White supremacy bares its ugly heart

Local authorities say that in the past few years white supremacists were responsible for a number of noteworthy crimes, including a July triple homicide in Woodland and the shooting of a Vancouver police officer in 2014.

Organizations that track hate groups call white supremacists the most violent of the domestic-extremist movements in the United States.

One subset of the ideology, white supremacy prison gangs, is growing in numbers and has a presence in Clark County. While police say these gang members tend to stay off their radar, they still warn of their danger.

A majority of white supremacists, however, are not members of an organized group. Experts say violence is increasing among those who share the racist ideology, and that the current political climate is setting the stage for more violence.

A twisted ideology

White supremacy has been a grim part of American history, and Clark County is no exception.

Historians say that white supremacy was part of the political and social landscape of Clark County in the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan had an active chapter. According to Columbian archives, about 500 hooded Klansmen gathered in August 1924 at Bagley Park to swear allegiance to the invisible empire in a ritualistic ceremony. A fiery cross loomed in the background.

White supremacy at its core boils down to survival, said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The central belief for the ideology is that the Caucasian race is doomed to extinction unless something is done soon to rectify it.

“They call it white genocide or impending white genocide,” said Pitcavage, whose organization tracks hate groups. “It’s a white supremacist fantasy.”

The ideology can have a powerful effect that often leads to violent behavior, Pitcavage said.

“A certain part of humanity will always fear or hate things they don’t understand or things or people that are different from them,” he said. “When traditional, widely accepted methods of changing policies aren’t available to you, alternative means, such as violence or terrorism, can be more attractive.”

In the last 10 years, white supremacists committed 83 percent of extremist-related murders, according to a 2015 study by the ADL. The organization explained, though, that most murders committed by white supremacists are unrelated to the ideology.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, another organization that tracks hate groups, found in a 2016 report that the number of deaths last year attributed to white supremacists versus domestic Islamic extremists was 20 to 19.

Prison gangs

Over time, white supremacy has taken on a less recognizable face.

In the mid-2000s, Multnomah County, Ore., sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Burkeen started noticing a high number of crimes committed by young white men who had a specific tattoo: a shield with the letters EK on it.

Burkeen was part of a regional gang unit, tracking groups such as the Crips and Bloods. But no one in law enforcement, he said, had been paying much attention to white gangs such as the one he had discovered, European Kindred.

He learned that European Kindred, which police say Courtier is a part of, is a white supremacy gang that started in prison as a form of protection. As members are released, the gang takes to the streets, and some members even begin recruiting outside prison walls, Burkeen said.

Of the organized white supremacy groups, white prison gangs are the only type growing in numbers, according to the ADL. They also are increasing in violence. Since January 2009, the ADL has recorded 70 shootouts between police and domestic ideological extremists, and of those, half were committed by white supremacists.

Randy Blazak, a sociology professor at the University of Oregon who studies hate crimes, said that for some inmates, the prison system breeds racism.

“The protection is first and the ideology is after,” he said. “You don’t join because you’re a racist; you become a racist because you joined.”

It is not illegal to be part of a gang, and law enforcement and prison officials say they can only do so much.

Of the approximately 18,991 inmates in Washington prisons or work-release centers, about 5,237 are affiliated with a safety-threat group, or groups that exhibit negative behavior, according to the Washington State Department of Corrections. Of that number, 611 are affiliated with a white supremacy group.

Corrections staff do their best to keep tabs on these groups, DOC spokesman Jeremy Barclay said. They screen inmates upon intake, document tattoos and monitor daily activity, such as phone calls, visitation and interactions with other inmates. If inmates are interested in leaving a gang, the prison system offers a program to help them.

Gang activity in general in Clark County has increased over the last few years, according to a 2012 gang assessment written by members of the Vancouver Police Department and Washington State University Vancouver.

But many white supremacist prison gang members in the Northwest fly under law enforcement’s radar. They were associated more often with lower-level crimes, such as property crimes, than violent ones, Burkeen said. But as time went on, European Kindred gang members were associated with kidnapping, sexual assault and homicide investigations.

