Nobody's Counting

The government has known for twenty years that abusers and extremists wear the badge. It still won't keep the count.

By Matt Stone

Ask a simple question. How many police officers in America beat their partners? How many belong to the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or some other white nationalist crew?

Nobody can tell you. Not the FBI. Not the Justice Department. Not your local chief. That is not because the evidence is missing. The evidence keeps showing up. It shows up in leaked membership rolls, in court records, in photos from inside the Capitol. The count is missing because the people in charge of keeping it have decided, over and over, not to.

That choice is the story.

The Warning Nobody Followed

In October 2006, the FBI's Counterterrorism Division wrote an internal assessment titled "White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement." It warned that white supremacist groups had a long interest in getting their people into police work. It described "ghost skins," members who "avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes." It reported that at least one group had told ghost skins to seek police jobs so they could warn their crews about coming investigations.

Nine years later, a classified 2015 FBI counterterrorism policy guide said the quiet part again. Investigations into militia extremists, white supremacists, and sovereign citizens "often have identified active links to law enforcement officers."

So the FBI knew. It wrote it down twice. Then nothing happened at scale. When The Intercept dug into the issue in 2017, it found the bureau had not publicly addressed infiltration since the 2006 report.

In 2020, Michael German, a former FBI agent who once worked undercover inside white supremacist groups, published a report for the Brennan Center called Hidden in Plain Sight. His finding was blunt. Federal, state, and local governments were doing far too little, even when the problem was well known. Since 2000, officers with alleged ties to white supremacist or far-right militant groups had been exposed in at least fourteen states, from Alabama to Washington. Few departments even had a written rule against joining these groups.

German was careful. He said only a small share of officers are likely active members. But it does not take many. One officer in the wrong unit can tip off a target, bury a case, or decide which neighborhood gets the hard treatment.

What the Leaks Showed

In September 2021, the journalist collective Distributed Denial of Secrets published the Oath Keepers’ leaked membership files. The group was built from day one to recruit police, soldiers, and first responders. A year earlier, the ADL had found 76 documented cases of extremists serving in law enforcement nationwide. One leak multiplied the known count almost five times. The ADL cautions that a name on the list is not proof someone was an active member or shared the group’s views.” In 2021, a leak exposed the Oath Keepers' membership files. NPR and WNYC compared the list against police rosters in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago and found active officers on both. Chicago had the most, with 13.

At least 10 were police chiefs. At least 11 were sheriffs. These are not patrol officers on the fringe. These are the people who set policy and decide who gets disciplined.

In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League went through more than 38,000 names on the leaked lists. It identified 373 people it believed were working in law enforcement at the time. A year earlier, the ADL had found 76 documented cases of extremists serving in law enforcement nationwide. One leak multiplied the known count almost five times. The ADL cautions that a name on the list is not proof someone was an active member or shared the group’s views.

Some did more than just pay dues. A patrol commander at the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona told the group he had already shared its website with dozens of his deputies. He later said he left because of the volume of emails. A Pittsburgh police lieutenant and firearms instructor offered to spread the word to his students. After the leak, he was reassigned pending an investigation.

Even 373 is a floor. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes let serving police and soldiers take part without formally signing up, because a name on the roster could cost them their jobs. The ADL also contacted departments where an employee’s name matched the list. Some responded. Others never did.

The Proud Boys trail is thinner, mostly because nobody has leaked a full roster. What exists comes one case at a time. And the cases tell you how the system works.

Chicago: How a Blind Eye Works

Chicago is the best case study in America for how an institution looks away while saying it is looking hard.

Officer Robert Bakker was investigated for ties to the Proud Boys. The city's inspector general found he had associated with Proud Boys leaders, attended their events, backed the group online, and failed to tell the department he was under FBI investigation. He also made false and conflicting statements about it. The inspector general recommended firing him. In October 2022, police brass said no. He got a 120-day suspension and kept his badge. The department's reasoning was that internal affairs could not prove by a preponderance of the evidence that he was a member.

Then came the Oath Keepers. In August 2022, the ADL sent Chicago police leaders a letter naming eight officers tied to the group. A year later, a top department official told the City Council that, until recent news stories, the brass had no evidence any officers had Oath Keeper ties. Reporters at WBEZ and the Sun-Times had the letter that said otherwise.

When internal affairs finally looked, it mostly asked the officers if they were guilty. Inspector General Deborah Witzburg found investigators had interviewed only the officers themselves and taken no further steps. She called the probe "materially deficient" and told the department to reopen it. The department refused. It said the gaps did not change the outcome.

Mayor Brandon Johnson had promised during his 2023 campaign to fire officers tied to far-right groups. Superintendent Larry Snelling vowed before the City Council to clear them out. The department's third investigation ended the same way as the first two. No discipline. And an officer photographed wearing a Three Percenters militia mask while working a 2020 racial justice protest ended up, after years of investigation, with a reprimand.

Notice the pattern. Nobody denies the evidence. The process just eats it. Police investigate police, set the bar for proof where the evidence can't reach, and call it due process.

When the Badge Is the Leak

If you want to see what the FBI warned about in 2006, look at Shane Lamond.

Lamond was a lieutenant in Washington, D.C. He ran the intelligence branch of the department's Homeland Security Bureau. His job was to gather information on groups like the Proud Boys. Instead, prosecutors said, he fed information to their national chairman, Enrique Tarrio. The two exchanged at least 500 messages. After the 2020 election, Lamond moved the conversation to an encrypted app. When police investigated the Proud Boys for burning a Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a Black church, Lamond warned Tarrio that a warrant for his arrest had been signed.

