Posted on December 4, 2020

Police Guide That Calls BLM a Terrorist Group Draws Outrage

Ryan J. Foley, Associated Press, December 2, 2020

A prominent law enforcement training group is promoting a lengthy research document riddled with falsehoods and conspiracies that urges local police to treat Black Lives Matter activists as terrorists plotting a violent revolution.

The document distributed by the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association contains misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric that could incite officers against protesters and people of color, critics said. It alleges Black Lives Matter and antifa, an umbrella term for leftist militants, are “revolutionary movements whose aims are to overthrow the U.S. government” and claims they are planning “extreme violence.”

Phillip Atiba Goff, a Yale University professor who is an expert on racial bias in policing, called the document dangerous, noting that the association is an important source of training materials for many small and midsize departments across the country.

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The association in October sent a link to the 176-page paper, “Understanding Antifa and Urban Guerrilla Warfare,” in an email news update to its thousands of members. The document, labeled “restricted to law enforcement only,” is one of the few publicly available materials on its website. The Associated Press learned of the document from one of the policing organization’s members.

The group’s executive director, Harvey Hedden, defended the document, which he called one member’s opinion and open for critique and debate. He said the association supports the exchange of ideas and strategies to improve criminal justice training but does not endorse specific approaches.

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Goff said police executives with whom he’s discussed the document this week were “disturbed by it.” He and others said it was irresponsible for the group to promote the paper.

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She said the paper repeatedly promotes “wildly outlandish” claims about Black Lives Matter, shows cultural ignorance by falsely conflating the movement with antifa, and primes officers to use force by painting both as terrorists plotting to kill police.

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The paper claims that those who participated in months of protests earlier this year in Portland and Seattle were “useful idiots” designed to give cover to the “hard-core, terrorist trained troops” that would follow. {snip}

The paper claims that military officials who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are concerned about the movements because they “have witnessed these types of terrorist groups organizing, creating insurgencies and the horrible consequences of it.”

The FBI is largely “clueless” about the nature of their threat and, along with the news media, has wrongly focused attention on violence carried out by white supremacists, it argues.

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