White Supremacy in Law Enforcement: FBI Warnings, Cases, and State Laws

White supremacy in law enforcement has been formally documented by the FBI since at least 2006, when a counterterrorism assessment warned that white supremacist groups were infiltrating police ranks and that sympathetic officers were volunteering their access and training to extremist causes. In the two decades since, officers tied to hate groups, racist social media networks, and far-right militias have been exposed in at least 15 states, yet the federal government has never built a national system to screen out or remove extremist officers. Discipline is left to individual departments, and the responses have been uneven.

What the FBI Warned in 2006

In October 2006, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division produced a classified intelligence assessment titled “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.” It found that the primary threat was not an organized infiltration campaign but “self-initiated” conduct by officers already on the job who sympathized with white supremacist ideology and offered up their professional resources.¹

The assessment introduced the term “ghost skins” for white supremacists who hide their beliefs in order to blend into mainstream institutions, including police departments, and advance their cause from within.² It flagged concrete harms: compromised investigations, personnel safety risks, potential sabotage, and the “passive tolerance of racism” in affected communities. Sensitive FBI bulletins had already been accessed by white supremacist leaders, exposing investigations and personnel.¹

The report also acknowledged what the FBI did not know: how deep the infiltration already ran, how recruitment was being done, and whether infiltrated agencies were steering investigations away from the groups themselves.³ A redacted version surfaced in 2017; the full document was released by Rep. Jamie Raskin in September 2020 ahead of a congressional hearing.⁴

A Problem Older Than the Warning

The entanglement predates the FBI assessment by well over a century. Early organized policing in the United States included slave patrols, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required officers to help return escaped enslaved people. After the Civil War, police enforced Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, and sundown town ordinances.⁵

By the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan claimed roughly one million members and had, according to researchers, “fully infiltrated” segments of federal, state, and local government. In 1964, civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi with the direct participation of law enforcement. The Department of Justice charged 19 Klansmen, including two active and two former law enforcement officials. An all-white jury convicted only one of the officers.⁵ The FBI’s own 2006 assessment noted that the KKK had “historically” found support in many communities, which “often translated into ties to local law enforcement.”⁶

Cases That Have Surfaced Since 2000

The Brennan Center for Justice has documented officers tied to white supremacist or far-right militant organizations in at least 15 states since 2000.⁵ A few recurring examples give a sense of what the problem looks like on the ground.

In Los Angeles County, a federal judge in the 1990s labeled the “Lynwood Vikings,” a group inside the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang” engaged in racially motivated violence; the county paid $9 million in settlements in 1996. Deputy gang activity has continued. A 2023 special counsel report confirmed the ongoing existence of groups such as the Banditos and Executioners, and the Civilian Oversight Commission found they continue to “run” many patrol stations.⁷ Nearly 60 lawsuits involving these deputy groups have cost the county about $55 million.⁵

In 2014, a Florida agency fired two officers, including a deputy police chief, after an FBI informant identified them as Ku Klux Klan members. It was the second time in five years that Klan members had been uncovered in that same department.²

Muskegon, Michigan, officer Charles Anderson, a 20-year veteran, was fired in September 2019 after a prospective homebuyer photographed a framed Klan application and Confederate flags inside his home and posted them to Facebook. An internal review found he had cited Black drivers at disproportionately high rates. Anderson had shot and killed an unarmed 23-year-old Black man in 2009 and been cleared at the time.⁸

In Virginia the same year, Sgt. Robert Stamm of the Division of Capitol Police was fired after an anti-fascist research group identified photos showing him with white supremacist tattoos and symbols, and linked him to the Asatru Folk Assembly, which the Anti-Defamation League classifies as a hate group. In the same week, Chesterfield County officer Daniel Morley was fired for ties to the white nationalist organization Identity Evropa.⁹

In Wilmington, North Carolina, three officers were fired in 2020 after a patrol car camera accidentally recorded them using racial slurs and discussing killing Black people; one, Officer Kevin Piner, was recorded saying he “can’t wait” to start “slaughtering” Black people.¹⁰ No state charges were filed. The district attorney requested a federal investigation, and roughly 70 criminal cases the officers had worked on were dismissed.¹¹

