WASHINGTON (CN) — The U.S. Capitol Police Inspector General told a congressional committee he felt it was imperative to issue a warning regarding an officer training company before his latest flash report — after the group was found displaying images associated with white supremacists.
Michael Bolton, the Capitol Police inspector general and Gretta Goodwin, the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s director for justice and law enforcement issues, testified before the House Administration committee Tuesday about recommendations their offices had issued to two select Capitol Police forces — the Containment Emergency Response team and the First Responders Unit.
Bolton, issuing independent reviews as a part of an examination into the groups' programs, found a number of deficiencies, including some failings that directly affected officers' abilities to respond to the Jan. 6 attack. His fourth iteration of recommendations outlines some 21 steps Capitol Police officials implement into those programs, including recommending the First Responders Unit receive more bicycles and that unit be trained in the use of less lethal weaponry.
Before those recommendations were issued in Bolton’s fourth flash report, the inspector general issued a memo about Northern Red, a training company the Containment Emergency Response Team has spent more than $90,000 on in 2018 and 2019 for officer training.
Bolton suggested the department review its utilization of the company after its logo was examined and found to be a combination of two Nordic runes associated with hate symbols. One of those logo symbols, the Tyr rune, was adopted by Nazi Germany and its Waffen-SS infantry.
Bolton testified Tuesday it was necessary for him to issue an advisory report on Northern Red in addition to his flash report because in-person trainings are slowly resuming as pandemic restrictions are lifted and officers return to that company for training. Another concern for Bolton, he said, was the company’s display of “Devil’s Guard” patches — a 1971 novel titled with the same name, which sympathetically described a Nazi SS soldier’s escape after the country’s fall.
It was for those reasons, Bolton said, he wanted to get the message out as quickly as possible. The appearance of that relationship, “raises issues and concerns,” he said.
“There are better options of doing training and one of the reasons in our recommendations was that the department needs to clearly, clearly define what the role and responsibility skill sets that [the Containment Emergency Response Team] needs to have,” Bolton said. “Once the department has that then they should give it to the Office of Training, our Training Services Bureau and say, ‘Here, come up with the training scenarios, the lesson plans.’ They control the training, not the individual unit.”
Bolton said the Northern Red training contract with that specific Capitol Police group had prompted for a line item in his FY2022 budget to examine the outside training companies Capitol Police were utilizing.
Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, expressed his concern that the Containment Emergency Response Team even needed outside contracting for basic training needs. Northern Red, a company based in North Carolina with training facilities some 250 miles away in Danville, Virginia, seemed like a counterintuitive destination for officers to train, he said, considering the U.S. Secret Service training facility was only 16 miles from the Capitol and the FBI’s training facility in Quantico, Virginia, was only 45 miles away.
“It just seems to me that there are better law enforcement and Department of Defense entities that [the Containment Emergency Response Team] could leverage for training purposes than some of these that are more far-flung and that have very questionable relationships,” Raskin said.
The U.S. Capitol Police said in a statement Tuesday the Northern Red facility “provides a high-level training course,” which other federal law enforcement agencies have trained at in the past. The statement says the last time Capitol Police officers or those in special units have used Northern Red training facilities was in 2019.
“Acting Chief [Yogananda] Pittman believes it is time for a culture change in the law enforcement profession,” the agency said in a statement. “Diversity and inclusion has been a passion of hers throughout her entire career. Acting Chief Pittman and all of the USCP leadership team takes extremist ideology seriously and are working on a plan to ensure that kind of cancer does not find its way into this Department. It has no place here.”
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