Two months ago, Dr. Joyner related the report that the US Army is a bunch of hate-group/neo-Nazi/gangland thugs, and said it was BS.
Finally, on Monday, the Provost Marshall (Chief of Police) of Fort Lewis (WA) finally refuted the AP story, though it isn’t so clear, as this isn’t a black-and-white issue.
There is little gang activity among soldiers at Fort Lewis, and no recent evidence of extremist hate groups working among the ranks, the Army post’s top law enforcement officer said Monday.
“And we want to keep it that way,” Col. Katherine Miller, the Fort Lewis provost marshal, told reporters. Miller and the post’s public affairs officer called a briefing with the news media in response to stories over the past several months about gang and extremist activity among U.S. military service members.
The Chicago Sun-Times in May reported a rise in gang activity among soldiers. And the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization based in Montgomery, Ala., in July asserted that racist hate groups were exploiting the U.S. military’s recruiting pressures to enroll members into the armed forces.
Both reports drew extensively from interviews with Scott Barfield, a Defense Department gang investigator from Fort Lewis.
He was quoted as saying that since 2002 he has identified 320 gang members and extremists at Fort Lewis, but that commanders have shown little interest in discharging them from the Army. He was quoted as saying gang investigators across the military were getting little support to remove gangsters from the ranks.
Barfield was not present at Monday’s briefing.
Bad PR move, why was he not available? Regardless, there is a interesting disconnect on gangs, or maybe it is semantics. Years ago it was a fact of life that a young “ruffian” in court was given a choice between jail or the Army. Today, the social worker concept means that they think it is bad that someone goes into the Army to straighten them out, because a social worker is obviously much more capable (job security for the social worker?). And gangs are not necessarily the “extremists” quoted.
But Miller said Barfield told her he didn’t tell reporters that his figures included hate-group extremists, not only gang members. “And he told me he wasn’t sure he used the 320 number,” Miller said.
She said she directed him to review his files, after which he told her that over the past five years, there have been 126 soldiers identified as gang members or possible gang members.
Of those, five committed crimes, Miller said: Two were involved in tagging Fort Lewis buildings with gang graffiti, two fought each other and claimed past gang affiliations and one was involved in drug use.
“The facts are over the past five years, I’ve had less than a handful of soldiers investigated in criminal activity associated with gangs,” Miller said.
Or maybe there is something to worry about
The Chicago Sun-Times in May reported a rise in gang activity among soldiers. And the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization based in Montgomery, Ala., in July asserted that racist hate groups were exploiting the U.S. military’s recruiting pressures to enroll members into the armed forces.
Both reports drew extensively from interviews with Scott Barfield, a Defense Department gang investigator from Fort Lewis.
He was quoted as saying that since 2002 he has identified 320 gang members and extremists at Fort Lewis, but that commanders have shown little interest in discharging them from the Army. He was quoted as saying gang investigators across the military were getting little support to remove gangsters from the ranks.
Barfield was not present at Monday’s briefing.
But Miller said Barfield told her he didn’t tell reporters that his figures included hate-group extremists, not only gang members. “And he told me he wasn’t sure he used the 320 number,” Miller said.
She said she directed him to review his files, after which he told her that during the past five years, there have been 126 soldiers identified as gang members or possible gang members.
Of those, five committed crimes, Miller said: Two were involved in tagging Fort Lewis buildings with gang graffiti, two fought each other and claimed past gang affiliations, and one was involved in drug use.
“The facts are over the past five years, I’ve had less than a handful of soldiers investigated in criminal activity associated with gangs,” Miller said.
Fort Lewis public affairs officer Lt. Col. Dan Williams said Monday that he would ask Miller if she would make Barfield available for more interviews. He works under her chain of command, Williams said.
My father has related to me his experiences as a drill sergeant with Italian inner-city mob draftees, which he considered better than the illiterate Texas and Mississippi (etc) draftees that he also had to deal with (my father is from Oklahoma, Sooner).
Bottom line here is that the Army is the same as the rest of the country. except they do not tolerate extremists, nor idiots. My Google News search finds 5 media sources covering this, all local to Ft Lewis. A whole lot of attention about nothing so long as it is negative, but no appologies when this is found to be not so.
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