Researcher: Boisterous armed white supremacist street gang out maneuvered Columbus police

Dec 3, 2022; Columbus, Ohio, United States;  A man standing next to Patriot Front protesters shouts across the street at counter-protestors on High street outside of Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church on Saturday morning. Proud Boys were also present, protesting Holi-drag, an event at the Red Oak Community School, where local drag queens read story books. The event was cancelled due to a safety concerns, the school said on social media.  Mandatory Credit: Joseph Scheller-The Columbus Dispatch

Ohio native and former Ohio State University student Matthew Valasik is an associate professor in the University of Alabama Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. He co-authored "Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White" by University of California Press. It examines the rise of alt-right groups through the lens of street gang research.

This past weekend an armed group from the far-right Proud Boys and Patriot Front protested the Red Oak Community School and caused the cancelation of its “Holi-Drag Storytime” event.

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As anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations rise across the country, replacing Covid-19 lockdown restrictions as the new cultural flashpoint to exploit, members of these far-right groups intimidated local residents while law enforcement remained idle.

More:Chief Elaine Bryant says Columbus police created safety plan with drag show organizers

The boisterous and violent street presence being routinely observed by Proud Boys and Patriot Front is exactly the same behavior that has been observed among traditional street gang research from nearly the past century.

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Ohio state law considers a criminal gang to be an ongoing formal or informal organization, association, or group of three or more persons, that has

  1. a common name or identifiable signs, symbols, and colors

  2. members individually or as a group engage in a pattern of criminal activity

  3. one of the group’s primary activities is criminal activity. Such criminal acts include a felony offense (e.g., murder, robbery, assault, rape), arson, sex offenses, intimidation of witnesses, improper handling of firearms in a motor vehicle, drug trafficking, ethnic intimidation, disorderly conduct, and aggravated trespassing.

The gathering of Proud Boys and Patriot Front members protesting of the Red Oak Community School’s canceled “Holi-Drag Storytime” clearly committed the two latter offenses by being a reckless “inconvenience, annoyance, or alarm to persons of persons of ordinary sensibilities” and causing residents “to believe that the offender will cause physical harm to that person,” otherwise the event would have pressed on.

Things that you will not see in Ohio’s definition of a criminal gang, or other states for that matter, are racial or ethnic categories, urban or rural designations, age requirements, or gender designations.

It is important to remember that street gangs are not a minority-based problem, despite clear bias existing towards considering people of color to be gang members when compared to their white counterparts. Proud Boys and Patriot Front clearly fit the state’s criteria of a criminal gang as the they meet the three criteria laid out by Ohio’s revised code.

More:Chief Elaine Bryant says Columbus police created safety plan with drag show organizers

Yet, applying existing gang laws at the local or state level towards such far-right groups remains limited.

Proud Boys, a self-described “western chauvinist” men’s club, functions more like a typical street gang with their gathering involving large amounts of drinking and violence. They have an agreed upon uniform (Fred Perry shirts), colors (black and yellow), and a mascot/symbol (cockerel) reifying a collective identity.

Traditionally, Proud Boys would be considered nothing more than a modernized version of racist skinheads, however, their adept online branding and hipster persona has created a much less brazen identity that employs humor and irony to spread far-right talking points broadly opposing feminism, multiculturalism, immigration, and political correctness.

As a researcher who studies street gangs and far-right groups, the relentless focus on white nationalists being united in ideology, intent, and coordination, diverts attention away from identifying these localized groups and individuals as something more manageable.

Yet, despite the overwhelming intimidation and threatening street presence of members from these far-right groups in Clintonville, local law enforcement failed to gather any meaningful intelligence (e.g., field interviews) or produce any criminal arrests but officers did show their support of these far-right groups by high fiving a Proud Boys’ member.

Such acts succeed in reinforcing the legacy of white supremacy in policing, further segregating law enforcement from the community.

Far-right groups should be dealt with just like conventional street gangs by local law enforcement.

Members are likely to be well-known in the communities they live in and have most likely come under some law enforcement or local scrutiny (including schools) and should be handled locally where they are at.

This also means that law enforcement agencies need to focus more broadly on the varied criminal offending, violence, and antisocial behaviors that these far-right groups engage in and remove the limited focus on hate or terrorism-related offenses.

The gang statutes that have been used aggressively for Black, Indigenous, and people of color gangs for decades can just as equally be applied to groups that do not fit the gang stereotype.

As we have seen with RICO cases targeting large numbers of gang members and associates, it is possible to target far-right groups with large scale arrests.

Ohio native and former Ohio State University student Matthew Valasik is an associate professor in the University of Alabama Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. He co-authored "Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White" by University of California Press. It examines the rise of alt-right groups through the lens of street gang research.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Opinion: Why did white supremist street gang out maneuver Columbus police