As a detective within the Recruit Background Investigations Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, Jennifer Gugger was tasked with determining whether job applicants had done anything or posted anything on their social media that would disqualify them from joining the force.
But it was Gugger’s own social media posts last week that led to trouble. She reportedly posted on Facebook to mention that she was in DC on Wednesday for the “Stop the Steal” rally by Donald Trump, which resulted in a violent takeover of the US Capitol that left five people dead, including a law officer from the Capitol. Then, in line with the Philadelphia Inquirer, which posted screenshots before her account was deleted, she reportedly tweeted on Friday that vice-chairman Mike Pence was “a traitor and cabal operative and a pedophile.”
Gugger was reassigned by the department from the background check unit, took away her gun, and opened an inquiry into whether she had violated any policies. Gugger failed to reply to a request for comment.
Department officials refused to comment further, but a department lieutenant, who asked for anonymity because he was not permitted to speak on the matter, said he believes that the Gugger incident is “just the tip of the iceberg.” Many officers in his department, he said, believe Donald Trump has stolen the election. He called it “very, very scary.”
Many of those incidents only came to light after the officers themselves brazenly posted about it on their own social media. Lt. Roxanne Mathai, who works for the Bexar County, Texas, sheriff’s office near the city center, put up pictures of herself inside the Capitol. “It was amazing today! ” she wrote.
Residents of Troy, New Hampshire, wanted captain David Ellis to resign after a replacement York article identified him in concert with the protesters at the rally. However, Ellis condemned the violence and said that though he attended the rally, he didn’t join the Capitol invasion. They couldn’t contact Ellis for comment.
Chris West, sheriff of Canadian County, Oklahoma, admitted during a news conference that he carried a Trump flag to the Capitol but said that he didn’t enter the building, adding, “I didn’t see the violence; I don’t know when it happened.” West didn’t answer a call for participation for comment.
for some officers watching the events unfold on their television screens, the very fact that off-duty cops traveled to DC to protest a free and fair election alongside white supremacist groups was just the newest indication of growing radicalization in the enforcement ranks of the country, one that they say departments should have seen coming and done more to avoid.
“When it involves supremacist beliefs and ideas like that, the nationwide mentality is to downplay it or overlook it,” said Stanley Jean-Poix, a sergeant within the Miami department of local government and president of the Miami Community Police Benevolent Association, a union that represents around 60 officers, most of them Black. “If you enable certain attitudes and that they go unchecked, it turns into a monster.”
Longstanding officers told BuzzFeed News that a widening gap within police forces has been generated by the ethnic and political tensions of the past decade. On one side, stand officers pointing out among their colleague’s bigotry and unnecessarily brutal methods. On the contrary, are officers who feel their profession has been unfairly abused by left-wing radicals and politicians who fail to realize the dangers they face on the job; for these officers, Trump emerged as a hero. And some officers took action when the president called on his supporters to protect him against what he described as a plot to get rid of his power.
Thomas Robertson, a police supervisor in the department of Rocky Mount, Virginia, visited DC and entered the Capitol with a fellow officer “to actually put skin in the game and stand up for their rights,” he wrote under a photograph on Facebook, showing him and his colleague Jacob Fracker standing before a statue inside the building. “If you are too much of a coward to risk arrest, being fired, and actual gunfire to secure your rights, you have no words to speak I value [sic]. Enjoy your feel-good protests and fame. I’ll simply accept a ‘Thank you’ for the very blanket of freedom that you live and sleep under.”
In his own Facebook posts defending his actions, Fracker said, “Sorry, I hate freedom? “and said he was battling against “tyranny.”
Pending an indoor investigation, the department put both officers on administrative leave, and federal prosecutors charged them with a violation and unlawfully accessing the building. In an interview with the Roanoke News, Robertson said they believed they were legally inside the Capitol because “the door was wide open and law enforcement officials were actually handing bottles of water dead set folks that came in.”
Some Black officers traced the origins of their white colleagues’ loyalty to Trump to the demonstrations that erupted in 2014 after Michael Brown, an unarmed Black 18-year-old, was fatally shot by a political candidate in Ferguson, Missouri. As an outsized swath of the nation protested police brutality and even opened a series of federal inquiries into agencies across the country by the Obama administration, several officers closed ranks, treating those who opposed them as enemies of law and order.
