HAS THE OATH OF OFFICE CHANGED?

By Trey Rusk

Running Code 3
June 17, 2019

I recently read an article posted by a blogger who copied and pasted an article from The Daily Mail. The article was about American police officers who have been outed for being members of hate groups on FB. Is it true? Yes. I believe that there are police officers that are members of hate groups. With nearly a million police officers in the US a person would be stupid to believe otherwise. However, I think it is a miniscule amount.

I always like to see who labels groups as hate groups. It turns out one of the main accusers is The Southern Poverty Law Center. Lately, SPLC has had it's own problems with accusations of misconduct and on March 14, 2019 replacing of their leader, Morris Dees.

Oath Keepers Website printed the following article from Breitbart News:

According to a June 2018 report, more than 60 groups have weighed legal action against the SPLC for branding them as “hate groups” after Nawaz successful sued the organization. In February, Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes sued the SPLC, accusing the organization of “defaming” him by publishing “false, damaging and defamatory” information in an attempt to “deplatform” him. The SPLC has reportedly worked with some of Silicon Valley’s largest technology companies, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter, to police their platforms for “hate,” and has enjoyed donations from Hollywood star George Clooney and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

I want to know if in the age of sanctuary cities and local laws that are in direct violation of federal laws what do the cops do about their Oath of Office? I researched and found the Oath of Office hasn't changed and neither has the Constitution of the United States of America.

I recently read on the City of Phoenix website that their police officers reaffirmed their Oath of Office:

Oath of Office
I (state your name), do solemnly swear (or affirm), that I will support the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution and laws of the State of Arizona, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, and defend them against enemies, foreign and domestic, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge, the duties of a peace officer, to the best of my ability, so help me God.

There it is. Nothing has changed. Yet if these officers were working in a sanctuary city they would have committed a crime. Are they criminals? If the state law has changed in violation of federal law have they violated their oath?

What if police officers who recognize these facts vent their frustrations in an open forum on FB? Will the SPLC accuse them of being a member of a hate group? After all it has been reported by news outlets that SPLC is working with Silicon Valley's tech companies to police their platforms for hate and accept donations from owners of these tech companies.

Does anyone see a conflict besides me?

This isn't an easy problem to settle but before we post an article which accuses cops of being members of hate groups, we should see where the initial accusations originate. In my opinion for nearly a decade there may have been criminal activity in the DOJ and I hope it comes to light. According the article posted by the blogger, it was the same DOJ that made a similar report in 2015 about cops in hate groups. The last sentence of the article by sociologist, Peter Semi stated, "So far we are dealing with the tip of the iceberg."

I don't believe that.

That's the way I see it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I believe that. It stands to reason that with 800,000 law enforcement officers, there will be far more than just 400 of them that are involved with hate groups.

It is the article “150 COPS ARE ALLEGED TO BE INVOLVED WITH VIOLENT ANTI-GOVERNMENT GROUPS SUCH AS THE OATH KEEPERS” about 400 cops involved with hate groups which I posted on June 16 that has Trey’s poopie all in an uproar. The SPLC was not the only organization that identified hate groups that some cops were involved with.

The fact that SPLC is being sued or has been sued by groups it designated as hate groups does not necessarily absolve them of being hate groups.

Oath Keepers has no relationship to the oath police officers take. Oath Keepers is an anti-government far-right organization associated with the patriot and militia movements.

There is no doubt that a significant number of cops have involved themselves with white supremacist and anti-government groups and they need to be weeded out of law enforcement. Instead of being alarmed by the message, Trey prefers to kill the messenger.

In responding to a comment, I pointed out that it is also important to note that 400 cops constitute a very tiny percentage of the 800,000 law enforcement officers in the U.S. And even though far more than just 400 cops are likely to be involved with hate groups, they still constitute only a tiny fraction of all cops. But that tiny fraction can give all of law enforcement a bad name.

Trey Rusk has had an illustrious law enforcement career. Among his achievements, Trey was in charge of state police units in Texas counties bordering with Mexico and in redneck counties of Deep East Texas. He was always respectful of minorities and the LGBT community at a time when many cops were disrespectful towards these groups.

Trey was the kind of law enforcement officer I wish every cop in this country would be like. But in his rush to defend cops, Trey has discredited the report that 400 of them belong to hate groups.

Trey has called my attention to the following article:

Cop watch database endangers police lives and careers

By unidentified police officer

Law Enforcement Today
June 15, 2019

A recent article by the Front Page Mag by Dawn Perlmutter, brought to light another attempt by “Copblockers” and “Cop watch” folks to ruin and endanger the lives of police officers, as well as influence the next major election in favor of Democrats – all in the name of both science and journalism.

The Front Page Mag writes:

“The Plain View Project (PVP), a cop watch group disguised as a reputable research organization, analyzed the Facebook accounts of thousands of police officers across eight U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, Dallas, St. Louis, Phoenix, York, PA, Twin Falls, ID, Dennison, TX and Lake County, FL.

On June 1, 2019 the Plain View Project study was published online as a database. This resulted in immediate internal affairs investigations, officers placed on desk duty and mandatory sensitivity training.

