Chicago City Wire

The Chicago media's relentless campaign to press Chicago Police Department Superintendent Larry Snelling to dig deeper into reports that some members of the CPD are linked to Oath Keepers, a group the leftist organization Southern Poverty Law Center says is an “extreme far-right antigovernment group,” continues.

This week the Sun-Times ran a follow-up story to a report that the Department found nothing after an investigation into the allegations.

“The investigation is closed and the allegations were not sustained,” spokeswoman for the CPD said in a statement. The Sun-Times also reported that the Department declined to provide documents related to the investigation.

In its follow-up story, the paper reported that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a group the story characterized as a “leading civil rights organization” insisted in a letter to Snelling that he “conduct a more thorough investigation.”

Jason Johnson, President of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, said that he applauded Snelling for not bowing to the media pressure and for supporting his officers.

“It appears that the CPD has fully investigated the alleged affiliation of officers to the Oath Keepers and find that its employees did not violate any law or CPD policy,” Johnson, who has twenty years’ experience in law enforcement, told Chicago City Wire. “It also appears that the alleged affiliation with the Oath Keepers was grossly exaggerated.”

Johnson added that disciplinary action, including termination, would likely result from active membership in a group that engages in criminal or subversive activity or in which membership requires conduct inconsistent with the officer’s obligation to serve the public.

“But one must distinguish between these groups and groups that simply take political positions that are controversial or unpopular. The United States Supreme Court has on several occasions addressed limits on public employers in the regulation of public employee speech, including speech by law enforcement officers,” he said.

Progressives typically look to the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League— which also urged an investigation into the CPD, Oath Keepers connection— 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 for an earlier story.

“Both have a long and well documented history of applying the term (hate group) overzealously towards ordinary conservative activism,” Thayer said in an email for an earlier story. “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 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.

“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 also unclear if any left-wing groups will make the police ban list.

“Instead of respecting the results of the investigation and CPD employees’ constitutional rights, far-left activists are attempting once again to undermine the legitimacy of law enforcement by making spurious and previously disproven allegations,” Johnson said. “Unfortunately, this is something we have come to expect.”