{"id":200354,"date":"2021-05-02T18:36:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-02T23:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/05\/02\/if-you-thought-that-there-was-a-speck-of-sanity-in-law-enforcement\/"},"modified":"2021-05-02T18:36:00","modified_gmt":"2021-05-02T23:36:00","slug":"if-you-thought-that-there-was-a-speck-of-sanity-in-law-enforcement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/05\/02\/if-you-thought-that-there-was-a-speck-of-sanity-in-law-enforcement\/","title":{"rendered":"If You Thought That There Was a Speck of Sanity in Law Enforcement\u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Then you should read just how cops believed the weirdest conspiracy theories during the Black Lives Matter protests<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I want what they are smoking:<\/p>\n

The graffiti on a port-a-potty in a gravel pit was, in the opinion of one Washington state<\/a> resident, a sign that anti-fascists<\/a> might blow up a nearby dam. Another local was convinced that a young man reading signs was actually an \u201cAntifa or BLM<\/a> scout.\u201d A third person warned, via an anonymous email tip, that her ex-husband was part of an anti-fascist group that was coming to burn down the town.<\/p>\n

All these complaints were forwarded throughout police ranks in Washington, where officials urged vigilance against the leftist threat.<\/p>\n

As racial justice protests flared across the country in summer 2020, so did conservative fears of leftist protesters. From Oregon<\/a> to Virginia<\/a>, social media lit up with rumors about anti-fascists (\u201cantifa\u201d) or Black Lives Matter participants, who were allegedly coming to terrorize small towns.<\/p>\n

Anacortes, a scenic city of 17,000 in coastal Washington, was no exception. From June to August 2020, the city\u2019s police department received repeated tips about supposed antifa threats, according to police documents obtained by the government transparency nonprofit Property of the People<\/a> and shared with The Daily Beast. Even some of the most absurd claims found their way up to state-level law enforcement, those documents show.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

The documents, obtained via Freedom of Information request, reveal the absurdity of some of last year\u2019s complaints.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

The following month, another alleged antifa threat, even wilder than the others, found its way to the Skagit County Sheriff, documents show. In this case, it involved two overturned port-a-potties in a gravel pit near a boat launch in Concrete, Washington.<\/p>\n

One of the port-a-potties had been spray painted with the acronym \u201cACAB,\u201d short for \u201call cops are bastards.\u201d The other was tagged with an A in a circle, an anarchist symbol. But where some observers might have seen common vandalism symbols, the tipster who photographed the port-a-potties saw something more ominous\u2014maybe even part of a plot to blow up a dam.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen individuals and law enforcement have been whipped into such a paranoid frenzy that they\u2019re primed to see \u2018antifa\u2019 or \u2018BLM\u2019 terrorist conspiracies literally in the toilet, the situation is a powder keg,\u201d Shapiro said. \u201cThere\u2019s a direct line from this sort of deliberately induced political hysteria to violent, repressive crackdowns on progressive dissent.\u201d <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The police were clutching at any potential excuse to foment violence and beat up (riot against) protesters.<\/p>\n

It’s not conducive to the proper functioning of a democratic society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Then you should read just how cops believed the weirdest conspiracy theories during the Black Lives Matter protests. I want what they are smoking: The graffiti on a port-a-potty in a gravel pit was, in the opinion of one Washington state resident, a sign that anti-fascists might blow up a nearby dam. Another local was …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1041,1049,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law-enforcement-misconduct","category-protests","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200354"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}