Lamond was convicted in December 2024 of obstruction and lying to federal agents. In June 2025 he was sentenced to 18 months. Tarrio, by then free, showed up at the sentencing. He had been serving 22 years for seditious conspiracy until President Trump pardoned him in January 2025. Tarrio stood outside the courthouse with Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, whose own 18-year sentence Trump had commuted, and asked the president to pardon the cop too.

That is a ghost skin story with a happy ending for everyone except the public.

The Cops at the Capitol

On January 6, 2021, two off-duty officers from Rocky Mount, Virginia, Sgt. Thomas Robertson and Officer Jacob Fracker, drove to Washington together, went into the Capitol, and posed for a photo inside. Robertson carried a large wooden stick and confronted D.C. police officers who had come to help hold the building. After he was charged, he destroyed his own phone and Fracker's. He was sentenced to 87 months in prison.

Here is the part that matters for this story. Rocky Mount fired both men in less than a month. Fresno, California, fired an 18-year officer named Rick Fitzgerald in 2021 after he was seen marching with the Proud Boys. The police chief said that kind of ideology had no place in law enforcement.

So it can be done. A small Virginia town did it in weeks. Fresno did it. The problem is not that firing is impossible. The problem is that it depends entirely on which chief you get and how loud the news coverage is.

And at the federal level, the message went the other way. On his first day back in office, President Trump granted clemency to all of the more than 1,500 people charged in connection with January 6. That included the ones who assaulted police. It included the cops who joined the mob.

The Abuse Nobody Tracks

The domestic violence side has the same hole in the middle.

You may have seen the claim that 40 percent of police officers abuse their families. Be careful with it. It comes from two small surveys from the early 1990s. One asked officers whether they had "behaved violently" toward a spouse or child and did not define violence, so shouting likely counted. The other counted physical aggression in the home from either partner, including violence by the spouse. A 2016 review of the research found self-reported rates ranging from about 5 percent to 40 percent.

Here is the real scandal. In 2026, those 1990s surveys are still what people quote, because nobody has built anything better.

When criminologists Philip Stinson and John Liederbach at Bowling Green State University studied officer domestic violence with federal grant money, they had to build their data from newspaper clippings. They found 324 cases of officers arrested for domestic or family violence between 2005 and 2007. Their conclusion was plain. There are no comprehensive statistics on officer domestic violence, and no government agency collects data on police convicted of it. Stinson's broader research found domestic violence is the most common violent crime police are arrested for.

The incentives are built to keep it hidden. Since 1996, the federal Lautenberg Amendment has barred anyone convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from having a gun. That includes cops. A conviction ends a police career. So the pressure runs toward never getting to a conviction: reduced charges, quiet resignations, victims who know the person they would report to works with their abuser. An ABC7 Chicago investigation found that nine out of ten domestic violence complaints against Chicago officers from their spouses or children ended with no discipline at all.

Now add cameras. Thousands of departments run Flock license plate readers, which log where cars go and let officers search that history in seconds. In Haines City, Florida, Officer Christopher Goodson was arrested this year after an affidavit said he ran 717 searches on his estranged wife’s car between September 2024 and June 2026, on duty and off. He was charged with official misconduct and a computer crime. His department’s fix was a quarterly check on who is searching what. It is keeping the cameras.

In Mooresville, North Carolina, Officer Elizabeth Snowman was charged in August with using Flock 31 times for personal reasons, reportedly to track her boyfriend’s ex-wife. She stayed employed while human resources decided her fate. Her chief said at least 10 other cases involving officers and Flock were under review.

Every one of these cases was caught after the fact. Nobody knows how many weren’t caught at all, because nobody is counting that either.

The One Tool, Gone

For one short stretch, the federal government tried to keep a count.

The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database was first floated by Trump in his first term, then created under Biden after George Floyd was killed. It tracked misconduct by federal officers: convictions, firings, suspensions, and officers who quit while under investigation. Its purpose was to stop "wandering officers," people who get pushed out of one agency and hired by another. By late 2024 it held 4,790 records covering 4,011 federal officers. Agencies were using it more every month. Searches went from about 400 in January 2024 to more than 3,000 by that August.

On January 24, 2025, the Justice Department shut it off. Agencies could no longer search it or add to it. The White House and the Justice Department gave no specific reason. The watchdog group CREW argued the shutdown likely broke federal records law.

It only ever covered federal officers. State and local cops, the ones who answer domestic calls and police protests, were never in it. And now there is not even that.

States are doing the same thing. In July 2026, North Carolina, the first state to require police to report traffic stop data, quietly repealed that requirement in a two-line provision buried in the state budget. The law that let anyone check who gets pulled over, searched, and arrested is gone.

Same Old Policing

Put it together. The FBI warned about infiltration in 2006 and again in 2015. A former FBI agent laid out the problem in 2020. Leaks put hundreds of names on the table. Inspectors general recommended firings. Researchers begged for data on domestic violence. Every time, the answer was the same. Let the department investigate itself. Set the proof bar high. Keep the records sealed. Delete the one database that existed.

This is not a failure of knowledge. It is a decision. Every institution that could count has chosen not to, because a count would demand action, and action would cost the people in charge something.

The officers who beat their wives and march with extremists are a minority. Nobody serious claims otherwise. But a system that can't tell you how big that minority is, and won't try, is a system that has made its peace with them. The rest of us live with the result every time we call 911 and hope we get one of the good ones.

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Sources

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