Racist conduct on social media appears to be far more common than isolated hate-group membership. The Plain View Project, launched in 2019, verified Facebook accounts for about 2,800 current officers across eight departments, and roughly one in five had posted content flagged as bigoted or as undermining due process. In Philadelphia, nearly a third of the officers flagged had already been subjects of civil rights or brutality complaints that produced settlements or verdicts.¹² Discipline across the eight departments was wildly uneven; many officers faced no consequences.¹³

January 6 and the Oath Keepers Rolls

At least 28 current and former law enforcement officials participated in the January 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, according to former FBI agent Michael German.¹⁴ Those charged included retired NYPD officer Thomas Webster, accused of attacking a Capitol Police officer with a flagpole, and two Rocky Mount, Virginia, officers, Jacob Fracker and Thomas Robertson, both fired by their department.¹⁵ Houston Police Department veteran Tam Pham was charged with illegally entering the Capitol.¹⁶ More than a dozen Capitol Police officers were themselves placed under investigation for their conduct that day.

A 2022 Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism analysis of more than 38,000 names in leaked Oath Keepers membership lists identified over 370 people the ADL believed to be currently serving in law enforcement, including at least 10 police chiefs and 11 sheriffs. Some said their membership had been brief, lapsed, or signed up without their knowledge, but the scale of the overlap between a far-right militia and active officers was itself striking.¹⁷

Why So Few Officers Get Caught

A striking finding across the research is how little standardized screening exists. The FBI identified screening as an intelligence gap in 2006. Nearly two decades later, researchers find most agencies still lack formal social media screening policies for applicants; investigators tend to browse profiles from personal accounts, with no written criteria for what disqualifies a candidate and no systematic documentation.¹⁸ A survey of 46 Florida agencies found that 48% did not screen applicant social media at all, 58% had no written policy on employee social media use, and only 7% of those with any policy applied a specific standard to social networking sites.¹⁹

Few departments have policies that specifically prohibit affiliation with white supremacist groups. Officers who are caught are typically disciplined under vague “conduct detrimental to the department” provisions. Among officers exposed as extremists, ADL-cited research finds roughly equal numbers forced out as kept on or reassigned with full pay.²⁰ There is no national decertification database preventing an officer fired for extremist conduct from being hired by another agency. Georgetown law professor Vida B. Johnson has argued that confidentiality statutes shielding police disciplinary records, combined with the “blue wall of silence,” make it extraordinarily difficult to identify or remove extremist officers at all.²¹

What It Costs Communities and Criminal Cases

Officer extremism has produced measurable harm in policing patterns and in the criminal cases those officers touch. A 2016 Department of Justice review of San Francisco, prompted by the discovery of racist and homophobic text messages among officers, found that Black and Hispanic residents were stopped, searched, and arrested at higher rates than white residents even though they were less likely to possess contraband.⁵ In Los Angeles County, a 2019 wrongful death settlement of $7 million involved two deputies belonging to a deputy gang who shot an unarmed Black man.

The Brennan Center has argued that explicit racism by an officer qualifies as impeachment evidence under the Brady and Giglio doctrines, which require prosecutors to turn over information that could undermine a government witness’s credibility. St. Louis prosecutor Kimberly Gardner acted on this theory, adding 22 officers identified by the Plain View Project to her office’s “no call” list and barring them from testifying.⁵ Johnson’s scholarship argues hate group membership and racist expression should be treated as Brady material in every jurisdiction, though the Supreme Court has not explicitly ruled on the question. The erosion of community trust is reflected in survey data Johnson cites: 60% of African Americans hold an unfavorable view of law enforcement, compared with roughly a third of the general population.²²

State Laws That Target the Problem

With no federal statute specifically addressing extremism in law enforcement, a few states have moved on their own. California’s AB 655, the California Law Enforcement Accountability Reform (CLEAR) Act, was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September 2022 and took effect January 1, 2023. It requires agencies to screen peace officer candidates for hate group membership, participation in hate group activity, or public expressions of hate within the prior seven years, and mandates termination of current officers if a complaint of such “covered misconduct” is sustained. Implementing regulations were approved in March 2026 and take effect July 1, 2026.²³²⁴

