The police think they are the good guys, and that the left, generally, are not just the bad guys, but literally Satanists (based on the fact that Soviet communism was anti-religion). Nevermind that there’s no correlation between being a good person and adherence to any major world religion, but imagine that if your worldview were so insane that you believed the mutual aid and community defense organizations in your area were literally the epitome of evil. You might be willing to do some really unethical things to destroy them.
Here are just a few of the things cops have done to attack the left:
- In the US, an FBI agent infiltrated an indigenous anti-pipeline group and gave the activist he was dating a gun. They later arrested her claiming she shot at police.
- In Britain, undercover cops were encourage to have sex with activists, presumably to help gain their trust. Undercover officers ‘encouraged to sleep with activists’ (BBC)
- In two other cases, the two different infiltrators actually went so far as to have children with their targets, then ghosted them.
- In fact, British police spies have been infiltrating left-wing groups for decades; the same goes for the US. See “COINTELPRO“.
- In the US, an FBI informant entrapped an environmental activist by encouraging him to behaving conspiratorially in the hope of romantic fulfillment.
Let me just emphasize that these are just a few examples of constant attacks from the police against organizers. Police routinely go so far as to have long-term sexual relationships with activists in an attempt to get them arrested. It wouldn’t be surprising if they took a dump in the coffee at your distro just to get you in trouble with the health department. They’ve already decided you’re guilty and that they can’t win ethically. They’re trying to live out the idiotic narrative of a police procedural — “We know the guy is dirty, we just can’t get him without bending the rules!”
With this as context, we were completely unsurprised to learn about the latest completely unethical and gross police infiltration of left-wing organizing. A Colorado Springs police officer infiltrated the local activist scene posing as a sex worker. Importantly, all of the organizations affected are completely above-ground, legal, and a shining example of human goodness. Per normal cop behavior, when they discovered that nothing illegal was going on, they shifted to trying to induce illegal behavior.
In this case, the cop’s strategy was to try to get the organizers to make a “straw purchase” of a weapon. Specifically, they tried to get at least two of the organizers to buy a gun and give it to the infiltrating cop (Colorado is a universal background check state), and even tried to entice them into participating in a full-on black-market gun business. It didn’t work, but you can see how a naïve organizer could be duped by a charismatic infiltrator into doing something that seems relatively fine, but that is very illegal.
A big crime isn’t necessary to get your people into trouble, either. If you’re not doing anything illegal, and they can’t induce you to do anything illegal, the infiltrator will just make a catalog of all your identities so that when you do something minor, but technically illegal — like stepping off the sidewalk during a protest — they can easily round you all up, interrogate you, violate your privacy in the most uncomfortable ways possible, and make you miss three days of work. Maybe break down your front door and kill your dog, too. That’s the best case scenario. If one of you happens to have a knife that’s a quarter inch too long, they could be trapped in jail for months. Maybe they didn’t have such a thing, but it somehow appeared in their pocket at the time of arrest.
In short: It takes more than just complying with the law to protect yourself and your community from the police. Yes, these are the same police that Biden wants to fund more, apparently. (Have I mentioned lately that the left hates Joe Biden?)
So what can you do? Here are a few suggestions. Some are stolen from the article in “It’s Going Down”. Many address mistakes we’ve made ourselves.
- Don’t add strangers to group chats.
- Don’t vouch for unvetted people at meetings.
- Vet people and allow yourself to be vetted; vetting should be detailed, intimate, and unpredictable.
- Don’t overshare with unvetted people.
- Be wary of new people who just show up, especially if they have backstories that create a barrier to confirming anything about them (e.g., because it would be rude or awkward to ask).
- Make an effort to understand the law regarding gray areas like drugs and guns; realize that, ultimately, all of the law is a gray area.
- Never agree to do something illegal, even if you definitely don’t intend to follow through; they’ll get you for conspiracy even though you were just trying to placate the informant.
- Don’t joke about breaking the law.
- Don’t engage in hyperbole (especially in terms of violence).
- Make a personal inventory of the kinds of strategies that would work against you.
To expand on #6 — if you are a firearm-centric organization like us, you must make sure that all your firearm transfers are 110% legal. That means that as an org, you understand national and state firearm law, and that you discuss any transfer as an org before it happens. That extra 10% above 100 might mean that any transfer involving any member of your org takes place at a federally licensed firearm dealer — even if you live in a state like Missouri that allows private transfers without a background check. If I wanted to buy someone a weapon, I would also make a point of never being in possession of that weapon myself. To clarify, I might shoot the gun at the range with the owner present, but I would never have it in my possession without the owner there with me. The person who passes the background check should be the only person who possesses it, and I wouldn’t even rely on the person having passed a check a few months ago; every gun transfer needs to come with an official background check.
I realize that hitting that 110% legal goal is likely to be extremely inconvenient, expensive, and might even be unjust or dangerous in some cases, but that’s how it is.
Above all else, we can’t let this constant harassment from law enforcement stop us from doing the right thing. We can’t even let it slow us down.