“As their numbers grew, so did the severity of the crimes,” he said.

When they are violent, Burkeen added, they don’t target any one specific demographic, and their victims are often people they know.

Vancouver police Sgt. Spencer Harris, who leads a multi-agency gang unit called the Safe Streets Task Force, said that police know all of the players in local white supremacy gangs, but police are kept busy by crimes committed by more well-known gangs. He added that keeping a close eye can be hard because of staffing — his unit only has two detectives.

“Generally, in comparison to other groups, they’re not doing criminal acts that are getting law enforcement attention,” Harris said.

Harris warned, though, that the group is violent and should not be crossed — a sentiment echoed by academic experts.

“It’s a lifestyle that celebrates violence,” Blazak said. “They use racism as a tool to intimidate people.”

Fighting hate crimes

Both the ADL and the SPLC track known white supremacists as part of their efforts to combat hate crimes.

However, it is difficult to keep clear tabs on every white supremacist.

The KKK more than doubled its number of groups between 2014 and 2015. But, it is hard to say if the total number of members actually increased or if large groups simply fractured into more, smaller groups, the SPLC said.

What is known is that more white supremacists are moving online, where they can freely express their views. One online forum that touts itself as a “community of racial realists and idealists” has more than 300,000 members. The site has been adding about 25,000 members annually for several years, according to SPLC.

“It’s not at the level where it’s like a plague,” Pitcavage said. “There’s enough where people in the area need to be aware of it. But, they don’t need to stay up all night worrying about it.”

However, it doesn’t take many people to cause “a lot of mayhem or misery,” Pitcavage added. “You don’t need a huge group for a hate crime to occur … or for a minority population to be terrorized.”

For example, Pitcavage said, the ADL has tracked Brent Luyster, the man accused in the Woodland triple homicide, for more than 10 years for hate crimes.

Though Luyster, a self-identified skinhead, doesn’t appear to be part of a formal white supremacy organization, he was involved in the 2001 beating of a black man in Vancouver’s Rosemere neighborhood, now called Rose Village. In March 2013, he and others threatened to kill an interracial couple cuddling at Vancouver’s QuarterDeck Bar.

Just as it’s not illegal to be in a gang, it’s also not illegal to be a white supremacist. The FBI’s authority rests on illegal activities, not a person or group’s political views or other beliefs, the agency’s spokeswoman Ayn Dietrich said.

“The FBI takes care to distinguish between constitutionally protected activities and illegal activities undertaken to further an ideological agenda,” she said in a written statement. “The FBI takes very seriously allegations of hate crimes because they are not only an attack on the victim, but are meant to threaten and intimidate an entire community.”

Political climate

Many Americans thought race relations would improve after electing the first black president in 2008, the SPLC reports. Instead, national polls found that more people now than in the last 10 years believe racism is a big problem.

The white supremacy movement has become more public, and Blazak says that’s tied to the hate-mongering Americans have seen this election season.

“Racists have been given mainstream permission to express their alienation,” he said. “The world is changing. They have gay people at work, female bosses, a black president. … They can’t say the things they used to say because it is not politically correct. They feel like they’ve lost power, and they have lost power.”

Blazak said that many white supremacists have thrown their weight behind Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has often focused on race and nationality.

“It’s shocking and striking to me … how much his rhetoric mirrors charismatic leaders in the white supremacist movement,” he said.

The good news, Blazak said, is that new generations are cutting the legs out from under the white supremacist movement. Millennials and Generation Z are the most diverse and politically progressive of recent generations, he said, and are inoculated against the white supremacist message.

Bruce said that while living in Vancouver, he’s felt discrimination through glances and comments. But when it came to raising his children, he didn’t talk to them too much about discrimination.

“I never talked about hate because I didn’t want to plant those seeds,” he said.

But in light of what happened to his youngest son, Bruce said that he might have done some things differently to keep them better protected.

Bruce said the fact that hate crimes are still happening points to a bigger problem that needs addressing.

“Hate is hate,” he said. “We’ve swept too much stuff under the rug. It’s time to pull the rug up and clean that up.”