Cops want self-proclaimed militia to stay away from protests. But there’s not much they can do

Cops don’t want self-proclaimed militias around. Protesters are uneasy when they see them. Anti-discrimination advocates worry that someone will get shot.

But there’s not much local agencies can do to keep the well-armed, self-styled militias away.

“Their Constitutional protections are the First and Second Amendments — and I don’t think anyone wants to change the First, and at least half the country doesn’t want to change the Second — so there’s not really a realistic way to take their protections away,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.

Militia groups have recently appeared in California at protests in the name of George Floyd, the black man killed while he was being arrested by a Minneapolis police officer, who knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Armed men have appeared on rooftops in Arroyo Grande, a self-identified militia group showed up in Oakdale and another attended a protest in Redding, according to local news reports.

Members say have said they want to help law enforcement or protect businesses from looters. In Oakdale they said they showed up in anticipation of a Black Lives Matter protest, but the event never materialized.

Stanislaus County Sheriff Jeff Dirkse, whose deputies patrol communities around Oakdale, told The Modesto Bee editorial board the gunmen were unhelpful and a potential safety risk.

“I don’t like groups like that thinking they’re helping us,” Dirkse said. “We would never ask for assistance from a unit — I don’t want to even give them the stance of a `unit’ — from a group like that.”

But his deputies can’t do much about them.

It’s only possible to arrest the gunmen when they violate certain laws, like obtaining weapons illegally or conspiring to commit violence.

“Police want to keep these people away, but their hands are really tied,” Pitcavage said. “Any time you bring weapons to an event like this, it’s a tinderbox for something horrible to happen.”

Modern militia groups, which Pitcavage said rose to prominence in the early 1990s, tend to be motivated by conspiracy theories centered on the government taking away their individual freedoms. Most are right-wing and anti-government, according to Pitcavage, seeing themselves as the equivalent to the Patriots who fought against the British government, except they fight the federal government.

Many are paramilitary groups, with their own training, ranks, uniforms and patches that mimic the U.S. military. Some members are former or active military or law enforcement.

Militia groups have had a new problem since President Donald Trump was elected, Pitcavage said. While militia groups commonly saw both Democrat and Republican presidents as enemies, Trump was the first candidate of either party to be elected that militia groups supported.

That makes motivating members more difficult, so Pitcavage said they’ve focused on other parts of the government, such as certain state governors, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, billionaire George Soros and left-wing groups.

Militia groups aren’t necessarily white supremacists, though some members are white supremacists, but they don’t see the protests against police brutality and racism as being legitimate, Pitcavage said.

“They saw these protests as being led by antifa, George Soros, or even Black Lives Matter, who they’re not crazy about,” Pitcavage said.

Antifa (short for antifascist) is a far-left organization that gained prominence after the 2017 Charlottesville counter-protests to a white supremacist march. Antifa activists say they want to counter the far-right and white supremacists with violence when necessary, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

But antifa is also not a unified group, with local chapters differing from one another, and it’s unclear how many members the group actually has, the Anti-Defamation League says.

Multiple rumors about antifa have circulated throughout the U.S., including that that antifa has bused their members in to other cities and are posting Craigslist ads paying people to violently protest. Local police departments have held press conferences saying those rumors were not true.

Those are exactly the conspiracy theories that motivate these militia members to come out, Pitcavage said.

“They see themselves as a legitimate body of law enforcement, so when they saw looters, they thought they needed to show up to protect businesses from looters, who they thought were funded by left-wing extremists,” Pitcavage said.