A policy recently approved by a community oversight group that bans Chicago cops from joining “hate” and “extremist” groups is vulnerable to a First Amendment challenge in court.
Jason Johnson, president, Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, explained that for decades law enforcement departments around the country have banned their officers from association with known criminals.
But in an email to Chicago City Wire, Johnson said that a policy that bans joining a bias group “implicate(s) public employees’ First Amendment rights to speech and association. Officers may (and likely will) challenge the policy as a whole on that basis or may challenge specific identification of one group or another as a bias group.”
The ban was approved two weeks ago by the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability under the mayor’s office. The Commission is working in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department on developing the new policy, including compiling a list of groups that would be off limits for police.
The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the criteria that would be used to develop the list. Chicago Fraternal Order of Police president John Catanzara replied in an email that he had “no comment” when asked about the new policy.
Progressives typically look to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League as their sources for identifying hate groups, Parker Thayer of the Capital Research Center, a conservative government and charitables watchdog group based in Washington D.C., told Chicago City Wire.
“Both have a long and well documented history of applying the term (hate group) overzealously towards ordinary conservative activism,” Thayer said in an email. “There certainly are actual hate groups in the world that should be condemned but the watchdogs that supposedly detect and label them are often trigger happy, to say the least.”
For example, the SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center recently added several parents’ rights groups, including Parents Defending Education, Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and Parents’ Rights in Education, to its “hate map.”
“The SPLC boasts that in 2022 it ‘tracked 1,225 hate and antigovernment groups across the U.S,’” reported National Review’s Ryan Bangert in July.
“To be sure, that mélange includes some groups that affiliate with monstrous injustices, like the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. But it also includes a much larger number of mainstream public-policy groups that the SPLC has decided are antigovernment merely because they take widely held positions that just happen to offend the SPLC’s radically left-wing vision of society.”
It's unclear as well if any left-wing groups will make the police ban list.
Alerts Sign-up