Vigilante group activity on the rise, worrying law enforcement and watchdog groups

Driven by a patchwork of ideologies and enflamed by the Trump administration’s often misleading messaging on far-left agitators, analysts say, the groups are fueling concern among law enforcement and hate group watchers that they could be the cause of more violence. Legal experts are also warning that the militias, with their embrace of high-powered weapons and lack of police training, are on shaky constitutional ground.

“Law enforcement officers go through months of training in the use of force, de-escalation of force, defensive tactics, and the use of a firearm to defend themselves and the citizens they are sworn to protect,” said Thomas O’Connor, a retired FBI special agent who spent much of his career investigating domestic terrorism. “A civilian with a firearm on the street during a volatile situation may have the legal right to have that weapon, but that does not always mean it is the wise decision.”

Sometimes armed citizens at protests are welcomed by law enforcement, like at early protests in Kenosha where police were seen giving apparent militia members water and thanking them, but Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth has also said that the groups raise tensions.

“Part of the problem with this group is they create confrontation,” Beth said at a news conference Wednesday after Rittenhouse’s arrest. “If I put out my wife with an AR-15 or my brother with a shotgun or whatever it would be walking through the streets, you guys would wonder what the heck is going on. That doesn’t help us.”

Many established militias, or civilian forces, have long aligned with anti-government causes in pockets of the US and groups like the Oath Keepers first became an antagonizing presence at protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

Since April, according to researchers who track hate groups, more decentralized and organic outgrowths of the movement have increased in visibility, first at “reopen” rallies that challenged coronavirus shutdowns, and later at the site of racial justice demonstrations, where they say their patrols meant to deter criminal behavior have led to varying degrees of confrontation.

Armed citizens have squared off with Black Lives Matter protesters in Salt Lake City and stood outside of looted stores in Minneapolis. Hundreds of militia members and far-right group members gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, propelled by a threat of flag burning that was likely a hoax.

In Albuquerque, violence erupted and one person was shot when protesters calling for the removal of a statue of a controversial conquistador squared off with members of the New Mexico Civil Guard, a militia. The militia group denied the gunman was a member of the organization, but local leaders roundly criticized the armed group for inflaming tensions that led to the shooting.

“It’s the logical end of a years’ long path that we’ve been on of normalizing the idea that vigilante justice is not just justifiable but is necessary,” said Howard Graves, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which studies hate groups. “It’s not an accident that this resulted in death — that is what’s going to happen based on what these groups envision themselves doing.”

Shared among the variety of groups, which are mainly comprised of White men, is often a disdain for the Black Lives Matter movement and a misplaced emphasis on its ties to radical left-wing violence, though some have more explicit, extreme and at times racist ideologies, said Alex Friedfeld, an investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism who monitors the groups’ activity online.

Many are also inspired by disinformation they read online about violence and organized looting campaigns tied into the Black Lives Matter movement. President Donald Trump and the leaders of the Justice Department have regularly aggrandized the role of the anarchist group Antifa in the summer’s unrest without providing much evidence.

“There’s this disconnect between what is real on the ground and what people are reading on the internet, where everyone is sharing messages about George Soros paying for buses to go out into the towns and all these types of things that are totally not true,” Friedfeld said, referring to the billionaire philanthropist at the center of many anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

The Oath Keepers, which draws its members from the ranks of the military and law enforcement, and adherents to the Three Percenter militia movement organize to confront conspiracies about an overreaching federal government.

Members of the Boogaloo movement range in ideology from anarchists to White supremacists, but have proved to be some of the most violent extremists this summer. The FBI has arrested several this summer, including a pair charged in connection to the murder of a federal security guard at an Oakland, California, courthouse in May amid protests in the city. They have pleaded not guilty.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/30/politics/vigilante-group-activity-kenosha/index.html