"How does this multiracial element affect or complicate the government efforts to respond to domestic terrorism threats?
Because the government tends to look at ideology as the driver and has all these social media monitoring programs to examine what people are saying, white supremacist groups who don’t fit the profile that law enforcement might be looking for could slip through the cracks. But if the government simply focused on the violence and the threat of violence, they would be much more successful, because none of these ideologies that the government brands as precursors to terrorism are 100 percent pure in practice.
The government must understand criminality — particularly violent crime, and then attack the instrumentalities of violent crime, including the ease with which people can acquire extremely deadly weapons, which are the common denominator in these mass shootings. We have to establish a regulatory process that actually works.
And if we start gathering the data of all these white supremacist crimes around the country, then we can see the connections between them and how they may be related to an ongoing criminal conspiracy that’s continuing to perpetuate violence, even as certain individuals within the organization go to jail. There’s a law on the books — the National Defense Authorization Act of 2020 — that requires the FBI to document incidents of domestic terrorism, including white supremacist violence. But so far, the FBI has refused to do so.
White supremacy is foundational to our country, particularly our criminal justice system. Many of the laws that police used to enforce — from the Fugitive Slave Act to Jim Crow — were openly racist. So we have to recognize how law enforcement’s reluctance to properly respond to white supremacist violence because of its own affinity for white supremacy remains a problem."
~ Mireya Navarro and Michael German
"Why White Supremacist Groups Attract Latinos to Their Ranks"
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