The media enthusiastically reported that thousands of officers endorsed violence against Muslims, women, and criminal defendants. The ACLU is outraged, CAIR is making demands and an assortment of social justice protesters started marching. Everyone is calling for police to be fired. That is how a successful information operation works.”

At first glance, the results of the so-called systemic look at officers on social media seems indefensible. However, a closer look reveals an extreme left wing biased, major flaws in the research and a calculated manipulation of data to skew the results.

Comments were cherry picked, taken out of context and the data is presented in a way to make it look like all the comments in the posts were written by officers when most were posted by civilians on long comment threads.

It is obvious that the project was designed to make officers look bad. It is a classic cop watch hit job dressed up as a legitimate research study.

What the PVP and the media are not disclosing, is that many of the posts were in response to disturbing incidents.

For example, officers posted links to videos and articles immediately after terrorist attacks, when people were killed during robberies, when children were raped, when officers were killed, and after reports of officers having their home addresses and family information made public.

Others were in response to horrific homicides involving torture and dismemberment.

Some posts had no obvious racist, sexist or religious bias of any kind and were inexplicably included because they supported conservative issues, politicians and commentators.

For example, many officers were included in the database for sharing links to news articles and videos of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Pamela Geller, Brigitte Gabriel, Allen West and others or for linking to articles in conservative publications such as Breitbart, Fox News, Frontpage Mag, MEMRI, Townhall and others.

It should be noted that the police departments and areas represented are very important for Democrats to win in the next election. This information is clearly designed to incite disdain against police officers specifically and conservatives in general.

“There are so many significant flaws in this methodology that it should have never been published much less accepted as verifiable. PVP did not factor in the distinctions between active duty, former and retired officer employment status. This is significant because the problematic posts were primarily from former officers.

The distinction between former and retired is important because former means they may have previously been identified and received disciplinary action or dismissed from the force. PVP data collection included posts that were written nine years ago, which indicates researchers were unscientifically searching for any data they thought would support their desired results.”

This is politically motivated and likely financially supported.

There was also obvious anti-Trump bias in the review. There was a significant amount of posts flagged because they were Trump supporters and/or agreed with his law enforcement policies.

One post was from an officer who complimented President Trump for calling the husband of a murdered Orlando officer and negatively compared him to the former president.

Another post was from an officer who agreed with and shared a video of President Trump referring to MS-13 gang members as animals. One Facebook post was inexplicably flagged for depicting a photo of a Chicago Police officer whose head and face was bloodied after he was injured by protesters at a scheduled Trump election event.

The anti-Trump, anti-conservative bias reveals another significant flaw in the alleged study. PVP does not disclose who or how they assessed the Facebook comments. A legitimate study would have a strategy for analyzing and interpreting the data and would have listed the specific criteria that was used in the assessment. Their interpretation of racist, misogynist, Islamophobic posts was extremely skewed.”

The source and founder of this study and database has a very skewed origin.

“The project is reportedly the idea of Emily Baker-White, whose twitter account reads ‘I study: criminal justice, hate, disinformation, social media // I love: food, music, nature // I am: exec. dir. Plain View Project, HLS ‘15’….”

The young Harvard Law School graduate is described in the media as a Philadelphia based lawyer who claims that her group found a very high and concerning number of posts that appear to endorse, celebrate or glorify violence and vigilantism.

Baker-White admitted in an interview with the New York Times that “It’s not a statistical sample; it’s not a statistical study”.

In the same article the PVP study is misrepresented as a statistical study with the following results; “About one in five of the current officers, including many in supervisory roles, and more than two in five former officers, used content that was racist, misogynist, Islamophobic or otherwise biased, or that undermined the concept of due process, the project found. If this were a legitimate research study that would be extremely disturbing percentages.”

Emily Baker-White claimed that her motivation was based on the belief that the comments and posts “could undermine public trust and confidence in our police.”

Mission accomplished.

By posting and publicizing cherry-picked comments out of context PVP succeeded in undermining the trust and confidence in police.

For that she has been rewarded. The Dallas Police Department is working with her to go over each post to see if department policy was violated.

She has now become the arbiter of free speech and the heroine of the cop watch movement.

Front Page continued:

“Information operations, also known as influence operations, includes the dissemination of propaganda in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an opponent. The Plain View Project was a calculated anti-police information operation that was designed to incite hatred for police officers, provide party-line propaganda for the media and to ignite protests just in time for the 2020 election. It has all the hallmarks of being funded by a left wing political mega-donor.

If Baker-White were really concerned, she would have taken her results to the police departments for internal reviews, but she had an obvious political agenda which there is no doubt she was paid very well for. If one officer is injured or killed because they were included in this biased junk science database, then Emily Baker-White has blood on her hands.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Daily Mail report was based on “To Protect and Slur: Inside hate groups on Facebook, police officers trade racist memes, conspiracy theories and Islamophobia” by Will Carless and Michael Corey which was published by Reveal on June 14. That authors did refer to the allegations contained in the Plain View Project.

Whether or not the allegations are made by cop-hating leftists is really beside the point. Those allegations must be taken seriously!