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Congress Has Been Ignoring Racist Capitol Police for Years
Hundreds of Black officers in the U.S. Capitol Police have reported rampant racism from their colleagues for two decades, according to a story from ProPublica that traces a link between police racism and the ease at which White nationalists were able to overtake the Capitol on January 6.
More than 250 Black officers have sued the Capitol Police for racial discrimination since 2001, and former Black cops tell ProPublica that White officers would berate them with racial slurs and unprovoked traffic stops.
Frank Adams, a Black 20-year veteran of the Capitol Police, told ProPublica that Congress should have listened to the reports of racism years ago.
“They ignored the racism happening in the department. They ignored the hate,” Adams said.
And racism in the police force is obviously far from isolated to the nation’s capital. Another report from BuzzFeed News catalogs how more than 28 police officers from around the country traveled to Washington, D.C. to march alongside White nationalists.
Black police officers who spoke to BuzzFeed News say that they noticed their colleagues start to more overtly embrace racist views in 2014, after protests of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
