Headlines that Surprise Me

When you see the headline, "A Police Chief Got Rid of a Neo-Nazi. Then Came the Hard Part," your first guess is that the police union, or the state civil service board, got the Nazi his job back.

Fortunately, this did not happen.

What did happen was that the then newly-minted police chief found that had to deal with a whole range of people who were skeptical of his commitment to removing bigotry from the department:

Around 6 a.m. one Friday last year, Springfield [Illinois] Police Chief Ken Scarlette was jolted awake by a call from his deputy, whose tone was grim: “We have a problem here.”

The problem was Aaron Paul Nichols, an officer with 18 years’ service who also had served for two decades as a U.S. military reservist. Anonymous activists had released an online report unmasking Nichols as a white supremacist behind tens of thousands of social media posts seething with hate.

Because of the timing — April 1, 2022 — Scarlette wondered for a second whether this was an April Fools’ prank on the new boss. He had been sworn in just six weeks before. But the details in the exposé left no doubt. As Scarlette read one damning revelation after another, it began to sink in that the Officer Nichols he knew as an even-tempered professional had a secret life spreading neo-Nazi beliefs.

“We’ve got to handle this right now,” he recalled thinking.

………

Scarlette placed Nichols on unpaid administrative leave, effective immediately, and told him that internal affairs was launching an investigation. As a symbolic way to “strip him of his police powers,” the chief said, he ordered Nichols to peel off his department-issued gear.

“Remove his badge. Remove his gun belt. Remove his vest. His shirt. All that stuff,” Scarlette said, recounting the moment in a recent interview at his office. “He walked out of here in his pants and his undershirt.”

Scarlette’s no-nonsense response drew attention among analysts tracking the spread of far-right ideologies. Law enforcement leaders seldom act decisively when extremists are uncovered in their ranks, hate monitors say, with cases typically stagnating because of pushback from police unions, fear of expensive First Amendment challenges, or resistance to being seen as caving to anti-police activism.

………

Against this patchwork, Scarlette’s unequivocal and public response stood out.

The chief ordered a review of every available record of Nichols’s conduct on the job to check for bias in his police work, a mammoth task involving 132 hours of body-camera footage, 12 years of reports, a decade of traffic stops and more than 2,000 chat messages. He added extra screening questions to the hiring protocol. The entire police department underwent specialized training on extremism.

Scarlette met regularly with civil rights and faith leaders who were closely following the response.

A statement from Black Lives Matter Springfield, co-signed by several other civil rights groups, said “we appreciate the swift action and statement issued by Chief Ken Scarlette,” even as they called for a sweeping review of police conduct.

In the year that followed, however, praise for “the Springfield model” has been tempered by the deeply rooted distrust Scarlette hears from a community that has long experienced racial injustices in policing. He also has run into structural barriers that make it hard to deliver on those early promises of accountability.

This guy has a thankless job.  

I guarantee that in addition to distrust from civil rights activists, it's likely that he has made an in implacable enemy of the police union and half, the racist half, of the police force.