacks. Ryan Shapiro, the executive director of Property for the People, who has uncovered FBI files and investigated law enforcement surveillance of activists, said that to him the records suggested officials were more concerned with being exposed than addressing the problem of extremists on the force. Moreover, even after the far-right violence at the US Capitol, the sheriff appears to “target progressive dissent as the real threat”, Shapiro said. The training document also did not make clear the severe threats that some of the far-right groups have posed to law enforcement, which was a glaring omission, said Vida B Johnson, a Georgetown University law professor who has researched white supremacists in police departments.