FULL DISCLOSURE OF WHITE SUPREMACIST AFFILIATIONS NEEDED FROM RPD EMPLOYEES

We need members of the Richmond Police Department to immediately disclose all affiliations with any and all white supremacist, Klan-adjacent, alt-right, white nationalist, white separatist groups, including but not limited to:

• Three Percenters
• Proud Boys
• Militias 

We would like to see Richmond Police Department Human Resources draw up a questionnaire to ferret out this information; this questionnaire should include such questions as, “Have you ever attended to “Unite the Right rally?” and 

“Do you have tattoos designating your membership in any of these organizations?”

These sorts of disclosures should be required by all potential new hires and be grounds for disqualification for membership on this police force.

This is pressing because we are not safe. As details emerge from the attack on The Capitol, is very evident that many officers‘ responses were muted not only because of their orders but because of their personal affiliation and support for the domestic terrorism that took place.

“Theortis Jones, a Black officer whose career stretched from the Nixon inauguration to Barack Obama’s, said the agency had consistently overreacted to events with Black participants.” [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/Capitol-cops-police.html]

Worse, Capitol police leadership failed to recognize that this mob was a domestic terror event in progress. Over the past few days, expert views are coalescing around the conviction that this muted response was due to, at best, an assumption that a mob peopled almost entirely be white citizens would not rise to terrorism, and at worst, a hope that it would.

Reputable news sources have reported that many police officers from around the nation  - as well as members of the military - attended the rally and actively participated. Their tweets and Facebook postings have been screenshot and shared. I will post them as I am able.

Equally concerning, is that intelligence officials in our ally nations warned their U.S. counterparts that, based on social media chatter and other intel, the rally would have the cooperation of law-enforcement.