Insiders are speaking out about Fontana PD’s culture of white supremacy

In the almost Four years since supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol, federal prosecutors have charged at least 35 current or former law enforcement officers for their roles in the insurrection, an Intercept analysis shows.

One of their targets was Alan Hostetter, a former California police chief who entered the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021 with an ax in his backpack. convicted to more than 11 years in prison late last year, one of the longest sentences to date among more than 1,500 prosecutions stemming from that day’s events.

Hostetter, who represented himself at the trial, offered a wide range of views conspiracy theories during his closing arguments, including that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The judge overseeing Hostetter’s case emphasized his experience as a police officer during the proceedings. “No reasonable citizen of this country, let alone one with twenty years of law enforcement experience, could have believed that it was lawful to use mob violence to obstruct a joint session of Congress,” U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in court recently. year. In July Lamberth refused Hostetter’s request to be released from prison while he appeals, noting it is too risky for him to be released ahead of the “looming” November election. (Hostetter did not respond to attempts to reach him before his sentencing.)

Before his journey from police chief in La Habra, California, to insurgent, Hostetter spent money 22 years at the Fontana Police Department, a small agency in the mostly working-class region southeast of Los Angeles known as the Inland Empire. The area has a history as one hotbed for white supremacist views usually associated with the Deep South, giving it the nickname ‘Invisible empire” – a reference to the Ku Klux Klan.

For more than three years, filmmaker Stuart Harmon and I have been researching police culture in Fontana. We spoke with several local police veterans, including four whistleblowers featured in a new film published today by The Intercept. We also reviewed hundreds of pages of internal documents, interviewed residents and attorneys, and made several attempts to speak to police leadership. They refused to answer our questions.

In the wake of the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which reignited nationwide protests against racism and police impunity, many departments across the country – including the L.A.P.D and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department — came under officer scrutiny again misconduct and abuse. But there are still thousands of small-town police forces across the country that are rarely policed, and an untold number of them are run with near-absolute authority by police leadership that few residents, let alone officers, dare to challenge.

The Fontana Police Department, which in 2013 the dismal national record for the “worst minority representation” among cities with more than 100,000 residents, provides a snapshot of how such departments are governed. And as we have learned, the history of violence and racism is deeply intertwined with that of the city itself.

Decades of industrial development – ​​and later abandonment – ​​transformed Fontana’s demographics and character from an orange farm town that attracted white settlers a century ago, to a booming steel town after World War II, to a trucking hub for warehouses and low-wage jobs today the day.

Throughout the city’s history, demographic change has been met with racist responses. Still in 1981, men in white hoods marched through downtown Fontananear the police station – a moment captured in archive photos. A year earlier, a black lineman was shot by members of the KKK and left paralyzed. The incidents echoed previous ones, including the burning of a black family to death in their home in the 1940s after they refused to leave their all-white neighborhood.

Today, Fontana is home to a Latino majority population. But the mansion of a former KKK grand dragon still stands, not far from the police station — underscoring a point made by the late writer Mike Davis, a native of Fontana, in his monumental work “City of Quartz.” “The past is not completely erasable,” Davis wrote, “even in Southern California.”

Rare, unvarnished testimony

Days after the January 6 riot, I began investigating the Fontana Police Department. Hostetter, who left the department in 2009 after rising to deputy chief, had not yet been publicly identified as one of the law enforcement veterans involved, but one of his former subordinates emailed me a tip about “a White Supremacy group operating with me.” . former police station.”

David Moore, a 25-year veteran officer who began his career with the LAPD before being transferred to Fontana, had come across a study I had published years earlier detailing the FBI’s long, quiet investigation into white supremacist infiltration of police forces across the country. Although the FBI’s involvement was news at the time, the infiltration itself had been an open secret in many of those departments. Moore, who is black and currently works for a federal defense contractor, did not mention Hostetter in his email, but instead wrote that widespread racism permeated all the way to the top of the department’s leadership. Moore sometimes wrote that racism crossed the line into white supremacist extremism.

Moore had already described the racism in gruesome detail in a discrimination lawsuit he filed against Fontana police in 2016. (He amended the lawsuit to charge wrongful termination after he was fired in 2017, which he said was retaliation for his whistleblowing. In filing the filing, the Fontana Police Department dismissed many of the allegations surrounding racism as irrelevant for the case earlier this year with Moore and another officer, and the case was dismissed in April.)

In his email, Moore laid out a long list of accusations, including that officers routinely used racial slurs to refer to both residents and colleagues of color, and that his colleagues once staged a mock lynching of a Martin Luther King Jr. had carried out. figurine.

One statement in particular was shocking for its cruelty. In 1994, before Moore joined the department, the body of a homeless black man was found outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken near police headquarters just half an hour after he was released from police custody. An autopsy report said he had been fatally strangled and later stabbed. When he was taken for the autopsy, someone placed a half-eaten chicken wing in his hand and took a photo. For years, department officers circulated the photo, which they treated as a joke. An officer who spoke about the incident told The Intercept that he was later forced to leave.

As Moore became increasingly disillusioned with department leadership, he began researching the emblems he saw his colleagues wearing. He discovered that the lightning bolts, runes and the German eagle tattooed on their bodies or featured on their insignia were symbols associated with neo-Nazi ideologies. The department’s Rapid Response Team, an elite and notoriously violent unit, displayed as its logo a Northern Owl, another symbol favored by white supremacists.

Moore had been denouncing all this for years, first internally, then in his lawsuit, and finally to a local writer published the accusations to a muffled response. Fontana was a forgotten place, he told me, whose residents, many of whom are poor and undocumented, are too busy working multiple jobs and afraid of retaliation to openly criticize the department, despite being from the first know the abuses.

In small departments like this, extremism could grow silently, he believed. “We need to show people in California and the US in general that white supremacy is alive and active in law enforcement,” Moore wrote. “Very few officers have the courage to speak out about it.”

Moore, who spent much of the past decade locked in a battle against Fontana police at enormous personal cost, knows from experience why so few officers speak up. Others who raised the issues internally — including his co-plaintiff in the lawsuit, Andy Anderson — were also forced out of their jobs or resigned out of fear and frustration. One even moved to a police station across the country to get away from Fontana.

We spoke with Moore and Anderson long before they settled their lawsuit, an agreement neither they nor the police wanted to talk about. “Although the city and its police department believe that their conduct was appropriate and legal in all respects, the city’s insurer recognizes the uncertainty that litigation presents, as well as the costs associated with litigation,” wrote Christopher Moffitt, a attorney representing the police department, in an email. “David Moore and Andrew Anderson believe a settlement is in their best interests for the same reasons. The parties have agreed to limit our comments on the lawsuit to this statement.”

Moffitt also said police could not respond to The Intercept’s other questions “related to your coverage of the lawsuit.”

As The Intercept has previously reported, police departments large and small are wrapped up in one code of silence that rewards loyalty over ethics. And like a powerful 2021 USA Today investigation are exposed, officers who expose abuse and misconduct by colleagues are excluded, forced out of their jobs, or worse. Many current and former Fontana officers, Moore warned back in 2021, would never speak about what they saw. But he offered to put me in touch with three people who would speak to me on the record, and more people who wanted to talk but didn’t want to be named.

It was a rare offer of access to the unvarnished testimony of officers, now captured in a film that offers an unusually blunt perspective on police work from the inside – even if it comes from individuals who remain deeply involved in the institution itself.

“Unfortunately, the silent majority stands by complacently while rogue agents appear to take the lead,” Moore wrote. “This has to stop.”

The Vital Projects Fund supported the reporting and production of this film.