At the time, Heather Taylor, a sergeant with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, found fellow cops writing Facebook posts calling racial justice protesters “thugs,” “criminals,” and “rioters,” a shift in tone that she did not expect from colleagues she had admired.
She said, “They were just angry and fed up.” The phrase “Blue Lives Matter” quickly emerged as a rebuke to the movement of Black Lives Matter, a shorthand way to say that criticism of police brutality created a hostile atmosphere for law enforcement.
Among those who supported them, many officers found allies, including paramilitary groups, such as the Three Percenters, and right-wing militant organizations, such as the Proud Boys, who started disclosure at racial justice marches with the stated goal of helping officers preserve peace.
But there was no greater ally for white officers angry about the racial justice demonstrations than Trump, who, as a presidential candidate in 2016, gave the loudest voice echoing the concerns of dissatisfied law enforcement leaders, earning the endorsement within the process of the country’s largest police unions. In his speech at the Republican National Convention the year, Trump said the year that the Obama administration had introduced a “rollback of criminal enforcement,” and he told a roomful of cops on the island of New York in a speech months later that “the laws are stacked against you.”
“A lot of these officers were obsessed with him,” Taylor said.
“He said what they wanted to hear,” said Charles Wilson, a police officer for 45 years who retired in 2016 and now serves as chair of the National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers. “Police officers want to feel that their work is honored. They want to feel that it is legitimate, that it is appreciated. And when people find fault with what they’re doing, that tears into that perception. Trump came along and told them that he disapproved of the people who complained about them, that the things they were doing were appropriate and correct, whether it was true or not.”
The existence of white supremacist ideology in the police force is as old as law enforcement in the US. Black officers who talked to BuzzFeed News said they signed up for the job, knowing that some of their colleagues were potentially racist. But in their view, in many agencies, the rise of Trump has set back ties between black and white officers.
“They felt more emboldened,” said Sonia Pruitt, who worked as a police officer in Montgomery County, Maryland, for three decades before retiring in July. “They felt like it was OK to be more expressive of how they felt about politics. I was stunned. They were coming right out with it, not even hiding it anymore.”
BuzzFeed News, HuffPost, and Reveal have uncovered thousands of offensive remarks and memes shared on social media by law enforcement officers in recent years. The fact that so many officers felt comfortable with publicly sharing their racism reflect how their divisions paid no mind to their public postings.
Miami sergeant, Jean-Poix, was shocked to find that even the biggest and most heavily funded units had “no one to monitor officers’ social media,” he said. “It’s there if they want to find it, but [police leaders] give them a pass, so the culture keeps developing.”
Among those caught making racial remarks were leaders of police unions who protected officers from punishment. Over the years, an increasing proportion of Black officers left the country’s largest police unions and have formed alternative unions organized exclusively for Black members.
Often there were concerns from inside the department about an officer’s racial remark. Jean-Poix and Taylor recalled informing superiors about white officers overheard using the n-word, only for those officers to receive nothing more than a reprimand.
“Why should that change when no one holds them to account?” said Pruitt.
Departments have said that free expression protections prohibit them from disciplining officers for their views without proof that those beliefs compromise their ability to do their job. When a Philadelphia officer was cleared of wrongdoing by the department in 2017 with a tattoo of an image associated with Nazi Germany, a spokesman told BuzzFeed News, “In terms of your brains or your thoughts or your ideology, is that something we want to police?”
Over a dozen Black officers who talked to BuzzFeed News about the problem in recent years shared outrage about what they saw as a double standard that left their lives in the hands of peers in whom they had lost faith. “A culture of law enforcement that has repeatedly appeased white protesters, white extremist groups, and white supremacy,” Taylor said.
The Intercept’s 2015 FBI policy guide and a 2020 report by a former FBI counterterrorism officer chronicled proof that white supremacists have infiltrated police departments. “The federal response to known connections of law enforcement officers to white supremacist and far-right militant groups has been strikingly insufficient,” wrote the former agent, Mike German. “Any law enforcement officers associating with these groups should be treated as a matter of urgent concern.”
When Trump’s term comes to an end, his loyal officers have embraced his lie that the election against him was rigged. Some police, including Philadelphia detective Gugger, supported QAnon, a mass illusion that argues that the attempt to remove Trump from power is behind a cabal of satan-worshippers who sexually assault children. The FBI has deemed the conspiracy’s promoters a possible threat to terrorist activity. Gugger changed her Facebook profile picture to an image referencing QAnon, the Philadelphia Inquirer posted in October.
