by Katie Hayes InvestigateWest / November 2, 2020
When Olympia Police Officer Tiffany Coates’ cruiser rolled into a gun shop parking lot, she knew dozens of armed men were waiting for her. She wasn’t concerned.
Vigilantes with the group Three Percent of Washington, carrying AR-15 rifles, waved warmly as Coates arrived. A few minutes later Coates was smiling for a camera, flanked by nine paramilitaries.
Posted on social media as the Black Lives Matters protests unfolded in June, that photo of a grinning cop surrounded by armed, camouflage-clad men fed the worst fears of residents who for days had complained to police about armed men following and intimidating protesters. It was proof to some that police, amid an upsurge in guns sales, were coddling vigilantes they should be arresting.
“As a Black woman, I am scared right now … to live in a ZIP code where officers actively affiliate themselves with armed, white vigilantes, who have made their paranoid, suspicious hatred of my people an inescapable presence in my life,” Olympia resident Elisa McGee told the city council in June. She demanded that Coates be fired. That didn’t happen. (In fact, this month she was honored as “Officer of the Year” by the Olympia post of the American Legion.)
Now, as a contentious Election Day approaches, the ability of law enforcement to respond to vigilantes and possible paramilitary actions remains an open and pressing question.
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Paramilitary organizations are illegal in Washington and many other states. But the laws meant to stop the formation of ad hoc armies are archaic and vague, so much so that police and prosecutors who have had the opportunity to use those laws recently describe them as unenforceable.
Not that any have tried. Despite the rise in paramilitary activity, nowhere in the state have members of those armed, organized groups been prosecuted for violations of the state’s anti-paramilitary laws, according to interviews with law enforcement leaders and extremism experts. Rather than being prosecuted, the melange of AR-15-carrying, camouflage-clad vigilante groups has been called on by a handful of politicians to provide “security,” as President Donald Trump suggested that one high-profile group “stand back and stand by.”
Tensions are high as hundreds of members of the Washington National Guard are ready to support local police if civil unrest does break out. That unrest could manifest in a number of ways — including protests much like those seen this summer — but the possibility of paramilitary action presents a particular unknown.