Minnesota enacted a 2023 statute prohibiting peace officers from joining, supporting, or participating in the activities of a “hate or extremist group” or criminal gang. The law defines participation broadly, covering everything from distributing promotional materials to displaying insignia, maintaining a presence in group online forums, and making financial contributions.²⁵ In Maryland, a bill that would require the state Police Training and Standards Commission to prohibit officers from affiliating with white supremacist groups or causes had a hearing in February 2026 and remained pending.²⁶

Congress has not matched this activity. The 2020 House Oversight hearing produced Rep. Norma Torres’s “White Supremacy in Law Enforcement Information Act,” introduced in February 2021, which would have required the Attorney General and FBI Director to publish past assessments and produce a new one within 180 days; it was referred to committee and never advanced.²⁷ The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House in March 2021 but collapsed during Senate negotiations that September.²⁸

The Current Federal Posture

Federal priorities shifted sharply in 2025. A National Security Presidential Memorandum issued in September 2025 directed the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to develop a national strategy focused on investigating “anti-fascism” and related ideologies, including entities described as promoting “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.” A separate executive order designated “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization.²⁹

The Brennan Center reported that this directive effectively diverted federal law enforcement resources away from addressing white supremacist violence, which the FBI itself had previously identified as the deadliest category of domestic terrorism since 2000.²⁹ The administration’s 2026 counterterrorism strategy categorized “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as a major domestic terror threat and contained no mention of policies addressing white supremacist threats within law enforcement.³⁰ The administration characterized prior federal efforts focused on white supremacist violence as pretexts for the “weaponization” of government against political opponents.

Michael German, who spent 16 years as an undercover FBI agent infiltrating white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations, has argued that the federal government already has the legal tools to investigate and prosecute far-right violence and simply lacks the institutional will to use them. He writes that since the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, far-right militants have committed more than 100 deadly acts, and that the FBI and Justice Department have resisted congressional demands to compile comprehensive national data on this violence.³¹

1
The Intercept. Police White Supremacist Infiltration FBI
2
PBS NewsHour. FBI White Supremacists in Law Enforcement
3
Just Security. FBI Intelligence Assessment – White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement
4
U.S. House of Representatives – Raskin. Subcommittee Chairman Raskin Releases FBI Document on White Supremacists in Law Enforcement
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Brennan Center for Justice. Hidden in Plain Sight – Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement
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ABC7. Los Angeles County LASD Deputy Gangs
8
NBC News. Michigan Police Officer Who Had KKK Memorabilia in Home Fired
9
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New York Times. Wilmington Police Officers Fired
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WECT. No State Charges Being Filed Against Three Fired Wilmington Police Officers
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Injustice Watch. Police Racist Facebook Investigation Plain View Project
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The New Press. Policing White Supremacy – The Enemy Within
15
ABC News. Number of Capitol Riot Arrests With Military, Law Enforcement, and Government Backgrounds
16
VOA News. US Capitol Riot Prompts Fresh Focus on Extremism in US Police Ranks
17
PBS NewsHour. Elected Officials, Police Officers, and Members of Military on Oath Keepers Membership List
18
ResearchGate. An Exploratory Study of How Police Background Investigators Use Social Media Screening to Identify Extremism Among Applicants
19
FDLE. Social Media Screening Study – Florida Law Enforcement
20
ICSVE. Extremist Recruitment and Infiltration
21
U.S. Congress. Vida B. Johnson Written Testimony
22
Lewis & Clark Law School. KKK in the PD – White Supremacist Police and What to Do About It
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California Office of the Attorney General. AB 655 Regulations
24
ABC7 News. CLEAR Act Police Audit Biased Behavior Screening
25
Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Statute § 626.8436
26
Maryland General Assembly. HB0794 – Prohibition Against Certain Affiliation or Support by Police Officers
27
U.S. Congress. H.R.1031 – White Supremacy in Law Enforcement Information Act
28
The Guardian. US Police Reform Bill – Congress Bipartisan Talks
29
Brennan Center for Justice. Trump’s Orders Targeting Antifascism Aim to Criminalize Opposition
30
The White House. 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy
31
Brennan Center for Justice. Police Must Do Better Against Far-Right Violence